Warning: The following contains spoilers for Agatha All Along through the finale and all of the MCU. Read at your own risk.

Intro

Agatha All Along was so good it makes me angry. We’re talking Encanto levels of angry. Into the Spider-Verse levels of angry. The type of angry that makes me shout, out loud, “How DARE you?” while wanting to throw things at the wall because, seriously, how dare.

I don’t draw the Encanto or Spider-Verse comparisons lightly. As with those movies, Agatha All Along works by presenting a story which is not only baked in to every aspect of the show but which is built with layers. Spider-Verse in particular is an apt comparison because it would not be possible to do a single article about all the ways meaning, story, and symbolism is packed in to every second of this series. Give me one frame of the Witches’ Road and I could go on for days about everything happening in there. The level of details on everything is mind blowing.

To that end, I want to stress that you cannot create a show like this without everyone working on it bringing their A game. Not just writing and directing but camera, set design, props, makeup, editing (just try having Lilia’s episode make sense without top tier camera work and editing. It doesn’t happen), and more.

I’m talking about costuming in this article because, well, I’m me. But also because we’ve previously discussed what makes good costume design vs great costume design and the work on Agatha All Along by Daniel Selon and his team is unquestionably great. Ruth Carter great and you all know I don’t throw that level of praise around lightly. And when something this freaking good comes around you better believe I’m grabbing everyone I can by the shoulders and going “Look! Look! LOOK AT HOW GOOD THIS IS! THIS IS WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT WHEN I SAY IT CAN BE DONE!”

The costuming of Agatha All Along is so good you could teach classes on it. It’s amazing as is, let alone when you recall that the show was made with the smallest budget of any Disney+ show so far. We can’t even say this was the spare change in Kevin Feige’s couch because I’m pretty sure you could’ve had a higher budget even if you restricted it to whatever you could find in the back of Kevin’s closet where he kicked the Inhumans hat he’s hoping nobody remembers he owns.

The level of detail put into the costumes is just - ARGH! Seriously. And I want to stress this is very much a team effort in and of itself as well. Daniel Selon was the captain of this ship but it wasn’t just his hands holding the needle and thread.

To that end I want to give credit where it’s due, but IMDB isn’t helping. Daniel Selon does, on the other hand, but via links to people’s Instagram accounts where many of them are private and/or don’t have their full names listed. And I don’t want to be some kind of creepy stalker putting people’s information out there on their behalf if they don’t want it there (I’m a tiny bit sympathetic to that need, ahem). So, to that end, please check out Daniel Selon’s Instagram where he gets more into the individual pieces and provides detailed credits on who did what for each one. They all deserve the love and praise and if I felt I could respectfully name them here I would.

Which perhaps raises the question of okay, if the guy who headed up the costuming is already providing insight into the costumes themselves, what is there to talk about? And here, my friends, we go back to the idea of what’s the difference between good costumes and great costumes. Agatha All Along’s costumes are great. Why? So many reasons. But for the sake of keeping this article slightly under the word count of War and Peace, we’re going to focus on the following: How costumes tell us about the character, how they foreshadow, how they tell the bigger story, and how they connect the characters to the bigger story.

Let’s dive in.

Jennifer Kale’s Clothes Tell Us She’s the Bound Witch

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the bare minimum requirement of costuming is to keep your characters from being naked. The bare minimum need above that is to give us basic information about the characters: what time period do they live in? Are they rich or poor? Are they in a cold climate or a warm one?

You get the idea. One can do all of these things for a character with clothing and, if the clothing looks nice, have done a good job. But what makes a great costume is one that gives so much more information than all that. One which tells the character’s story just by looking at them.

Here we need to pause to discuss how one of the accomplishments of Agatha All Along is that it’s a story with twists and turns but it is not a story which relies on twists and turns.

When you’re doing a story with a reveal that seemingly changes the narrative - like The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, and the first season of Westworld, the key word is seemingly. You thought you were watching story A but in actual fact it was also story B. And the only way to do that is if story B is there right from the beginning. If you do anything else it’s a cheap trick.

This is something that showrunner Jac Schaeffer understood. She’s talked in many interviews (here’s just one) about how the story needs to be a story. The surprise cannot be the crux of the story. Because you can only pull the “Ta da! Teen is actually Billy Kaplan nee Maximoff!” reveal once. If your story puts all its eggs in the basket of the gasp when the audience reaches a surprise moment, your story has nothing once the surprise is done.

This is where in the pop culture world you’ll hear the phrase “subvert expectations” said as an insult. “Ha! You expected A but I forced you to have B!” basically. Or, as someone put it even better over on StackExchange:

“If you're going to subvert expectations and have a positive audience response, you need to do two things: reveal that you're telling an even better story than your audience thought you were telling, and also be able to show that the new story is really the one you were telling all along.”

Agatha All Along accomplishes this requirement and then some. And one of the ways it accomplishes it is through the language of the costuming. The costumes are telling a story the whole time. Maybe you didn’t notice it in the first watch but it was still there. The language of the clothing is present and it is consistent (more on that in a bit).

Which brings us back to Jennifer Kale. Our potions witch. Our water element. We can look at her pretty pink outfit for the Road and know that she is a woman who appreciates a sophisticated look. It’s a light color, she doesn’t like getting messy. It’s rich looking, so she likes appearing to have wealth whether or not she has any. If we are eagle eyed, we might pick up on how it was decorated with ingredients in potion making which brings it to the tippy top of the tier of good costume design.

What makes it great? It also tells us she’s the bound witch. Check it out:

Did you notice all those details? The stitching of her dress, such as there on her shoulder, is visible showing the pieces of the garment being tied together - bound, if you will. Her belt pulls fabric in tight around her waist. Yes, it shows off Sasheer Zamata’s silhouette but it also visually represents her garment being firmly held in place. This imagery is then emphasized by her belt, which has two metal buckles that invoke the idea of handcuffs. As we look to her wrists, we see she’s wearing bracelets that also suggest cuffs and the sleeves of her dress are also pulled in tight. In the concept art this goes even further by having them be tied closed by ribbons (a change that, if I had to guess, was done for practical considerations of not having to deal with those strings during filming - though note in the concept art how that visible stitching is even more obvious).

Then we go all the way back up to Jennifer’s neck. Her necklace is made up of multiple chains around a statement piece. And what is the statement piece? A pink crystal wrapped in wire. Bound upon bound upon bound.

“Oh come on!” you might say - because I have had people say such things when I talk about costuming. “Clothes are just clothes! A necklace is a necklace!”

Yes, on some projects. Not this one though. How do we know that? Peep Jennifer at the end of her trial when she gets her powers back:

Her dress is ripped, both by herself and her circumstances, and the chains on her necklace are broken.

Bound, now unbound. Told to you by what she was wearing.

Now let’s go deeper.

Sharon Davis’s Clothes Tell You She’s The First to Die

Look, I did say we were going to talk spoilers.

Now I want to be clear here, I don’t mean this in the sense that Sharon’s clothes give the game away. I mean it in the same sense that leitmotifs in music can “spoil” a story once you know what they are and how to listen for them. Again, the idea here is that there is a consistency of language on every possible level, not just the literal language coming out of character’s mouths.

Sharon Davis’s clothing is part of that language. Let’s take a look.

Here’s Sharon. Isn’t she cute? Her little shirt and hat and she even has a necklace all her own. She looks great, doesn’t she? Nothing amiss here, right?

Well… let’s try another angle.

Oh. Hm. Okay, now we might be starting to see it. Because the thing is not what Sharon’s clothes look like on her, it’s what do they look like compared to everyone else? And when you add in that crucial information, that’s when the full story starts to appear.

To begin with, let’s shout out this blocking which tells you already that Sharon is the odd woman out. This is part of how Agatha All Along doesn’t work unless everyone is doing their jobs. Debra Jo Rupp has to be told to stand there apart from the others, the camera has to get the right angle to highlight the distance between them, the lighting even puts in a strong line dividing her from the others, even her body language of her hands folded in front of her body compared to Lilia, Alice, and Jennifer having their hands at their sides says she is the one of these things that is not like the other.

But what about the clothes? Notice how her clothes are different from the others in a key way: not only is she the only one wearing a hat, Sharon is the only one wearing a pattern.

While Alice, Lilia, and Jennifer all have designs on their clothes, their clothes are very firmly on the side of solids. The jackets that Alice and Lilia wear come the closest by not being monochromatic the way Jennifer’s dress is, but they are still solid blocks of color. Unlike Sharon’s shirt which is a bright, big, floral. It’s a pattern. And when we see patterns in the land of Westview that means something.

How do we know that? Because hey, remember this?

Yeah, Agatha’s plaid from WandaVision. The thing that was the big ol’ clue that Agatha did not belong, because no matter how close her silhouette was to what Wanda wore - no matter how she appeared to be like Wanda - she wasn’t really. Daniel Selon worked on WandaVision. This is a man who does not mess around when it comes to using pattern to tell the story.

(Remember that plaid, btw, it’s coming back later.)

If you’re doubtful about whether Sharon’s pattern means something, well here it is again:

Different pattern, yeah, but pattern. Sharon is the only person in the coven still with a noticeable pattern on her clothes. The only others who come sort of close are Lilia and Billy who have stripes. But these are big, thick stripes compared to Sharon’s tiny flowers. Moreover, notice how the blue on Sharon’s shirt is a deeper color than everyone else’s. She stands out. She’s supposed to stand out. Because she’s about to die.

Now on a basic level what Sharon’s clothes are saying is “Notice me! Draw your gaze over here because stuff is going to happen to me that’s important!” Her death at the end of the first trial doesn’t mean anything if the audience forgets she was even there. So to that end she has to stand out.

But she could stand out in anything. We would’ve noticed her if she was in a solid neon yellow. Instead they went for pattern and specifically a floral pattern.

The beauty of the floral pattern is twofold. First, it tricks you, the audience, into not thinking this is weird. She’s supposedly the green witch, right? Earth? Earth is plants and stuff. Of course her clothing would represent plants somehow. We at home clock that she’s got those florals but we figure it simply symbolizes her place in the coven. (And for extra credit she’s even wearing a statement necklace like all the other coven members to again make the subtle impression that she “fits” with them.)

But what’s great on top of that? Well, what do flowers symbolize in Agatha All Along?

Oh right, Rio. The actual Green Witch. Whose flowers mean death.

Whoops.

Bye, Sharon, we hardly knew ye.

Why it Matters That Teen/Billy Maximoff/William Kaplan/Wiccan is Blue

Regular readers know I have strong opinions about the use of color in costuming. Or, really, color in any visual medium.

I’ve said it before and it bears repeating: you do not have to give characters signature colors. There’s no law about it. There are many ways of telling a story with visuals and color is only one of them. Yes, superhero stories do tilt in that direction depending on the character (The Scarlet Witch, for example) but if that doesn’t apply to your character then feel free to avail yourself of every option Pantone has to offer!

But when you do say that a specific color means a specific character, then you have to be consistent with it. If you, to pick a totally random example, have a character who is signified by the color green then you can’t put people wearing uniforms around them in anything remotely resembling the color green without implying that the uniformed characters share a connection with that green character.

(Regular readers totally thought I was going to link to a TV show there. Pffft. Why would I do that when a movie did it better?)

Anyway! Point being that if you use color then you need to be consistent with it. Which I’m teeing up here with an example of Billy in his Maleficent outfit.

I’m going to go on a small side track here by saying I did talk a lot in the last costume article about how if you recreate an outfit all you did is recreate an outfit. And the thing I want to add to that is that there is a circumstance where that’s okay, which is if the point is to recreate an outfit. If, for example, I’m doing a movie that includes a scene of Queen Elizabeth the First’s coronation it’s going to stand out if my costumer doesn’t recreate her original gown.

Now you don’t have to do that. But if you don’t then you should have a reason why. For example, perhaps you’re creating a version of the history that has some fantastical or fictional elements to it and you want the costumes to help the audience understand that visually as well. Bridgerton is a great example of costuming that goes for vaguely historic but highly stylized and the anachronisms are on purpose.

I also want to stress that recreating existing garments, particularly historic ones, is not an easy task! There are entire fields of study about it. So it’s by no means the lazy option either. I’m just saying that in terms of the results you want to be sure it’s telling the right story.

In the case of Agatha All Along, we have Lilia’s trial, in which the characters are dressed as known, fictional characters. This is an example where one could - and it could be argued even should - not reinvent the wheel. And I am loath to point out where anything fell short on Agatha All Along, but an unfortunate example of this is Jennifer’s outfit as the Evil Queen from Snow White in her crone form

Far, far too many people did not know what fictional witch Jennifer was supposed to be in this trial. I get what the show was going for, I do. Jennifer was focused on her youthful looks, it’s therefore torture for her to look older. It also makes perfect sense that our coven’s potions witch would embody the fairy tale witch known for poisoning an apple. But unfortunately that’s not the most iconic image of the Evil Queen. Which meant unless you peeped that Jennifer was holding an apple - good luck doing that with your attention on those swords growing lower! - she looked like a generic crone character. Frankly my first thought was the Witch from Into the Woods since her crone form is her more “natural” state, so to speak.

But anyway, point being that we can see that if we’re doing riffs on fictional characters we have to be very careful because otherwise the audience won’t know who the character is. And in total fairness to the Agatha All Along team it’s not their fault that it’s hard to find a fictional crone witch who is visually iconic nor is it their fault that Shasheer Zamata is so gorgeous that there’s not enough makeup in the world to make her look ancient and ugly.

The degree of difficulty with Jennifer emphasizes just how good and important it was when they riffed on Maleficent, on the other hand. Let’s get another, closer look:

The first thing we see is that Billy’s outfit isn’t a one to one even if you ignore color. You still recognize him as Maleficent, just as you recognize Agatha as the Wicked Witch of the West and Lilia as Glinda the Good Witch, but each of their outfits is also personalized to their characters.

Which is the other part of adapting outfits. Yes, you can do one to one. In some instances you should. But if you aren’t then you need to examine what that’s going to do for you. Particularly if the adaptation is of a fictional character because that character was designed that way for a reason. That reason being to tell their story, not yours.

The Agatha All Along team could’ve done a full on recreation of Maleficent’s outfit. Hell, Joe Locke has a build that I think with a little padding he could’ve probably slipped right into one of Angelina Jolie’s cast offs if the crew had access to that warehouse. But they didn’t go that route. Because they knew it was important for Billy’s clothes to always, in some way, signify Billy.

Especially the color.

Here’s Daniel Selon on that: “Instead of Maleficent’s purple accent (which of course is Agatha’s domain), we used a saturated blue to show how he has begun to own his magic.”

You catch that? Even though the original character’s signature color is purple, they didn’t use it because on this show Agatha’s signature color - the color of her magic - is purple. If you see purple on Agatha All Along that can only symbolize Agatha.

Likewise if you see blue then it has to symbolize Billy because Billy’s magic is blue. This is a rule. It’s a rule they set and it’s a rule they have to live by.

Why? Because of things like this:

What color is that light? Yeah. Blue. The second the door opened to the Witches’ Road the show told you it was Billy’s magic making it. Because the show never once lied to you about color.

Good vs great. The story was always the story. Billy’s magic always powered that door.

Now it’s funny because technically speaking there’s actually an exception to the rule of blue but it’s a good one. And I’ll get to it in a sec. But while we’re on the topic of Billy’s costume and good vs great I’ve got to give a shout out to Billy’s road outfit. Now there’s plenty of breakdowns of the details such as the symbols on his sweater and the stars embroidered into the sides of his pants. But I want to give a special shout out to the patch on his right knee.

What’s the big deal, right? A patch on a hole in his pants. Kids today are into visible mending, that’s all it is, right?

Yeah. The red thread around that patch matches the red piping on the Jamie McKelvie concept art for Wiccan in the comics.

At that point you’re just showing off.

(In a good way. In the best way.)

Now let’s bring it on home with Agatha herself.

How Agatha’s Clothes Connect Her to the Story

Now we come back to Agatha. Again, there’s so much about her clothes that I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. For a quick overview on her coat: it embodies masculine and feminine, there’s shaping to it that looks like bird feathers to symbolize how as a covenless witch she is a bird without a flock, there’s embroidered symbols on the inside that tell her story.

But what about more subtle things? Those good vs great details? Ah, well, let me help you out.

For starters let’s go right out of the gate. Remember episode one? Agatha in her own version of Mare of Easttown? What’s the detail there?

Try this.

Remember how I told you not to forget Agatha and plaid? What’s she wearing in that picture?

Yeah. Plaid.

And yes, Kate Winslet’s character does wear plaid in the series, but notably not that you can see in these scenes. This is the one to one comparison from the original series and Agatha All Along’s homage. You can see the plaid on Agatha. And that’s because plaid means something going all the way back to WandaVision, which is that Agatha is in the reality created by Wanda’s spell.

Again: showing off! In the best way possible! Love it!

Let’s do another one, how about Agatha’s signature coat, which of course is in her signature color of -

...blue? Wait, why is her coat blue? Her magic is purple. She loves her purple. Why is the purple on the inside?

Oh you’re going to love this one. There’s layers here.

(Pun slightly intended.)

The first thing we need to know is that Daniel Selon deliberately plays with color placement as it relates to the characters and what they want people to know about them. Alice, the protection witch, has bright colors on her clothes as a warning to others the same way a poisonous frog has brightly colored skin.

So if Agatha’s signature purple is not easily visible, if it is only revealed when her blue coat is out of the way as you can see on the concept art, that means it’s hidden on purpose.

This now raises two questions: Why hide it, and why is the outer color blue?

Well hiding is obvious. Agatha gets her power - her purple - by stealing power from other witches. Specifically, she can only do it when she’s attacked. In the same way it helps Alice to have bright colors to warn people away, Agatha wants to hide her color to trick people to come near. It’s among the reasons why, when she’s collecting the coven, she’s dressed in neutrals.

The other reason of course is that while she’s doing it she’s powerless. She has no purple. But even in the past when she’s done this she wore the purple once - when caught wearing it by a witch when she didn’t have time for an outfit change. But ever since then she kept it low key, only visible in accessories if at all.

So we know why the purple is hidden. Why the blue?

Well blue is Billy, right? We established that rule earlier. And yes, it is. You’ll notice Agatha’s coat kind of matches Billy’s hoodie. And there is a connection there. Billy is blue because that’s the color of his magic. His magic created the road. Agatha’s coat is her outfit for the Road. So her putting on a blue coat with a purple lining symbolizes how she figures out Billy’s magic created the place and she's going along with it for her hidden personal gain.

But - there’s one other meaning. Another reason for blue. Another time it shows up as a signature color. A time that is, chronologically, the first time it appears.

Yeah. There. Around Nicolas. But notice it’s not the color of Nicolas. He doesn’t wear blue in his clothes. Instead he’s in browns and neutrals. So it’s key that it’s not his color, it’s the color of his blanket. Aka the thing Agatha has him wrapped up in as an infant to protect him.

It’s the color of Agatha’s love for a son. The color she wears while she’s on the Witches’ Road.

On the road with Billy, the boy she looks at as a surrogate child.

This. Fucking. SHOW.

Lagniappe

As always, things that don’t fit anywhere else:

• In the same way Agatha’s plaid connects her back to WandaVision, it wouldn’t surprise me if Sharon having bright red flowers on her shirt wasn’t a coincidence as well. We see that Sharon’s still bearing the trauma of Wanda’s spell, and red flowers symbolized Wanda.
• There are so many things to get into with the costumes that it really is impossible to cover them all. The level of detail on Rio’s Road outfit, the embroidery on Lilia’s, the way Lilia’s Glinda outfit evokes the idea of a bubble without crossing pesky copyright territory (true Wicked fans know what I’m talking about). Instead I really recommend checking out Daniel Selon’s Instgram where he’s been very generous about sharing the details.
• You can also check out this video which does a brief overview and talks about using color to tell the story.
• And this video which includes how Jennifer’s outfit shows she is bound, in case you think I’m making this all up.
• Seriously, it took me so long to finish writing this article I was in a bittersweet place of loving how much source material was coming out each day while at the same time I wanted to scream “Stop giving away the answers! I want to show people I passed the test!”
• Ahem, I’m fine and perfectly mentally healthy. Ish.
• Anyhoo, there’s also this nice long interview with Daniel and the official Assembled showing the behind the scenes of the, uh, show.

And yeah, that pretty much covers it. Or covers it as much to hopefully give you some structure by which you can go back, rewatch the show, pay attention to the outfits, and have your own moments of “Oh neat!” as you realize all the things they were doing.

Then rewatch and do the same for props, lighting, editing… Damn this was a good show.

Thanks for reading!