Every gown and accessory becomes a clue to Elizabeth Harlander’s evolving presence in a world collapsing under the weight of ambition. Costume designer Kate Hawley uses fabric to say what dialogue cannot.
Through colour shifts, insect motifs, religious echoes, and Victorian structure, Elizabeth’s wardrobe becomes the film’s emotional map.
This is a character revealed not only through performance but through the way her clothing moves, glows, darkens, or comes apart as she steps deeper into the orbit of Victor Frankenstein and his creation.
She arrives in the story as a force of vitality.
Her first major outfit is a brilliant oceanic blue gown that seems to expand the room around her. The fabric catches light with a soft shimmer, the surface almost iridescent, recalling the gloss of beetle wings.
A Tiffany and Co. archival beetle necklace hangs at her collar, its blue glass segments locked in a delicate gold frame, while a feathered headpiece fans upward to create a halo-like frame.
This entrance matters.
Victor sees her first as an apparition of wonder, and the costume amplifies that point of view.
The halo, the blues that ripple like deep water, the jewel that hints at rebirth. She is coded immediately as luminous, otherworldly, and alive in a world where Victor is already obsessed with defying death.
This outfit becomes a declaration of the film’s central contrast. Elizabeth carries life in her colours while Victor drags death in his shadow.
Hawley describes Elizabeth as someone for whom nature is a kind of personal theology. That instinct blooms through her next set of outfits. Greens and blues dominate. Aniline green, lavender tinted iridescence, and malachite patterns sit across fabrics that mimic the cellular geometry of butterflies and beetles.
The green malachite gown, custom printed with a beetle pattern, becomes the clearest portrait of Elizabeth’s grounded essence. The cut is Victorian, cinched and formal, yet the pattern breaks the era’s restraint.
It tells us that she studies botany and entomology not as curiosities but as invitations to understand the world more deeply. Her identity is tied to living things. Her compassion is rooted in observation. This is why she becomes the one person who truly sees the Creature.
Her clothes, with their insect echoes, align her with beings that the rest of society dismisses, fears, or destroys.
Her veils also hold meaning. The gauzy green tulle that sometimes drapes across her face works like an insect’s translucent wing, a protective layer that softens her image without hiding it.
It signals both vulnerability and strength, both curiosity and caution. These veils become a subtle shield against the violence and moral decay gathering around her.
Midway through the story, the palette shifts.
Elizabeth arrives unannounced at Victor’s home wearing a pigeon-blood red dress trimmed with black. Gone are the greens and blues. Gone is the insect-inspired luminosity.
The dress is dense, heavy in colour, grounded in a Victorian silhouette that feels more rigid. Her mesh gloves and lace details echo the stitched seams Victor uses to build his Creature.
This is the first time Elizabeth’s clothing draws her into Victor’s emotional world rather than away from it.
The red slides her temporarily into his history. It is the colour of his mother’s blood, the colour tied to the trauma that shaped his obsession.
Seeing her dressed in this hue overwhelms him.
To Victor, she becomes the one person who might pull him out of the darkness he created. The costume creates that illusion. But Elizabeth rejects it.
She steps back from his confession, refusing to become the cure he projects onto her. The red, powerful as it is, becomes a costume she discards. She never returns to that palette again. It marks her refusal to be absorbed by his narrative.
When she encounters the Creature, the insect tones return, but now they sit against growing dread. Her empathy remains intact, but her belief in Victor fractures. That fracture deepens across her final transformation.
Elizabeth’s wedding dress is a study in unraveling identity.
The gown uses layered organza that glows under light, while the corset is shaped like a rib cage. The design pulls the insect imagery into harsher territory. She looks skeletal, ethereal, almost suspended between worlds.
Her arms are wrapped in white satin ribbons that mimic surgical bandages, directly linking her visual story to the Creature’s birth. These bindings begin to slip as her emotional world buckles.
The halo headpiece is gone.
Her hair hangs loose.
The structure collapses with her certainty.
The bandages, once neat, become symbols of wounds and unraveling protection.
In her final moments, when she is fatally wounded, blood begins to seep through the pale fabric. The red she refused earlier now returns without her consent. It stains her, harsh and irreversible.
Her compassion could not save her from the collision between Victor’s hubris and the Creature’s hurt. The costume turns her body into a canvas for the film’s tragedy. Life, stolen.
Colour, stolen.
Autonomy, stolen.
The luminous palette that defined her now gives way to a final, unchosen mark.
Elizabeth’s wardrobe charts her spiritual movement from beacon to witness to victim. Each colour shift, each insect motif, each historical cut, and each piece of Tiffany jewelry works like a narrative instrument.
Through her clothes, the film builds a story about empathy in a world that punishes empathy, about life in the path of those who fear mortality, and about the quiet courage of a character who refuses to surrender her humanity even when the world around her unravels its seams.
Extra for Experts:
- Kate Hawley designed all of Mia Goth’s costumes, building each gown as a custom creation that merged Victorian silhouettes with insect-inspired textures, cellular patterns, and iridescent fabrics. She developed watercolours and technical drawings to map out Elizabeth’s evolution through colour and form.
- The insect motifs came directly from Hawley’s research into beetle anatomy and butterfly wing structures. Many fabrics were screen-printed with custom malachite or beetle-like patterns, while organza and layered tulle were chosen to mimic paper-thin wings and exoskeletal translucency.
- Elizabeth’s blue beetle necklace and other key jewels were sourced from the Tiffany and Co. archival collection, focusing specifically on pieces designed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Paulding Farnham. These historic designs were selected to reflect Mary Shelley’s era and Victorian symbolism.
- Several pieces of jewellery were newly fabricated by Tiffany artisans using period-appropriate techniques, such as hand-carved garnet and enamel used for the blood-red cross necklace. The studio collaborated with Tiffany’s Jewellery Design and Innovation Workshop to ensure historical accuracy and narrative meaning.
- Elizabeth’s final white dress was engineered to echo the Creature’s stitched body, incorporating surgical-style satin wrappings around her arms and a corset shaped like a rib cage. Hawley and del Toro chose iridescent organza layers to make her appear ethereal under light, emphasising her role as the film’s embodiment of fragile humanity.
