Diehard fans of Marvel’s hit Agatha All Along have probably wished that they could step into the curly-toed shoes of a witch at one point in their life. Maybe you’ve felt a kinship with the women of American Horror Story or thought Anjelica Huston was the most glamorous witch you’ve ever seen. Or, perhaps, you’ve longed to run amok with the Sanderson Sisters. What Agatha All Along does, though, is introduce us to a brand new coven to die for, and costume designer Daniel Selon was not only tasked with giving them colorful verve, but his costuming canvas had to stretch far and wide through different realms and worlds. Selon’s work is exciting, lush, and breathtaking. And, yes, quite bewitching.
What’s remarkable about Agatha’s costuming is how diverse it is througout this season. Many of us dove into this without knowing that every episode was going to have its own point of view and design from top to bottom, and that is something that excited Selon, especially coming off of his Emmy-winning designs for Marvel’s WandaVision.
“This show was truly a gift delivered on a silver platter,” Selon admits. “The greatest thing that a costume designer can get to do is express themselves and what they can do in one project. It doesn’t happen like that, and I have been fortunate to do two brilliant shows that have turned out so well. Very early on in the development of Agatha with Jac [Schaeffer] and Mary [Livanos], we talked a lot about how WandaVision had specific shows and eras that we could hang our hat on. The specificity is what made us successful in what we chose to show, recreate, and emulate. Agatha All Along is not exactly the same, but we are jumping genres a lot throughout this season. The challenge and excitement fell into how we could bring those elements into the costuming.”
Some might assume that the first trial, in episode three, is more styling than design since it’s a more modern feel, but Selon was quick to point out how he immediately wanted to show subtle correlations between each trial look with the coven’s respective road looks. The first trial is set in a pristine home with heavy Nancy Meyers influences. Come on, you know those women. Beiges, pinks, and whites aplenty. It’s a gorgeous meld of contemporary costume design while winking at the more fantastical elements found elsewhere in the season as we step to and from the road.
“If we had to boil down one prompt, it would be Nancy Meyers,” he says. “I did a lot of looking at Diane Keaton wearing turtlenecks–I may have an album on my phone. I knew it had to be a symphony of beige, and that was the goal of how it would look cumulatively. I like making sure that we respect the established silhouette of each character, especially because, in that episode, it was the first trial where we see everyone made over and the road was doing it. I take such joy in finding exactly the right thing for everyone.
“For Alice, her road look is this mesh shirt with a sort of eyeball frame where the necklaces become the iris of the eye with this cutout across her chest. We found this sweater that was both the turtleneck that had a cutout, and I knew that we had to use it. Lillia’s scarf was a find by one of my assistant costume designers, Christine Casaus, and I was so thrilled because it had her colors in it. It gives coastal grandma that is affluent and chic and drinking pinot gris while the coloring feels like her road look.”
Every time I watch episode four, I latch onto something different in Selon’s designs: Lillia’s layered, goldfish-colored coat…the cut of Jen’s pink, flowy dress or Alice’s vest…Teen’s baby blue, fluffy jacket…Agatha’s bell bottoms…the list goes on and on… The work in this particular trial is celebratory and unapologetically 1970s. We all think we know what the time period has to offer, but Selon and his team make us look at the decade in a whole new way. He even allows Agatha and Rio to have a bare-chest-off that he reveals has a surprising influence.
“I will admit that I kept procrastinating on figuring out what those looks would be, because I was very intimidated by it,” Selon says. “I feel like the seventies have been done in so many ways and we’re just far enough away from it now that people romanticize it in a way that isn’t necessarily the way that it happened. That’s how we always understand period.
“I found a key in to the designs once we started to identify actual rock goddesses from the period to emulate. It wasn’t about stealing an exact look, but it was about taking elements like what part of Stevie Nicks did we need to incorporate with Agatha? Her bare chest was actually born out of references of Robert Plant who is not a woman, but he was a sex symbol. He was often wearing these silk kimono shirts that, it turned out, had this backstory where he would wear the shirt of the woman that he slept with the night before. He would wear it on stage the next day. We wanted her to feel exposed but commanding like a lead singer, but we wanted to mix masc and femme as we kind of all do. Working with Cindy Welles, the hair designer, and Vasilios Tanis, the makeup designer, felt like we were a coven unto ourselves. All of this was custom made.”
Even the sparkle throughout that entire episode is captured so beautifully with every sequin and every strand catching the camera’s eye. In the hands of a different costumer, these pieces would feel too put-on or like the actors were told to pick their favorite look from the decade. Every character looks glamorous and true to themselves…as they inhabit a world they are visiting for the first time. It’s like the road knows what every witch would want to wear as they step into the next trial…
“When we were working out what the camera filter would look like, we loved that the references of like Suspiria and the colors were really pushed. The shadows are what we called “crushed” like there is a kind of nostalgic fuzziness to the look of the filter. We knew that if a sequin would actually read in the glint of a bead. These are the things that I like to think about, so I knew that we could push further since they would read on camera.”
Selon and I spoke the week of Halloween, and he knew that the costumes of Agatha would cross his path as trick-or-treaters descending on every town or as parties raged. You couldn’t scroll through Instagram or TikTok without encountering Agatha devotees trying their hand at making Agatha’s coat or something out of Teen’s closet (like all of the jewelry that Selon and his team designed and made…a collection, please?). When you are inspired by something you love on screen, the biggest compliment you can pay any artist is to try your hand at recreating it.
“I’m so overjoyed, especially when people are creating the look themselves–it’s not something they bought offline,” Selon says with a smile. “I love when people feel so inspired by what they see that they have to make a version of themselves. My DMs are inundated with the cosplayers who are sending me videos of them climbing the mountain that is making Agatha’s traveling coat. In dealing with our goal of making practical effects in-camera, the way that I can contribute to that is through the textures. I wanted them to feel tactile, so you could experience them viscerally and see how the textures are really exaggerated so you feel them on your body.”
Agatha All Along is streaming now on Disney+. Follow Daniel Selon’s Instagram to get even closer looks at some of Agatha‘s costumes.
