SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot points for “Agatha All Along,” currently streaming on Disney Plus.
If there is one thing known about Marvel, it’s that no detail is added by accident: scenery, wardrobe, little lines of dialogue here and there. All these small additions tend to be Easter eggs that fans later meticulously comb through and analyze to comprehend the foreshadowing they might entail. One of the most noticeable methods this is done through is outfit choices, and the wardrobe in “Agatha All Along” highlighted more than just figures.
With plenty of fun themes to play around with clothing-wise, the “WandaVision” spinoff took a group of witches — composed of Agatha (Kathryn Hahn), Lilia (Patti LuPone), Jennifer (Sasheer Zamata), Rio (Aubrey Plaza), Alice (Alison Ahn) and Billy (Joe Locke) — through different challenges while they explored the dangerous Witches’ Road. This resulted in disco, wine country, camp trip and witch-off costumes galore. “We designed all of their looks with a trajectory, knowing that we would start in one place and we would end up in another place,” costume designer Daniel Selon said.
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Did you notice that their costumes evolved after each trial? That was not a coincidence, “I approach that by planting seeds on the initial costume that you see them in. And by seeds I mean easter eggs, and sort of the silhouette is established there, and within the framework of that silhouette, we slowly change things like Billy’s blue hoodie slowly turns red once he bleeds into it in episode four. And so you know that is slowly revealing his shift into who he becomes,” Selon said.
Full of twists and turns, the show revealed two major identities in the final two episodes. Plaza’s character Rio is actually Death and Locke’s character, previously known as Teen, turned out to be Wanda and Vision’s back-from-the-dead son Billy Maximoff.
“With Aubrey’s character, it was sort of about introducing things like green growing life, giving things like plants and leaves and flowers and what happens to those when they die. And so you sort of get this full life cycle of things that are on the costume. The silhouette is the same, but everything is alive and green and growing. And, when she becomes Death, all those things have died and decayed and calcified and become sort of like lava rock and hardened and dark and permanent,” Selon said.
Selon’s technique for each character was to “start basically from the inside out.” For Agatha, he says the trick was strong shouldered, tailored garments. “There is sort of like a presentational quality to her that she’s always like playing a character. She’s kind of giving attitude, and she isn’t necessarily telling the truth, or it seems like she’s not telling the truth. So she’s always hiding something.” The vision was “to give her this sort of masc-femme combination where there’s both the soft and the hard, and that carries through.”
On the other hand, Lilia had a different focus, instead of figure, it was color, “I always wanted her to be in this sort of yellow color palette, which is air and divination and intuition and this sort of magic,” Selon said. “[It was a ]callback to her roots, which was just revealed in Episode 7. We see her as a young girl in 1540s Italy, and that some of the shapes and the color and the details in her costume from that time when she was a little girl have carried all the way through to present day Lilia. So we always see that there’s something embroidered on her costume, no matter which costume it is, and that there’s similar neckline, and that we keep her tarot card pendant that she had from being a very little girl.”
Also in Episode 7, the trial’s costumes were elevated. Agatha was covered in full-body green paint, Jennifer embodied the Evil Queen, Lilia became Glinda and Billy was dressed as Maleficent. Out of all of these, Locke’s Maleficent was particularly striking. Selon explained this costume was done with a lot of thought behind it: “It’s important in authentic queer representation to make sure that it’s done with the proper intention. And so we, looked at the original Maleficent character that is played by a female presenting Evil Queen and she is in a big, voluminous dress, essentially. So it was like, ‘OK, Joe, are we putting you in a skirt, or does this become pants?’ We made sure with everybody high up the chain, it was like, ‘Here we drew it, we made our illustration.’ We were like, ‘This is what we want to do. Is this cool? Making sure you all can see that’s a skirt.’ And everybody was like, ‘Absolutely yes, of course.’”
No longer nervous about the response behind putting Locke in a skirt, Selon said the only instructions he was given for the costume was to ensure Locke felt “at his most powerful.” They did this through the choice of fabric: “It’s covered in these tiny leather, essentially, leather sequences that have a reflective quality, but it’s also like armored dragon skin. And so I sort of wanted to push him from the feminine into this sort of dragon which Maleficent becomes.”
