Teen movies are a world of their own, specially when talking about costume design. As many other genres, they're mostly cut from the same cloth: just as a sci-fi movie might have the heroes dressed in bright angelical tones and the baddies dressed all in black, high school and college stories also follow similar patterns to differentiate the cool kids and the outsiders.
It's not difficult to find such differences. From Heathers to Mean Girls, from Clueless to Beverly Hills 90210, My So-Called Life and so on, rich posh kids have dressed like Barbies and misfits like Kurt Cobain. It's an effective narrative tool, one that allows the audience to identify easily which side each character is in and gives them a personality at first sight. It may also even allow to twist cliches when use imaginatively.
Ryan Murphy is not strange to any of this, having previously created another two deliciously teen TV shows, Popular and Glee. Both of them made use of costumes to show both sides of the "popularity fence". His new show, created alongside Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, Scream Queens, goes back to some common places, but this time on a college campus and inside de Greek system. A mix between gory horror, over-the-top dark comedy and soap opera-ish buffonery, Scream Queens follows the crimes committed by a masqueraded serial killer on a college campus and the lives of the Kappa Kappa Tau, the coolest, evilest sorority in it.
The focus of the show is divided between KKT's leaders, The Chanels, and their pledges, a group of mostly weird girls. The Chanels (named that way because they're called Chanel #1, Chanel #2, Chanel #3 and Chanel #5, duh) follow other infamous fictional cliques like The Plastics and The Heathers not only in their mean antics but also in their style. Pastel colors and matching outfits are their trademark, bringing back the sweet but deadly narrative, the Lolitas with a taste for murder, the indivisible sisterhood of crime. Because homogeneity seems a basic characteristic of the popular group in this kind of production, belonging is the most important, and so their costumes become uniforms in contrast to the more individual style of the supposed weirdos. As the show's costume designer Lou Eyrich (AHS: Coven, AHS:Freak Show) explains, "the costumes are not based on reality, clearly, but help to separate the in crowd from the out crowd".
As you may have noticed, Eyrich has given each Chanel its own personal touch, like Chanel #1's (Emma Roberts) taste for feathers or Chanel #3's (Billie Lourd) earmuffs (fun fact: Lourd's mother is also an actress and this accessory is inspired by one of her characters, a very very famous princess. Can you guess who?)
On the other hand, KKT's pledges, the "losers", have all very different looks. But that doesn't mean they can't be fashionable, as Grace (Skyler Samuels) and Zayday (Keke Palmer) prove. Headscarves, berets, oversize jackets, baggy pants... Their style could have easily came out of a fashion blog, while keeping its uniqueness.
So, if you want to take a look inside Scream Queens' amazing wardrobe do not miss the following video, as Emma Roberts says: "It's every girl's dream!"
So, if you want to take a look inside Scream Queens' amazing wardrobe do not miss the following video, as Emma Roberts says: "It's every girl's dream!"
