‘It’s a huge challenge every time I work with him’: Colleen Atwood on pleasing Tim Burton with the costumes for Netflix’s ‘Wednesday’

Colleen Atwood is a legendary costume designer, and we don’t say that lightly. Beginning her career in the mid-’80s, Atwood has cultivated character through shapes, patterns, and colors for some of the biggest films of the past few decades, including Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Chicago, Into the Woods, and each of Warner Bros.’ Fantastic Beasts films.

She has also worked on most Tim Burton projects since 1990’s Edward Scissorhands. Thus, once Burton signed on to direct Netflix’s Wednesday adaptation, Atwood was one of his first calls.

In a recent interview for Variety, Atwood discussed the challenges of working with an artist whose taste she can easily anticipate by now, noting, “[F]or me, it’s a huge challenge every time I work with him because I know what he’ll like automatically. So I try to push it outside of those parameters.”

Discussing her relationship with Burton, Atwood said that she and the director “have a certain level of shorthand because we’ve worked together for so long.” She added:

“First and foremost, [Tim’s] an artist, and I always try to bring the art into the costume. He understands the craft. He appreciates the craft. When you work with an artist as iconic as Tim, as a collaborator, you don’t want to go back to all your old tricks.”

In the video interview, Atwood explained her process for designing the Wednesday costumes, which began with her reading the script. Then, Atwood decided to develop some looks for star Jenna Ortega and co-star Emma Myers, who portrays Wednesday’s roommate, Enid. While Wednesday infamously prefers black with a few dashes of white if she’s feeling generous, Enid loves all the colors of the spectrum.

Atwood explained that they didn’t want Wednesday “to become a caricature in black and white,” while they also didn’t want Enid to “look silly because she was in pastels.” Making the outfits broad without them feeling like parodies was key to Atwood’s mission.

Then there are the blue-and-black uniforms that students are required to wear at the Nevermore boarding school, which Atwood differentiated through styling:

“When you look at kids outside of schools that are heavy-duty uniform schools, you see everybody interpret a uniform in a different way, and I think that that interpretation per character is what makes it stand alone.”

Atwood also discussed the challenges of capturing stripes on camera, saying that one of Wednesday’s stripped outfits is “hand-painted” and “hand-silk-screened” because she “couldn’t find a fabric that had the right gradation on camera of the black and gray that I wanted — so you don’t have that strobe-y effect of stripes.” The designer noted that she learned a thing or two about stripes when she worked on Burton’s 1999 Hammer horror revival Sleepy Hollow.

Atwood even admitted to finding one of Wednesday’s black-and-white sweaters at a Zara store in Romania. So don’t feel bad for supporting fast fashion — even the legends do it from time to time.