MONSTER ENERGY

Costume designer Kate Hawley brings Frankenstein to life.

- Véronique Hyland

Mia Goth, costumed by Kate Hawley, in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

A red veil trailing against a decaying staircase. A wedding dress blooming with blood, its ribboned sleeves wrapped like bandages. A haunting white death mask. These are just some of the indelible frames in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein that could just as easily be on a museum wall as onscreen. (Unsurprisingly, costume designer Kate Hawley got her start as a scenery painter for the opera.) But while painting might be the immediate reference—along with a rich history of color-saturated cinema, from Hammer horror to Mario Bava’s giallo classics—music is the metaphor she keeps coming back to.

“When you are working with someone like Guillermo, he is a conductor, and we are all different parts of his orchestra,” Hawley says via Zoom from her New Zealand farm. This is her third time working with del Toro, having previously costumed Crimson Peak and