Jenny Ortego modernises the Addams Family in new Netflix series ‘Wednesday’. They are a severe and haunting family with equally intense clothes washed in monochrome colour palette.
On the recent series ‘Wednesday’, directed by Tim Burton, we see a modernised version of the 1991 family. The Addams Family. Designer Colleen Atwood had a mammoth task on her hands: how to create a set of costumes for an iconic family that felt nostalgically familiar and yet were still dramatic and individual in their own right.
According to Colleen, her plan was to start by establishing who each character was at the core before infusing it with her own vision. The outcome was pretty inspired. Colleen said “I made one out of leather, which was kind of cool but too much, you know? It didn’t feel as motherly as we wanted her to feel and as accessible” In the end Colleen leaned in the original look with a modern edge. A decision that paid off. The dress that Morticia wore in episode 1 looks exactly like the one she wore in the actual Addams family film but in the new series she wanted it to look more modern. However, as much fun as she could have with dressing Morticia the show is about Wednesday so she didn’t want to drop the ball too much.
When it came to the other Addams family the experiments didn’t stop there. Colleen said, “Gomez had a body that was so fun to play with, because its so round, and you’re doing up- and down stripes.so I knitted in a lot of little pieces and stuff to keep this jacket going straight up his body, to try to keep the linear kind of cartoon feeling of the Addams family in their clothes.”
For Wednesday’s brother Pugsley, she worked with a knitted and we sort of hand drew irregular lines instead of pure horizontal stripes. It was knitted in an artistic way. It was wavy stripes, to give it the modern vibe they wanted.
For Jenny’s character Wednesday her goal was to take the Wednesday we all know and love and make her more striking. Colleen said “we can take Wednesday to a new place that was sort of more accessible and mix it up with real clothes and sort of see more dimensions of the character. Wednesdays cuttingly straight look also served to combat the very serious ‘problem’ of Jenny Ortega’s face. Colleen admits that working on Wednesday look was quite gratifying because Colleen was dealing with black and white costumes the whole time which is a graphic. She also says that juxtaposition of black and white can be fun to play with artistically.
Many thanks to Jenny’s new role as Wednesday Jenny Ortega is now in her ‘dark moody era’, she has been spotted wearing a series of glamorously gothic outfits these past weeks. On November 16th on the world show premier jenny wore a jaw dropping corpse bride look from Versace. She is fully embodying the creepy character. The 20-year-old actor has blurred lines between art and reality.
-By Honey Sherwood
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