“Upload”'s Costume Designer on 'Pushing the Boundary' in Season 3's Digital Wardrobes (Exclusive)

Farnaz Khaki-Sadigh tells PEOPLE that with each new season, she likes to amp up the characters' costumes a little more

Imagine living in virtual reality where any outfits you dream up, you can wear. Your closet could be endless.

That's the digital world in Prime Video's Upload, but the downside is that if you're living in virtual reality, you're probably dead. Morbid? Maybe. Still pretty cool? Definitely.

In the show, when people are just about to die, they have the option to upload themselves into an afterlife so they can keep on living in virtual reality so that they're never really gone. They can keep in contact with the real world and keep on living out their days without aging. And because it's all digital, they can create what they want: including clothes.

Not everyone in the show is living in the afterlife, though. Some of the characters hop back and forth between the real world and the digital world via avatars — and they also get to dream up a digital wardrobe to suit their every whim.

In short, the sky is the limit when it comes to what you're wearing in Upload and costume designer Farnaz Khaki-Sadigh is the mastermind behind it all. She spoke to PEOPLE about diving back into the Prime Video show ahead of the third season, streaming Oct. 20.

Let's start with Ingrid (Allegra Edwards). Her character changes so much in three seasons. Walk us through her evolution from the beginning until the end of season 3.

She started off as this rich girl pampered by her family. She could have anything she wanted at the tip of her fingers, so she had access to everything. She doesn't have to work for it, and we show that in her clothing. She's very pretentious. She very much wears a new outfit every time. There's no repetitiveness. Everything has to be perfect and pristine and matched. And everything has a reason. She has an outfit for everything that she does in her life.

Then we go into season 2 where she's starting to find herself and she's starting to disassociate with her family a little bit. She's trying to figure out who she is without her family and without Nathan. In the virtual world, she's still trying to keep that image that she had in season 1, and she has access to it because it's a virtual world — she can have anything she wants. There's that kind of juxtaposition between the two worlds, where reality is a little bit simpler and the virtual world is over the top. We go through her closet at one point in season 2 and it's just massive. She asks for the latest fashions that haven't even come out yet that she wants in her closet, which is really nice to have, actually, in virtual reality. Every girl's dream.

And then season 3, it's really about her just kind of finding her humility and discovering who she really is. In reality, she doesn't have any money, she has to work for it. She still has to sort of pull from what she has. She can't buy anything new. In the virtual world, she's really trying to discover who she really is. We see her soften up throughout the season a little bit as she opens up herself and opens up to Nathan and accepts that she can be loved. She doesn't have to put on this facade for everybody to love her.

Another character who has evolved a lot is Aleesha (Zainab Johnson). Let's talk about her wardrobe.

It's been a progression for her from episode one. She's just gotten this promotion and she's still sort of just trying to adjust to having money. Then by the time we get through the episodes, she gets more powerful, more money and she's trying to blend in with the world that she's coming into. Even though we still kept some of her essence, she is losing herself in this world until the end of the season where she sort of goes like, "No, I am still who I am, no matter what."

It is a nice progression for her where we just tried in every episode to add a little bit more to her and build her wardrobe. It was a lot of fun this year playing around with what we can give her to dress her up and make her look fancier and richer and yet kind of keep a piece of her in there.

Her digital wardrobe has always felt very cool, and this season was even more so now that she's a boss.

Her digital outfits are also my favorite. We build a lot of stuff for the digital world. A lot of her pieces — the jackets and the vest that she wears — are all custom-designed and custom-made for her. It's such a specific color palette and we want to make it a little bit different from reality and a little bit more high-end. So I design and I have them built and we mix it in with pieces that we buy. So we'll buy the blouse, add the vest to it, or the blazers. I build little accessories. There's one sort of peplum skirt with a mesh underlayer on it that we built as an accessory to go over a dress that we bought. It's a lot of fun. The digital world is my favorite part to design.

We have to talk about the two Nathans (Robbie Amell) and their distinctly different wardrobes.

The Nathan in the virtual world still has his personality, but because he's being supplemented by Ingrid and still supported by her, her influence in what he wears is great. So we see that a lot. He doesn't really get to have a say in what he wears because Ingrid picks it for him. She supplements his closet, so a lot of the pieces are pieces that Ingrid would dress him in.

In reality, Nathan's sort of trying to discover who he is, as well as trying to gain his confidence as a human. He's not attached to Ingrid, and Nora is completely different, and he's trying to be independent after being so dependent on Ingrid's financing and support. So it's really like him sort of discovering himself. Plus, he doesn't have any money. He's poor, he has no job, he has no identity in the real world. So it's a lot of beg, borrow and steal kind of thing, and trying to blend that in with what he likes to wear and try and find his comfort level. It is still a discovery process for him to just kind of find his style.

Toward the end of the season, we see Nora (Andy Allo) all dressed up for the very first time. What can you tell us about her beautiful red dress?

We really wanted to go all out with it. We tried so many dresses on to try and find the perfect dress that would really sort of go, "Wow," and would turn heads and grab Nathan's attention, 100%. At the same time, she has to compete with Ingrid, so we really wanted to make sure that she stood out and held her own.

I think we tried on probably around 20 or 30 dresses. Because her wardrobe is a lot of darker colors, we tried a lot of black versions, short dresses, fancy dresses, long dresses. And this was the perfect va-va-va-voom. And we loved that it was red and completely contrasting to anything she's ever worn.

It seems the Angel outfits have gotten progressively more elaborate each season — is that purposeful?

I'm just pushing the boundary a little bit each time. Season 1, all of Nora's blazers are designed by me. There's maybe one that we purchased, but everything else is custom-built for her and designed by me. So I just slowly try and see what I can get away with and if I can push it a little bit further, I will. Because it's fun, and again, it's a digital world. You are representing a digital world and a world where you have unlimited resources and you can do whatever you want. So it's always fun to just level it up as much as we can. And this season, we really got to do that with Aleesha where because of the fact that she's trying to represent this higher status, she pushes her wardrobe, as well, to match that.

You've also got Tinsley [Mackenzie Cardwell] where she's sort of all over the place. She's still trying to figure out, "What is my style?" And she doesn't really have a style, but we kind of play around with her a little bit. In her backstory, she doesn't have any sense of fashion, she has no idea what fashion is, so she's sort of trying to figure out, "Okay, what looks cool?" And sometimes it looks really good, sometimes she pushes it too far and it doesn't really work, but that's on purpose so just to kind of add to her character a little bit.

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