She’s creepy and she’s kooky, but Wednesday Addams is now also a bona fide fashion phenomenon, thanks to her latest reincarnation in director Tim Burton’s Netflix series, “Wednesday.”
The first season blew through viewing records as the series took on a fresh story, look and lead character, capably personified by star Jenna Ortega as the morose Wednesday. The series follows Wednesday as she and her high school classmates at Nevermore Academy attempt to solve a supernatural set of murders.
The dark humor of “The Addams Family” has entertained generations since cartoonist Charles Addams launched it in the New Yorker in 1938. Successful films, television series, cartoon shows, a Broadway musical and even a pinball machine followed. In the latest iteration, the costumes have launched the rarest pop-culture coup: They’ve elevated not one but multiple costumes into icon status and also reignited overlapping fashion aesthetics such as gothcore, dark academia, emo and punk.
Across the globe, major media outlets and fashion mood boards tell readers how to achieve Wednesday’s gothic chic clothes, makeup and hair. Retailers and e-commerce sites sell replicas of her dresses, school uniforms and braided wig. Fashion magazines predicted, accurately, that the star’s black-on-black wardrobe would launch a trend.
The fashion frenzy can be traced to Emmy- and four-time Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood, who made Wednesday look relatable and elegant, even when she’s covered in blood.
“It’s really connected with people. It’s always been a good look, but it’s kind of shocking to me how much people really like the style of Wednesday and what her whole character was,” Atwood said. The designer gave a nod to the classic Wednesday black dress with white cuffs and pilgrim collar in her first appearance in the series. From there, her mission was to “make it something that is cool and fun to look at. We had a great time playing with that,” she said.
“It was so funny,” she added. “We made a lot of Wednesday’s wardrobe, but we also shopped a lot of it from fast fashion to high street to everywhere. When we were shopping, it was really hard to find. Now if you want to find black and white, it’s out there, on any price level.”
With a costume workroom functioning full speed throughout the fall and winter of 2021 in Romania, Atwood created and tailored costumes for each character, including the Nevermore Academy purple-striped uniforms. Wednesday’s custom, black-striped school uniform has made a convincing argument for modesty with her mid-calf length pleated skirt and functional chunky-sole Prada oxfords.
Atwood gave Wednesday a touch of high-fashion glamour with high-end pieces. Her lace-up combat boots debuted at Prada’s Addams-esque fall 2019 show on models with pigtails like Wednesday’s. The ruffled, semi-sheer dress she wears to a school dance was plucked from the window of the Alaïa boutique on New Bond Street in London. When Wednesday dances to the Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck” at the school’s ball, the Rave’N, an internet sensation was born.
“I had been looking for that dress or thinking how I was going to make it,” Atwood said. “I had looked at vintage stuff all over the world. I didn’t find anything that felt right to me. It had to feel like it came from this store in a small town. I saw that dress. I was like, Oh, my God. I don’t think I can do anything better. I just knew it when I saw it.”
Atwood called co-costume designer Mark Sutherland, who seconded the pricey purchase. The wardrobe team cut the dress down to fit the petite actor but had to handcraft multiples for extra shoots because Alaïa made only one. “It’s become an iconic dress in many ways,” Atwood said.
Wednesday’s off-campus wardrobe of sleek leather jackets, oversize hoodies, cropped, wide-leg pants and sweaters hand-knitted with geometric black and white patterns is now the basis of a Gen Z fashion trend. Wednesday’s roommate Enid is the perky personality and visual opposite.
“It was important to me that the graphic quality of Wednesday’s costumes be conveyed in Enid. It’s not as obvious … but it’s very angular and colorful. Enid is from a wolf-pack family, so we went with stuff that had a little hairiness to it,” Atwood said.
Atwood makes the series convincing and coherent, but the challenges were established early. In the first episode, Wednesday declares that she is literally allergic to color and, henceforth, wears nothing but black and white in scenarios that are often dimly lit. To help the camera read the black costumes, Atwood added color and contrast to the edges such as a white cuff, collar or shirt.
“Adding texture and shine to black helps separate it from other blacks,” she said. Some of the stripes were silk-screened to insert gradations of tone between the colors, a process that was aesthetically and conceptually purposeful.
The characters’ origins in cartoons and Burton’s background in animation inspired Atwood “to convey that almost-illustrated world in the clothing,” she said. Focusing on the silhouettes and surfaces, Atwood emphasized contrasts such as that between the short and round Gomez in stripes and the tall and lithe Morticia in drippy, fluid sleeves and hems. Pugsley’s pudgy shape is distorted further with wobbly stripes in a hand-knit sweater. Gomez’s pinstriped suit was cut and tailored to keep the stripes linear and almost two-dimensional on the actor’s round body.
“With Tim, I like to bring the art into the world. So there is some stuff that I draw on or paint on,” Atwood said.
Jenna Ortega kills as the dead-eyed, boarding school-bound Wednesday Addams in the streamer’s triumphant update to a pop culture institution.
Ortega wasn’t the only character to get the high-fashion treatment. For school principal Larissa Weems, Atwood tailored Gwendoline Christie into a Hitchcock heroine. “I didn’t want her to look like a grump schoolmistress,” Atwood said. Instead, she showed the 6-foot-3 actor a poster of Tippi Hedren from “The Birds,” and they agreed to make her chic wardrobe of sheath dresses and coordinating coats.
The style momentum of “Wednesday” is ongoing. Ortega has appeared in variations of her Wednesday look on magazine covers such as Elle, an Adidas ad campaign, and red carpets such as the Golden Globes and the Met Gala. This stylish story of teen angst and friendship set amid supernatural horror has been a certified hit. There’s more to come: A second season has been announced.
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