Killing Eve's Costume Designer Charlotte Mitchell Knows She's Pushing It

The first memorable Villanelle look of season 2 is a pair of colorful boys' pajamas she steals from Gabriel (Pierre Atri), her fellow patient in a Paris hospital. “She’s on the run and doesn’t have her wardrobe,” Mitchell says. “She has to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible and has to find something to wear. Initially, they were going to be Spider-Man pajamas—that’s how it was written in the script. But we realized very quickly that Spider-Man is heavily branded and we didn’t think Marvel was going to allow us to use him. We looked around for fabric and found this amazing comic book fabric, which was a stretchy Lycra, so I could make them tighter and tighter. I added the red trimming on the sleeves and trousers to really highlight the ends to show they are too short. It was actually quite tricky for a simple pair of pajamas.”

“I really picked up on the Dries Van Noten suit she wore when she kills Bill,” Mitchell notes of the Berlin episode from last season. “I loved that shape on her with the solid boots. That’s made me put her in trousers more. I like the way Jodie walks in a pair of trousers. She’s got such a great strut about her, and when she’s in a solid pair of boots she owns it even more. She’s about business. She’s also got the most perfect figure, so she can pull off a really lovely, fitted pair of trousers.”

The character wears several suits throughout season 2, most of them using mismatched pieces to reflect the character’s unique sensibility. In episode 3, Mitchell paired a velvet Chloe jacket with a pair of silver Isabel Marant pants, and in the most recent episode Villanelle gets a chic green look. “When she’s dressed up for MI6 [in episode 6] training she gets to wear a suit,” Mitchell explains. “It’s a Loewe green striped blazer and a pair of green Peter Pilotto trousers. It’s very sensible, but if you think about her sense of humor it’s almost like a schoolboy blazer. It’s like she’s playing going back to school and being a good, studious girl.”

Eve has a lot on her plate, what with chasing a serial killer around Europe, and her costumes reflect that. Just like in season 1, the MI6 agent's clothes come from mainstream British stores like Primark, Benetton, Marks & Spencer, and John Lewis. Often, she's clad in layers of clothing, much of which is wrinkled and disheveled. “Eve’s brain is cluttered,” Mitchell. “Eve is busy. So she just throws on another layer. I wanted to push the level of layers on Eve and also put a lot more linen in her wardrobe to be more crumpled. She doesn’t have time to press things. It’s in contrast to Carolyn, who I wanted to have more clean lines and be more minimal. She has a constant strong silhouette.”

The sleek blue dress Eve wears to Niko’s work event is the dress she bought online earlier in the season. “I had a long conversation with Sandra about it,” Mitchell says. “It needed to feel real. We originally started talking about Eve being influenced by Villanelle in her clothes and was that direction we would go in. Very quickly, we decided, no, it wasn’t the right direction. We didn’t want to distract her from the cat and mouse chase with the fashion. It didn’t feel real for someone like Eve, so we had to have a dress that was real. But it’s bright blue, which is totally against Eve’s color palette—she would feel she was dressing up a little. And that’s probably where the influence is coming in from Villanelle. There’s a slight awareness and it makes her feel very sexy.”

This season, Villanelle often has a look to match her environment. When she turns up to threaten Niko in Oxford, she’s clad in a college ensemble, complete with a pale fawn sweater tied around her shoulders.

In another scene, she visits Niko’s school dressed as a bohemian teacher in flowing floral print and a glitter pasta necklace that was meant to have been made by a student. “Not only am I dressing Villanelle, but I’m dressing Villanelle as someone else,” Mitchell says. “Villanelle obviously thinks this teacher very quirky if she’s wearing a pasta necklace. I made her quite hippy, purposefully heightening what a school teacher would look like. I think that’s what Villanelle would do. She’s very tongue-in-cheek, how she dresses up as characters.”

In the most recent episode, MI6 tasks Villanelle to pretend she’s a socialite named Billie, a character Villanelle embraces fully. To go along with Billie’s pink wig, she pairs an Armani pink fur coat with Helmut Lang leather trousers, as well as a turquoise oriental-style vintage jacket with a Paige striped shirt, Paige jeans, and Golden Goose sneakers. “She’s a bit of a fuck-up,” Mitchell says. “She’s one of those girls who spends a fortune on her clothes, but just picks them up off the floor after a night out clubbing. Where Villanelle is quite eclectic and together, the Billie character she plays is eclectic and disheveled. They’re all expensive items, but the blouse is done up slightly crooked. It’s in those little details.”

When Villanelle heads to Amsterdam to make a kill, she dons an elaborate costume, which Mitchell created from scratch. It took two rounds to get the look of the pig mask, which Villanelle wears knowing her target is into farm animals, right. “It was written in the script that she wore a dirndl, which is a Swiss barmaid’s outfit,” Mitchell says. “Lisa, the director, wanted it to be really pink, like a manga cartoon character—so cute it’s almost sinister and creepy. We had the pig’s mask made. It’s an incredible piece. Sometimes, things I come up with, I worry about my sense of humor.”