How can clothing convey emotion in a zombie-ravaged world where, from a birds-eye view, life has been reduced to little more than function and survival? More importantly, does clothing even hold meaning in such a landscape? These are questions that the London-based creative duo Gareth Pugh and Carson McColl were faced with tackling when director and producer Danny Boyle tapped them to lead the costume and production design for 28 Years Later, the third installment of the cult-classic horror franchise, 28 Days Later, released last June. With the most recent edition, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta and now in theaters, the two were required to explore these ideas even more thoroughly.
The professional pair and IRL couple initially connected with Boyle in Manchester in 2023 while working on a project called Free Your Mind, a The Matrix-inspired piece of performance art. “He was directing and we were essentially brought onboard to do costumes,” Pugh tells Vogue. “We were all there to make the show the best it could be so we definitely didn’t hold back on voicing our opinions on certain things, which I think he really responded to.” Pugh recounts that following the project, Boyle lightly prodded if they’d ever considered working on a major film. Quickly, they realized he was also inviting them to take over production design. “He suggested that we start to think about what those worlds would look like,” adds Pugh.
Pugh and McColl are no strangers to anarchistic fashion; however, transitioning from their usual sleek post-punk aesthetic to scavenged scraps presented a new creative challenge. A Central Saint Martins graduate, Pugh brought a rebellious polish to his eponymous runway collections and has spent the last two decades embracing all the ways he could manipulate leather as his favored fabric. More recently, the pair co-founded Hard + Shiny, a London-based creative studio that has gone on to collaborate with the likes of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.
When surveying their original moodboard for the two films, McColl likens their aesthetic goals to that of movies like Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. “When you look back at films like A Clockwork Orange, where the design is so iconic, it gives you permission to watch the film knowing that you’re watching a movie and to actually understand or examine why these people are doing what they’re doing,” says McColl.
Particular attention was paid to the “Jimmies,” a tracksuit-sporting hodgepodge gang of marauders led by actor Jack O’Connell that take the film’s protagonist Spike under their crooked wings. After scavenging any charity shop within reach of production in northeast England for scraps and samples and carefully handcrafting countless multiples of each look (just in case anything got too bloody during a particular take), McColl and Pugh reached their visually radical conclusion–one complete with gaudy cross jewelry, platinum mullets that may or may not have inspired the Guido Palau-designed wigs in Jonathan Anderson’s new Dior Men show, and makeshift Power Rangers.
Below, the pair delve into their process, including untraditional sources of inspiration and how they managed to make the Teletubbies feel so sinister.
You originally collaborated with Danny Boyle in 2023 on Free Your Mind, what was it like making the jump to 28 Years Later where you led the costume and production design on such a large scale?
Gareth Pugh: With our work in fashion, and especially our work with people like [Ruth] Hogben and Nick Knight, this idea of kind of seeing our work on film and this idea of building these worlds that exist outside of our own was sort of a space that we’d already kind of inhabited. Obviously, stylistically it was very different. Our work in our fashion was to make everything very sharp, graphic, and clean.
AH: With a cult-classic franchise like 28 Days Later, there’s so much material to look back on. Did nostalgia come into play when you were sourcing and designing these looks?
GP: Going from the initial spark of 28 Days Later, the clock stopped in the world as we know it and fractured into this alternate reality in 2002. So this idea of the clock stopping–no clothes being made, no kind of industry anymore as we know it within the U.K.–it’s quite a unique starting point. The idea that humanity is still imbued in all of those clothes, like [how] people have to make do and mend, that was very much a driving force behind a lot of the decisions that we made.
AH: How did this carry over into The Bone Temple?
GP: With the Jimmies and their leader Jack O’Connell, we really were able to have a lot more fun and kind of creative freedom with that. A lot of what you see on screen comes from Alex Garland s script, like this wild idea of this marauding band of kind of bloodthirsty teenagers essentially dressed in a bricolage of tracksuits. We’ll try not to spoil it, but within the film, they take part in this quite brutal act that they refer to as “charity.” Danny really wanted them to put on some kind of mask, almost like an executioner s mask. But because of this brief we were given about these tracksuits, we decided to create these masks made out of reappropriated trainers and T-shirts to establish a world beyond what we know.
AH: So much of what resonates with 28 Years Later, as with a lot of Garland’s and Boyle’s work, is that the most terrifying aspect isn’t necessarily the supernatural element, but it’s the mirror held up to humanity. How did you manage to communicate this sinister stunted youth through the Jimmies’ unique look?
Carson McColl: You hit the nail on the head. One of the key pieces of research that we did for the Jimmies in particular was looking at youth cultures, isolationist cults, and these worlds within a world where they have their own internal logic. We looked a lot at the photography of Derek Ridgers and looked at these quite aggrieved youth cultures that were building their own iconography and how you do that when you’re in isolation. Obviously there were visual cues that Alex had given us, but there were also things they hadn’t linked directly in the script that jumped out to us, like the Teletubbies or the Power Rangers.
AH: Speaking of the Teletubbies, which are shown on the TV in the opening scenes of 28 Years Later, how do you go about making them post-apocalyptic?
CM: The thing about these two movies is that 28 Years Later and then The Bone Temple is that 28 Years Later is a hero’s journey–it’s a classic story told in a visually radical way. And then with The Bone Temple, it’s a really radical script told in a much more classical way. The way that Nia DaCosta and Sean Bobbitt have filmed it is very beautiful, but the story is much, much darker than 28 Years Later. The first film, for us, was always about mortality and then the second film is very much an examination of morality. Nia gave us the latitude to create a look for the Jimmies in particular. It’s very heavy metal and she allowed us to push it to a more hyperreal place.
AH: Were there any other untraditional sources of inspiration that you drew from to evoke these feelings?
CM: In all honesty, it was risky for Danny to bring us on board, and when he did, it was for both movies. In order to get the gig, we basically had to present references for our visual take on the script, and those references were very varied. They included things like performance art, prepper manuals, war photography, lots of Francis Bacon, and Marlene Dumas. The way we work–the way we’ve always worked–is that when we see something interesting, we bank it. It’s the same as the Jimmies’ masks. That was a collection of references we found on Tumblr back in the day that we had sat on.
AH: In 28 Years Later, clothing is reduced to merely function, but in The Bone Temple there’s more expression seen through the way that the Jimmies dress. Do you find that in a post-apocalyptic world that clothing can still evoke emotion?
GP: I don’t think you have it in America, but in the U.K., we used to have these things called “cut and shuts,” which is essentially the front and back ends of a car that’s been involved in a road traffic accident, melded together. We used that sort of “cut and shut” device, but did it in a much more violent way. The Jimmies used a lot of knives and it was this kind of vicious design language that we hoped to use throughout that group. It’s then mixed with this very delicate hand sewing that holds all of these pieces together. A lot of sportswear has these appliqués or stripes, but to have these kinds of things disintegrating or trailing off adds to that silhouette.
AH: One final note on the Jimmies. . .I don’t know if you guys saw the Dior collection earlier this morning with the neon yellow mullets, but our team couldn’t help but draw a comparison. That kind of youth culture is definitely back in fashion. Did you get a chance to see the collection?
CM: We definitely have to look that one up, Gareth.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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