BIg Shoulders, Period Details Create Modern Past

It’s impossible to pin “Poor Things” down at any place or time except its own. It begins in a vaguely Victorian London, with scrappy medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) being brought into the Baxter home to obscure the development of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), who has the body of an adult woman but the mind of an infant. As that fact suggests, the technology, travel methods, and science of “Poor Things” would all be at home in an Isaac Asimov novel, let alone the 1992 Alasdair Gray novel the film is based on. 

The problem of building a visual world that evokes both the past and the future was a prime challenge for the production and costume design teams on the Yorgos Lanthimos film, and it allowed costume designer Holly Waddington the opportunity to blow up expected conventions of period costuming. 

Normally, historical costumes cheat a little bit and have slightly more modern silhouettes, or don’t use the same structure that held clothing together in the past. “Bridgerton” has made a point to embrace colors, patterns, and fabrics that wouldn’t have existed in the 18th or 19th centuries. “Poor Things,” while it doesn’t lean on historical patterns, does embrace — albeit in isolation — the big sleeves, more structured menswear, and dramatic shapes that were parts of past fashion. Waddington remixes these bits with modern fabrics and a design sensibility that embraces organic material to create clothing that is as singular as…