Inside the Textiles of Frankenstein: Kate Hawley’s Oscar-Winning Approach
Kate Hawley’s Academy Award win for Best Costume Design on Frankenstein (2025), directed by Guillermo del Toro, marks a defining moment in a career shaped by imagination, craft, and an unwavering commitment to storytelling through design. For Hawley, a New Zealand-born designer whose work spans both stage and screen, this recognition feels less like a culmination and more like a natural evolution of a lifelong creative practice rooted in texture, colour, and narrative.
From her early years in Wellington, where she designed costumes and sets for school productions, to her formal training in visual communication and theatre design, Hawley developed a sensitivity to how materials and visual language shape emotional experience. That sensibility is vividly present in Frankenstein, where costume is not mere adornment but an extension of character, landscape, and theme.
Working once again with del Toro, Hawley approached the film as a study in metamorphosis, with colour becoming a central storytelling device.
Scene from Frankenstein, directed by Guillermo del Toro. Photo: Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025
What makes her work particularly compelling is its conceptual depth. Rather than recreating a traditional Victorian palette, she constructs a new “language of the gothic”, one that feels organic, emotional, and constantly evolving. This language is expressed most vividly through colour: scarlet reds dominate, symbolising blood, desire, and inherited trauma, while jewel-toned greens, blues, and purples are layered to create a painterly effect inspired by Art Nouveau and the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025
The textiles themselves are extraordinary in both concept and execution. Hawley and her team created entirely bespoke fabrics, including silk jacquards inspired by beetle shells and microscopic cellular structures—an idea drawn from the film’s fascination with anatomy and scientific discovery. These are not merely decorative choices; they embed themes of life, mutation, and creation directly into the cloth.
Above: Original mood-board by Kate Hawley for Frankenstein, directed by Guillermo de Toro. Below: Mia Goth as Elizabeth in the scarab necklace, designed by Meta Overbeck under the direction of Tiffany’s art director, Louis Comfort, in 1914. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025
Elizabeth’s costumes, in particular, became a laboratory of experimentation. One gown required multiple versions to respond to different lighting environments, shifting tone depending on whether she stood indoors or against a green exterior landscape. This responsiveness reflects Hawley’s acute understanding of how costume interacts with cinematography and set design, treating garments as living elements within the frame.
Jacob Elordi as the Creature. Credit: Ken Woroner/Netflix
The scale of the work is equally striking. Hawley oversaw more than 1,250 costumes for background performers, constructing entire visual worlds—from stark funeral processions to Arctic expeditions. Even the Creature’s wardrobe demanded multiple iterations of a single coat, some designed to be torn apart by wolves, others to withstand explosions, turning costume into an active participant in the narrative.
Ultimately, Hawley’s Oscar-winning work on Frankenstein is about transformation. Through colour, textile, and relentless experimentation, she constructs a world where clothing breathes, evolves, and carries meaning. It is this fusion of craft and concept that elevates her designs from beautiful garments to cinematic storytelling at its most profound—an achievement now rightfully recognised on the industry’s biggest stage.
-
Further Information:
Frankenstein is currently available to watch on Netflix.
-
Image Credits:
Lead: Mia Goth wearing Elizabeth's "Cell Dress" by Kate Hawley for the Frankenstein Costume Department. Credit: Ken Woroner/Netflix.
All further images as credited in photo captions.