Little Friday – Style – Kommersant

The Addams family (or rather, family) are characters with whom the viewer has been familiar for a very long time. The first newspaper comics with gothic characters appeared back in 1938 in The New Yorker magazine and came out from the pen of illustrator Charles Addams (he gave the family his last name). Surprisingly, for 80 years, the images of the characters have not changed much – black and white monochrome is unlikely to ever go out of fashion. The Netflix series follows the daughter of a family, Wednesday Addams, and places her from the family’s crypt home to a school with other teenagers. For the new setting, the image of the heroine had to be reinvented, while paying tribute to the original. We tell how the creators of the series perfectly coped with this task.

Costume designer Colin Atwood has previously worked with series director Tim Burton, for example, she created the character of Edward Scissorhands and was the costume designer for Sleepy Hollow. This time, Atwood faced a very difficult task: to present Wednesday Addams in a new, but at the same time recognizable image. The viewer meets Wednesday in an ordinary school where there is no uniform and all students look equally bright. For this segment, Atwood chose to recall Wednesday’s original dress from the 1990s film adaptations, a black dress with a white collar (which Atwood made more edgy). And it worked: we understand that Jenna Ortega is the new Wednesday, and not a reincarnation or parody of Christina Ricci.

Speaking about creating the image for the title character, Colin Atwood admits that it all started with a little black dress. The abundance of black is Wednesday’s calling card, and white is needed only in order to better highlight the contrast. A great example of monochrome is the school uniform, which is made especially for Wednesday when she enters Nevermore School (after all, she is allergic to color). Atwood complained that the black and white stripes could look washed out on screen, so she made the stripes on the jacket black and gray. So things had a depth that looked advantageous against the bright jackets of other students. However, even casual images of the heroine had to exist within only two colors. Here you can clearly feel the inspiration that Atwood drew from zoomer fashion: oversized hoodies, black and white T-shirts, knee socks and huge (of course, black) sneakers. Such an image could be seen on teenagers who prefer, say, Balenciaga. By the way, special attention should be paid to shoes – all the shoes that Ortega wears in the frame are on a large platform. This is a tribute to the trends for massive shoes, as well as an attempt to make Wednesday less tiny – the actress herself is just under 155 cm.

Speaking of characters surrounding Wednesday. Tim Burton’s sketches of Nevermore students’ school uniforms were hand-drawn, but it was Colin Atwood who gave them life. Each student, as expected, “customized” the form for themselves – to make it unique. Hoodies under the jacket, scarves, hats – through these details, Atwood showed the uniqueness of each of the students. When designing the dress for Wednesday’s mother Morticia Addams, Colleen initially wanted to make it all leather. However, she soon abandoned this idea, because then Morticia would become too “fashionable” and the image of her mother (albeit such an extravagant one) would be lost in her wardrobe. And here Atwood is certainly right – such a dress would look appropriate, perhaps, only on Kim Kardashian. The three-piece suit of Gomez, the father of the family, or the striped sweater of Pugsley’s brother are also unique: every detail in them was created by hand to emphasize the features of the actors’ figures, but with a reference to the images of the 1960s TV series and 1990s films.

Principal Wims was a kind of politician in the eyes of the costume designer, hence the strong emphasis on formal and representative style – after all, she is always in the public eye. With the image of Miss Thornhill, played by Christina Ricci, it was more difficult – you had to completely get rid of any associations with her version of Wednesday in the 1990s. Atwood was saved by the fact that “Christina is great at wearing vintage.” Bright accessories only added to her image of uniqueness and finally broke the connection with her version of Wednesday Addams.

But back to the main character. Every image of Wednesday on the show is close to flawless, but the most striking (if I can even put it that way) was her dress at the school dance – just like the dance itself. Atwood found the dress in London’s Alaa boutique and customized it a little, making the top lighter – the original model, according to Colin, had a too “suffocating” collar. The artist tried to find something similar to vintage black Dior dresses, but this nylon model seemed perfect to her: modern cut and details perfectly coexisted with a puffy skirt, referring to the old fashion. The final touch was the same unique and unusual dance of the heroine (which, by the way, Jenna Ortega invented and staged herself).

Wednesday has already become Netflix’s most popular English-language series of 2022, surpassing even the new season of Stranger Things. Obviously, the sarcastic and cold girl detective will return for a second (hopefully not only) season. At some points, you can feel the pop culture finger of Netflix pointing in the direction of trends and social networks, but Tim Burton still managed to maintain his own unique tone. Largely thanks to the work of costume designers. Therefore, in the new season, it is worth following not only the ideas and decisions of the writers, but also how Colin Atwood will return the image of Wednesday to the screen. An image that the whole world fell in love with in just a week.

Ilya Petruk