8 “Poor Things” Wardrobe Secrets from the Costume Designer, Like Which Look Is Emma Stone's Favorite (Exclusive)

Holly Waddington tells PEOPLE about the lengthy process of creating the elaborate wardrobe for the Emma Stone-led film

Director Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things is a fantastical — if not overtly sexual — Frankenstein-inspired movie starring Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, Willem Dafoe as God (his name, not the celestial being) and Mark Ruffalo as Duncan (Bella's part-time lover).

The film, which is saturated in color and humor, is also an explosion of beautiful costumes, helmed by costume designer Holly Waddington. The Critics Choice Award nominee, who has previously worked on Atonement and Clash of the Titans, crafted hundreds of costume pieces alongside her team to outfit the cast while filming in Hungary.

In the movie, Bella is given a second chance at life, thanks to God, and she rediscovers the world around her. Her wardrobe grows with her and evolves in color and silhouette. It also matures right along with her as she discovers the joys of sex — or "furious jumping" as she comes to call it.

The costume pieces in the film are some of the most elaborate and intricate we've seen in awhile, and Stone has praised Waddington's work openly. She and the costume designer did an interview together with Interview this week, where Stone even said some of the pieces from this movie are her favorite costume pieces she's worn in her entire career.

Ahead, Waddington sits down with PEOPLE to reveal her process for building the magnificent wardrobe for the film, which is in theaters now.

Warning: Some spoilers for Poor Things ahead.

Related: Taylor Swift Supports Her Friend Emma Stone at Poor Things Premiere in All-Black Look

The Brothel Wardrobe Is a Celebration of 'Nude' Colors

Most sexy underwear is black. We're very saturated with images of sexy underwear and pornography and sex work. A Victorian brothel normally has a certain color palette. So I just wanted to come up with something that was unique to the film. So I thought, what is the most unsexy underwear? Oh, maybe neutral tones. So let's make a whole palette based on that. And I quite liked it actually. I thought it was really soft and easy on the eye.

I took the color palette from this range of women. The women in the brothel are a really diverse group. Skin tones are really varied, and I wanted it to be a sort of celebration of them and their bodies. Many have their breasts exposed, and I just thought it was quite a funny subversion of "nude."

Related: Mark Ruffalo Poses with Daughter Bella and Wife Sunrise Coigney on Red Carpet at Poor Things U.K. Premiere

The Whole Concept of Bella's Wardrobe Before Leaving Home Is That of a Child Who Is Always Half Dressed

It started with deciding who is dressing her. So in my mind it was [housemaid] Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine). Baxter would probably be getting really nice things made for her because he loves her and cherishes her. So the clothes needed to feel kind of luxurious and beautiful and a bit childlike, but not too childlike. There would be a sense of half-dressed. This was the thing that I wanted to do. So it came from observing. I have children — I was observing how my kids, especially when they're tiny, seem to have this drive to lose their clothes and end up half-dressed. So often, even if they're going to a wedding or a party, they've got their pants missing. They're dressed from the top.

Through her undress, I like the idea that we would get to see a glimpse of some underpinnings. When I was looking at what those would be, I came across a reference of a bustle that looked like it was quilted. I really wanted to recreate this thing because I just felt like the language of it, its puffiness, its kind of quilty, weird, strange sponginess. It felt very interesting and correlated very well with the space that we were in. I like the idea of this strange lobster tail puffer thing. (Above)

The idea is that she's removed a skirt and we're seeing what's underneath, and it's just odd. And I suppose that with a lot of the clothes, I was striving to find things that had an organic quality. Lots of my references were sea creatures and things that live under the sea or the textures that are in the body, like the lining of an intestine or the bubbly texture on something like a sea sponge. So I wanted everything to feel like it was living and breathing.

Related: 'Poor Things' Director Yorgos Lanthimos Says Star Emma Stone Had to Have 'No Shame' Filming Movie's Sex Scenes

They Made 3 of the Blue Dress from the Opening Scene and Overdyed the Fabric to Get the Right Color

Let me start with the color. I just love blue, but I am very, very particular about color palettes and so is Yorgos, and I knew that we had this very dreamy, soft, quite optimistic palette for Bella's wardrobe, and I needed a total contrast for her wardrobe when she was the person that she was before. This blue [in the beginning] isn't an easy blue, it's very rich. It's a bit toxic. The fabric was beautiful and already blue but not intense enough, so we overdyed it and overdyed it. I worked very closely with a dyer and she did about 20 different samples of how she could push this blue and identified this particular shade.

But then we had to make this dress in repeat because Bella throws herself off the bridge and it gets covered in mud and water, so we three. It's a lot of fabric. It was not at all cost-effective doing this dress this way. Never do this if you're a fashion designer. We had these Hungarian costume assistants literally spending weeks folding and ironing, folding and ironing making these dresses. It was torture for them but they came out beautiful.

The idea for the dress was that she was married to an army general, and this was almost like a piece of armor and the sleeves were taken from the idea of suit of armor. So that's why they've got the articulated folds going down the arms. That was the concept.

We had these Hungarian costume assistants literally spending weeks folding and ironing, folding and ironing making these dresses. It was torture for them but they came out beautiful.

Related: Emma Stone Says She Made Poor Things to Explore 'What It Is to Be a Woman' in Extended Preview

Emma Stone's Favorite Look in the Film Is Bella's Wedding Dress

"Before we even went to Budapest and did all of the research, I plotted everything and had boards with references to early 20th century French designer Madeleine Vionnet. She was absolutely brilliant. She was the person who came up with the bias cutting in the 1930s. She did this dress in the 1930s called the Beehive Dress, and it was a black evening dress, and it combined these tubes with netting. I felt like this combination of horizontal bands was a really good analogy for marriage. It felt like it was good for her wedding dress to almost be like an expression of a cage that you could almost see right through.

These sleeves are huge. They're some of the biggest sleeves in the film, and they hold themselves up. They're like balloons, but they're made of nothing. They're made of hat netting and organza. They're just flimsy. It was a nightmare to make it. It was very difficult to make it. Partly, we couldn't easily get fabrics between Hungary and the U.K., because of Brexit. So we were just scatting around.

The dress is actually Emma's favorite. She liked it.

Related: Poor Things Director on Why Emma Stone Didn't 'Shy Away from' Sex Scenes: 'She Had to Be Free'

It Took About 40 People Roughly 22 Weeks to Create the Wardrobe

With the full team, we had 11 weeks of shooting and then prep, about 22 weeks of work.

The team was about 40 people, which is big. We had four cutters, lots of makers, one dyer working with me all the time, dyeing everything. I very rarely use a fabric just on its own. Everything is dyed and dyed and overdyed. Crowd costume people doing things and on-set people. A lot of people.  I needed more people. There's never enough time. There were never enough people.

Related: Emma Stone Finds Life Fascinating — and Slaps Mark Ruffalo — in 'Poor Things' Teaser Trailer

The Color Story During the Black-and-White Scenes Is 'Rotting Apples'

I came up with a palette for the first part of the house, which was based on rotting apples, and that was Yorgos' idea. So he defined this color to me, which absolutely knocked me sideways when he said it to me. I was coming up with references of things that were sort of fleshy and skin tones and quite like the body colors. I wanted Emma to just keep going back to the fact that she was a creation.

I described colors to him through words, through images, and he said, "What you're describing to me is the color of a rotting apple." And I went off and had a little look on my phone and noticed that he was absolutely right. It was the palette of a rotting apple. But just the fact that he would know that says about this man's ability for visuals.

But then that all ended up being black and white, didn't it? So we did a lot of work on the color, and then it was black and white, but that kind of worked, because Bella arrives in Lisbon and it's like the world has just exploded in front of her. She's seeing the world for the first time. Suddenly she's out of the house and she sees everything in technicolor.

Usually when you film in black and white, you think about the contrast, but I didn't really do it like that, because I didn't know ahead of time. We did end up remaking a few pieces with more contrast, but we didn't have time to start over after deciding about the black-and-white bit.

Related: Mark Ruffalo Praises Poor Things Costar Emma Stone: 'She's a Once in a Generation Talent’ (Exclusive)

Bella's Exaggerated Sleeve Motif Was Director Yorgos Lanthimos' Idea

I started off doing a lot of concept work for Yorgos. One idea was setting it a little bit earlier and having the sleeves tight with the skirts almost phallic. They looked basically like giant penises. I liked the idea of the clothes referencing body parts somehow and having an organic unruly quality. Then I did a lot of research on these sleeves and he very much went to the sleeves. That was him. He was just like, "Give me the sleeves."

Then I went to meet Emma with a big suitcase of clothes in Athens about 10 weeks before the shoot began and tried lots of shapes, had different varying degrees of sleeve to try on her, and actually just found that silhouette in that fitting, the huge sleeve.

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Bella's Clothes Are Meant to Make Her Blend In with the Men in Medical School

When Bella's going to the medical school in Paris, I wanted her to be a bit more formed. So she has this proper suit, and I wanted her to be totally blended with men. I didn't want her to be at all conspicuous in that scene in the medical school. I wanted her to be in tailoring like them, black like them, but for there to be a small little flip so that when she gets up and you see her legs, she has no skirt on. But the fabrics are weightier. They're heavier than her earlier outfits, they're more structured, they've got more body. It's suddenly like proper serious tailoring. It isn't light air-filled, dreamy, cloudy, girly stuff.

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