Somewhere between the paintings of Giotto, the papal courts of medieval Europe, and a mesmerising photograph of a wealthy woman wearing Dior sunglasses in Iran, Jacqueline West found the visual language for Dune: Part Three. There was Howard Hughes, too, the eccentric American billionaire who spent years living in near-total seclusion in a Las Vegas hotel penthouse, whose lonely existence became a reference for Timothée Chalamet’s burdened Emperor Paul Atreides. And then came Carrie, the 1976 horror film starring Sissy Spacek, which inspired Anya Taylor-Joy’s costumes. For a film set thousands of years in the future, West found herself looking further into the sands of time than ever.
“It’s a gift to get to do all three,” West tells Vogue, reflecting on the nearly eight years she has spent building Denis Villeneuve’s gargantuan sci-fi universe—and surveying a set of images from Dune: Part Three shared exclusively on Vogue. A five-time Oscar nominee whose credits include The Revenant, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, West began her career as a fashion designer, running her own label and boutiques in California before making the transition into film. Her meticulous, research-driven approach has since made her one of Hollywood’s most distinctive costume designers.
The trilogy’s final installment, which takes place approximately 20 years after the events of Dune: Part Two, presented West with a new challenge. “It’s a different vision,” she explains. “The script was much more emotional and really character-grounded. Everyone has evolved in very profound ways.”
West and Villeneuve began discussing this new direction while she was in London working on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, speaking almost daily before she arrived in Budapest for production. Their three-movie creative partnership is now a well-oiled operation. West begins with the script, followed by long conversations about how Villeneuve imagines each character’s psychological development. From there, she works with her concept artist to develop ideas, bringing sketches and references back to the director.
There has remained an overarching philosophy to the way West dresses the Dune universe. Early in the project, she coined the term “modieval”—a marriage of modern and medieval—to describe the world they wanted to create. Villeneuve, she recalls, was adamant that the designs should remain grounded in reality instead of relying on the conventions of the sci-fi futurist aesthetic. West found her guiding principle in an observation she attributes to Frank Herbert: “to imagine the distant future, look to the ancient past.”
For Part Three, however, even that concept required some reconsideration. “I’ve kept that principle as a flashcard,” she says, “but the story gets darker, and then there’s a redemption. I had to switch from that medieval sense to something almost Renaissance-like. My references got a little more modern in this one.” Her inspirations have expanded to include the paintings of Francisco Goya, the ecclesiastical imagery of the early papacy, Etruscan and North African tribal dress, and the sculptural sartorial language of Cristóbal Balenciaga.
Nowhere is this passage of time more apparent than in Paul Atreides. The young, reluctant messiah of the earlier films has become an all-powerful emperor, haunted by the consequences of his own reign. “With power came enormous guilt,” says West. “He carries the weight of the world on his shoulders.” To communicate this, she turned to the reclusive figure of Howard Hughes, imagining Paul alone at the summit of the Citadel of Arrakis just as Hughes once isolated himself in a Las Vegas hotel suite. West translated that psychological heaviness into robes constructed from substantial fabrics, rich leather, and embroidery.
For Zendaya’s Chani, the approach was almost the opposite. “She’s the moral compass of the story. She’s kept all of her wits about her, along with her wardrobe,” West explains. Now an established leader, warrior, and mother, Chani remains connected to her Fremen heritage through the more traditional stillsuit. That continuity makes the development of the film’s other stillsuits more striking. One of the most ambitious technical undertakings of Part Three was a redesign of the desert survival garment, which West and her team have made more body-conscious. The original suits featured extensive external tubing and multiple visible layers, while the new versions have a scuba-diving quality, with moulded acrylic components sitting closely against the body.
“One of [Denis’s] notes was he wanted them sleeker than the first stillsuit,” West explains. As described in the book, the suits still needed to facilitate Herbert’s system for collecting and recycling the body’s moisture in the barren desert. Deep research and experimentation with materials and fabrication brought West to a specially developed, rubber-textured coated Lycra that stretches with the body, incorporating moulded hard sections directly into the softer fabric. “They’re kind of melted together,” she says. “It’s like one continuous sheath of moulded hard pieces and soft pieces for mobility.” The textile was initially developed in Los Angeles before a factory in Budapest was enlisted to reproduce it at the scale required for production. The plastic components were also largely moulded in Hungary, with specialist costume-effects makers developing the initial prototypes.
New armies appear with architectural armour and distinctive headgear drawn from ancient Japanese samurai that required specialist engineering to be made weatherproof. Filming in punishing desert temperatures, West’s team developed cooling suits that could circulate cold water through tubing worn close to the actors’ bodies. She had previously faced the reverse problem on The Revenant, when she needed to keep Leonardo DiCaprio warm in temperatures of minus 40 degrees. This time was about keeping the cast cool enough to endure the heat. “You don’t want unhappy actors going to the set, to Denis…” she says.
Amid the technical innovation, West remains devoted to the tactility of natural materials. “I feel that polyester didn’t make it to the future,” she jokes. “It all melted in the heatwave!” Among her longtime collaborators is a textile artist and designer in Lucca, Italy, who creates many of West’s handwoven textiles, including fabrics for Paul’s robes, from her studio within the medieval city walls. This melding of ultra-modern fabrication and centuries-old craft compounds West’s broader vision for costuming Dune, creating futuristic objects that appear to have lived entire histories.
Princess Irulan’s wardrobe articulates the melancholy of an imperial queen trapped in a deeply unhappy marriage. “I tried to make her Lady Sings the Blues,” the designer says of the predominantly blue palette for Florence Pugh’s character. Irulan’s costumes also continue the ecclesiastical language established for the Bene Gesserit, with elaborate head coverings. West commissioned London-based designer Liria Pristine to create intricate knitted and hand-crocheted metal headdresses, with details that speak to both religious habits and armoury. A note in the script that came from the original book described Irulan wearing a cape of intriguing material: blue whale fur. “I thought, ‘What does blue whale fur look like?’” West says. Unable to leave Budapest, she dispatched her assistant designer to Italy to investigate the country’s fabric manufacturers, in search of something to pass for it. He returned with a luminous, icy blue faux-fur-like textile, with which she quickly fashioned a mock-up and dressed a mannequin for Villeneuve’s inspection. “He just loved it,” she recalls. “He couldn’t believe we’d found something like that.” The cape is one of Irulan’s most sumptuous pieces, with an almost liquid surface that contrasts with more austere, monastic silhouettes.
Meanwhile, Anya Taylor-Joy’s Alia Atreides, the younger sister of Paul, has grown into a powerful and sinister presence. Her wardrobe, like Irulan’s, draws on the monasticism of the Bene Gesserit. West looked further to Giotto’s religious paintings in Padua and the elongated silhouettes of the characters. As the leader of a cult, West dressed her predominantly in white, also drawing on Sufi-inspired shapes for more dramatic, dynamic movement. West remembered the image of a wealthy woman in Iran, dressed in a white chador and oversized dark sunglasses. “She looked so beautifully sinister,” says West, who recreated the entire look on a mannequin, glasses included, and kept it in her office as a reference throughout production. While West was working on the film, she received a call from longtime collaborator Jack Fisk, the production designer and Sissy Spacek’s husband. With Spacek on the line too, the concept drawing of Taylor-Joy covered in blood prompted a comparison with Spacek’s performance in Carrie by Spacek herself. “So Carrie automatically became a reference,” West says. “I put more and more and more blood all over Anya Taylor-Joy! When I showed Denis, with all the blood, he said ‘oh, you know she’s worked with Scorsese.”
Robert Pattinson joins the cast as the shapeshifting Scytale, and has a wardrobe that relates that slippery persona, from his stillsuit to his Fremen robes. West initially imagined his look through the imagery of the early papacy—particularly the period when the papal court moved from Rome to Avignon. She was drawn to the historical associations of religious persecution. “I wanted to keep him unsettling and menacing,” she says. Jason Momoa also returns as Hayt, a “ghola” (a genetically engineered replica of his character Duncan Idaho), wearing luxurious-looking garments. “He’s almost presented like a gift to Paul,” says West.
It’s been a deeply personal and emotional piece of work, one she’ll find hard to let go of. “[Denis is] so passionate about this project,” West says. “It was really important to him that we all got it right. We were all very emotionally involved with it.” After nearly eight years and three films together, West likens their creative relationship to an orchestra. “Denis [is] the conductor and we’re all the instruments,” she says, “and he keeps us all in the right key.”
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.
