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...

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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.