The Kiwi costume designer getting global attention

When Kiwi costume designer Kate Hawley signed on for Frankenstein, her third collaboration with director Guillermo del Toro, she knew it would be special, she says.

“I can really look back on it and be very thankful for the project, it was a wonderful project to be on, it was a very, very special collaboration.”

It’s a project that has garnered Hawley a slew of industry plaudits and recognition in recent months.

She has one of nine Oscar nominations for Frankenstein, and is also up for a BAFTA for her work on the film. These nominations follow her winning Best Costume Designer at the Critics' Choice Movie Awards in early January, and being named the British Fashion Council's inaugural Costume Designer of the Year in late 2025.

Hawley's work has been seen in a host of other movies, including Edge of Tomorrow, Mortal Engine, Suicide Squad, Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak and The Lovely Bones.

She also designed the costumes for the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s production of Hansel and Gretel.

Hawley, who studied at the Wellington School of Design before being trained at London's Motley School of Theatre Design, says the adaption of Mary Shelley's gothic classic was a project long in the making for director del Toro.

“He's lived with the project for 50 years. He talks about being five and worshipping at the altar of Frankenstein… he's had a lot of time to think about what he was going to do with this project.”

The script, she says, is her “Bible”, the starting point for her costume ideas.

“That first few precious moments you get to read that script, I try and lock myself away and just be in the world that they're creating and try and visualise what it is my director's trying to do.”

Del Toro’s script for Frankenstein was particularly evocative, she says.

“I think the thing that inspired me most was the tone; there's this beautiful tone and mood and atmosphere that was created.”

That in turn informed the colour palette she created.

“Guillermo was very clear, he said, 'I want a more visceral, vivid, saturated world'. He even mentioned Hammer Horror, but he also mentioned painters like Caravaggio.”

Colour can be a “strong, hungry thing”, she says.

“How do you still capture the mood and tone? So, we played a lot, I used a lot of translucent fabrics, and the tones that we picked together were colour on colour, almost like a painting, in fact, all the work across all the departments was very painterly in its approach.”

Red is a thematic visual through line in the film, Hawley says.

“We have the mother in the red veil on the step, we have her bloodied hand on young Victor, it becomes the red glove that he wears, the blood on his hands, the effigy of the mother in the coffin surrounded by the red, we echoed that in the bonnet of Elizabeth.”

Frankenstein is her third del Toro project after Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak. The pair have formed a strong professional bond, she says.

“When I first met Guillermo it wasn't my drawings or my design. It was the fact that I had the same books on my bookshelf.

“I had Goya and Joel-Peter Witkin and a host of horrors on my bookshelf. And he just looked at that and he said, ‘oh, and you've done opera, we can work together'.”

The Bafta Film Awards will be held in London on 23 February (NZ time), and the Academy Awards will be on 3 March in Los Angeles.