SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2, Part 2 of “Wednesday,” now streaming on Netflix.
Last Halloween, Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood was accepting Variety’s creative impact award at SCAD Savannah Fest. Immediately after, she had to head to Los Angeles for a mysterious VIP fitting for “Wednesday.”
That VIP fitting turned out to be for Lady Gaga’s cameo in episode 6, “Woe Thyself.” In the series, Gaga plays a deceased ghostly teacher, Rosaline Rotwood.
Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday encounters Rosaline one night after following the advice of her Grandmama Hester Frump (Joanna Lumley). In her efforts to strengthen her psychic gift, she visits Rosaline’s tomb and reads the inscription, which transports her into the tomb. She finds herself facing the former Nevermore teacher, who is now a ghost.
Atwood found a “putty gray French wool crepe” fabric for the dress. But the devil was in the details. “It had silk embroidery with feathers.”
Atwood, who has worked on both seasons of the show, explains that the idea came from how Rotwood’s character was described. She explains, “What happened in her story, the time of her demise was in the 1930s. So that was an influence on her dress.” Atwood adds, “She had a bird influence on her dress, like the raven, so she has embroidered feathers.”
Originally, the idea was to have the shoulders on Rotwood’s dress be “super pointy, so it looked like a bird hunching their wings up, but because of the action, we dialed that down,” Atwood says.
The big sleeves on the dress still played into the wing idea.
Atwood has always loved crepeline, a thin silk, and when it came to fitting, she had an idea. “I said, ‘What if we put this over your head?’ It could blow and make it more ghostly. You still saw the gray through it. And she loved it.”
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Elsewhere, Atwood was able to expand on Morticia’s (Catherine Zeta-Jones) look to align with the family’s new setting, as the matriarch finds herself at Nevermore Academy with a job in fundraising. Production designer Mark Scruton infused red into his sets, and Atwood took that as a cue to weave that into Morticia’s outfits. Of course, Zeta-Jones was game with the idea too.
“We had a lot of opportunities with Catherine to take Morticia and put her out in the world, while nodding to the original silhouette,” Atwood says.
Previously, Atwood used jersey fabric, but this time, “it’s a thin stretch velvet, and it’s not particularly an expensive fabric, but I really like the way it lit. It wasn’t as flat as jersey, and it had kind of a weight to it.”
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Atwood admits she loved the idea of Grandmama Frump. In one scene, Grandmama and Wednesday go hunting, and Grandmama sports a hunting jacket.
“That [jacket] was influenced by a Schiaparelli jacket I saw from the 1930s,” she says. “The pockets were embroidered with silver bullion. She could keep the bullets in the bullion embroidered pockets and have the shape of it and still be able to shoot.”
Grandmama Frump’s other costume was her main outfit, featuring a large collar. “As an Addams, her palette was black with smaller accents of white and gray. The collar fanned out, which I really loved. Ultimately, the shape of Gaga’s dress fell into that world too.”
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