Academy Award winning Costume Designer, and long-time Tim Burton collaborator, Colleen Atwood takes us through how she defined the new look for 'Wednesday' and where she drew her inspiration from for the many outfits Jenna Ortega & Catherine Zeta Jones wear on the show.
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00:00 [music]
00:07 The idea of what I bring to Tim Burton is a certain level of shorthand because we've
00:13 worked together for so long.
00:15 First and foremost, he's an amazing artist, and I always try to bring the art into the
00:19 costume.
00:20 He understands the craft, he appreciates the craft.
00:23 When you work with an artist as iconic as Tim, as a collaborator, you don't want to
00:28 go back to all your old tricks.
00:31 So for me, it's a huge challenge every time I work with him because I know what he'll
00:35 like automatically.
00:37 So I try to push it outside of those parameters.
00:40 [music]
00:52 Hi, I'm Colleen Atwood.
00:54 Myself and my co-designer, Mark Sutherland, are the designers for Wednesday Addams from
00:59 Netflix.
01:00 Wednesday is such a near unique name.
01:03 I'm guessing it was the day of the week you were born.
01:05 I was born on Friday the 13th.
01:07 It was Tommy Harper, the producer, who called me and he said, "Tim's going to call you because
01:11 he's doing this series and he would like for you to do it."
01:15 The first thing I do is read the script because the script, they can say it's Wednesday Addams,
01:19 but it could be so many things.
01:23 The first place I started was a school at Nevermore.
01:26 In the beginning, I had two cast members, Wednesday and Enid, which are Jenna and Emma,
01:31 but I didn't know the rest of the cast yet.
01:33 So I started with the two girls.
01:34 The idea for them was that we didn't want to have Enid just look silly because she was
01:40 in pastels.
01:42 We knew that Wednesday was in black and white, but we also didn't want her to become a character
01:47 in black and white.
01:48 When you look at kids outside of schools that are heavy duty uniform schools, you see everybody
01:55 interpret a uniform in a different way.
01:57 I think that that interpretation per character is what makes it stand alone as a uniform
02:04 in a story.
02:05 In Wednesday's case, for her uniform, first the shirt, which I had this old vintage Carnaby
02:11 Street kind of shirt from the '60s that had a really tiny, elongated Peter Pan collar,
02:17 which a lot of uniform shirts have Peter Pan collars, but this was a Peter Pan with some
02:22 panache.
02:23 This necktie that I made for her, which is black on one side, white on the other, which
02:27 doesn't really show, but the edge of it shows.
02:30 Little things like that made me really happy.
02:33 The fabric's actually hand-painted and silk-screened because I couldn't find a fabric that had
02:38 sort of the right gradation on camera of the black and gray that I wanted.
02:42 So you don't have that sort of strobe-y effect of stripes.
02:46 I've done this before with Tim with stripes on Sleepy Hollow.
02:50 I painted Christina Ricci's black and white dress with stripes with a yellow edge on it
02:55 just to do kind of the same effect and break it up a little bit.
02:59 The other thing I loved in making this is the top of the skirt, the stripes are black,
03:05 but when you move, the gray stripes show.
03:07 So it kind of gives you a barber pole effect in movement, which I did with all the school
03:12 uniform skirts, which was kind of a pain when you went to make them to get the math of it
03:17 all right.
03:18 I think the idea of the longer skirt, the sort of Victorian black stockings, the heavy
03:23 shoes, which give her a real edge and a weight to her character and sort of helped her with
03:30 her movement are the things that sort of make it specially Wednesday.
03:35 [singing]
03:39 [singing]
03:42 Hello, Finn.
03:44 Besides the uniforms, the next step was what they wore to hang out in.
03:49 And so the first time we see Wednesday, she's in her original costume and Enid is in bright
03:56 and exciting pastels.
03:58 I really wanted to continue the graphic into the color, so you had black and white graphics
04:03 parallel to a color graphic in the costumes.
04:07 So I found things for Enid that even though it was colors and stuff, there were angles
04:11 and edge to everything, rather than just being girly in that way.
04:15 I think the first sweater we see her in, which has the angles in it, it's an angora sweater.
04:20 It's coupled with a skirt, this kind of crocheted little flowers, but they're crocheted so they
04:25 don't look girly, they just look printy.
04:28 And then the kind of Wednesday of it all is so contrasty to that, but still kind of balanced.
04:34 Tim's a reactive director, so I always show him a lot of different things.
04:37 He just looks at them and goes, "I like that one."
04:41 I am not you, Mother.
04:43 I will never fall in love or be a housewife or have a family.
04:47 The first zoom I had with Catherine, she had her hair straightened, red lipstick, she was
04:52 ready to be Morticia.
04:54 So we talked about the dress.
04:56 We knew it would be that shape and it would be a long dress, and she really wanted to
05:00 be able to move in it, that it was fluid on her.
05:02 I made her dress in three different materials for the first fitting.
05:07 I made it in leather in the beginning, which looked really amazing.
05:11 It felt too costumey, so we ended up with the jersey because it draped, it was sort
05:15 of ethereal.
05:16 In season two, she'll have a lot of looks, so it'll be really fun to see what Morticia
05:21 does when she's out of the dress and into around the house looks.
05:25 Please excuse Wednesday.
05:27 She's allergic to color.
05:31 When you use black and white, you're limited, but if you're going to be limited, it's a
05:35 great world to be limited in.
05:37 You can juxtaposition the two colors in different ways graphically that can make things look
05:43 very different.
05:44 You know, when I found the, I call it the potholder sweater, I was in Romania and I
05:49 walked into the Zara store there, and there was like a rail of those sweaters, and I was
05:54 like, "Oh, they must have heard I was coming," because it was so great, because I was like
05:59 always, always, everywhere I was, whether I was in London, Romania, wherever I was,
06:04 I was always looking for black and white, different versions.
06:06 You start seeing stuff in the world when you're looking for something that's been there all
06:11 the time, but you see it in a different light.
06:14 I won't say I redid Wednesday, but I feel like I took Wednesday into today's world,
06:21 into a world that was applicable to a large audience.
06:25 One of my favorite costumes in the movie was kind of my second one I did after the uniform,
06:36 which is the costume she wears playing the cello on the roof, which is just a gigantic
06:40 oversized sweatshirt, a pair of baggy sweatpants shorts, and her shoes and knee socks.
06:47 It was nerdy, but it was cool, relaxed, but a little bit different than what other kids
06:52 wore to hang out in.
06:54 It had to be practical, because a cello, your legs are spread, so you have to have something
06:58 that's like movable in that way.
07:00 When I put that on with her hair and her makeup and everything, I was like, "This is the beginning
07:05 of Wednesday in the world," and then we just spun out from there.
07:09 The floral dress that she wears in the opening with the fish and then coming to the school,
07:15 it says the Wednesday that's come before, so it's immediately recognizable to the audience.
07:21 I changed it up a little bit by adding some shoes that I found that I thought were great,
07:25 which are kind of like a girl, Mary Jane shoe, but they've got a little bit of a Bondage
07:29 vibe with all the straps.
07:31 The idea of what I bring to Tim Burton is a certain level of shorthand, because we've
07:37 worked together for so long.
07:40 First and foremost, he's an amazing artist, and I always try to bring the art into the
07:44 production.
07:45 He understands the craft, he appreciates the craft.
07:48 When you work with an artist as iconic as Tim, as a collaborator, you don't want to
07:53 go back to all your old tricks.
07:56 For me, it's a huge challenge every time I work with him, because I know what he'll like
08:01 automatically, so I try to push it outside of those parameters to come up with new things
08:06 all the time for him and for myself.
08:08 [Music]
08:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]