How Dune’s Costume Designers Created the Definitive Sci-Fi Fashion Fantasy
Film costume departments regularly bring new worlds to life, but when Jacqueline West and Bob Morgan began work on Dune, they had to create an entire galaxy. Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal science-fiction novel introduces a complex extraterrestrial kingdom where a multitude of planets—each with their own culture and social structure—play a key role in the narrative.
Herbert was known for his intricate world building, and the book doesn’t lack detail, so when Villeneuve decided to bring the story to the big screen, his cast and crew knew they had their work cut out for them. “It took an entire city, but it was thrilling,” says West over the phone from California. “Denis forces you to give the utmost to achieve a vision, and he felt so profoundly about this book. We had such an amazing crew of artists and talent working together, all there with the best of attitudes and ready to collaborate.”
Dune’s story of feudal monarchs, psychedelic drugs, and sandworms is a true original. The tale charts the journey of the Atreides family as they move from being nobility in their lush home on Caladan to taking stewardship of Arrakis, a desolate planet whose deserts are the only source of the galaxy’s most valuable commodity: the spice melange. Yet while the book has influenced everything from Star Wars to Mad Max, it wasn’t a surefire choice for adaptation. Despite its outsized impact on science fiction, Dune was for many years considered unfilmable. Filled with exposition and inner monologues, the 15 books (six written by Herbert and nine completed posthumously by his son Brian and writer Kevin J. Anderson) have a breadth that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a visual medium. Multiple studios tried (and failed) to adapt Dune faithfully; David Lynch disowned his 1984 attempt, while directors like Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ridley Scott came close to production only to see their projects fizzle. When the announcement came in 2017 that Villeneuve was working on his version, then, its success was by no means a sure thing.
Aware of the project’s challenging history, West knew it would take a special director to do the books justice. Encouraged to meet with Villeneuve by Mary Parent, vice chairman of worldwide production for Legendary Studios, she connected with him over Skype and was immediately sold. “I loved his passion,” she remembers. “From the beginning, he had a very grounded take on everything, and after speaking with him, I thought to myself, This guy is going to make the real Dune.” Having brought tech-bro realness to David Fincher’s The Social Network and provided The Revenant’s tale of revenge with period-accurate grit, West had proven her versatility in costume design for a wide range of genres; still, she had reservations about taking on a sci-fi epic. “When I spoke to Mary, I told her that it wasn’t my genre and I had never done anything like this before,” she continues. “She, of course, assured me that was precisely why Denis wanted me to work with him.”
Though the plot takes place ten thousand years in the future, Villeneuve wasn’t interested in rehashing the standard sci-fi motifs. The austerity and sleekness that Hollywood uses to denote steps forward in time would have been antithetical to Herbert’s vision. In the book, Dune’s worlds are modeled after the feudal courts of medieval Europe. “Denis wanted to create a world that felt different from existing sci-fi films, so [there are] no aliens, no silver gadgets. Instead, you have a philosophical experience,” says West. “It’s a futuristic take on the past and immediately made me think of medieval references, ancient tarot cards, and alchemy. We went back to Greek tragedy, [as] I felt there was a correlation between the house of Atreus and the house of Atreides. Our references were primarily historical, and Denis loved that.”
With estimates for the number of costumes required to bring Dune to the screen in the hundreds, West enlisted Morgan to codesign. Friends and collaborators for years, they were able to work together seamlessly. Morgan’s experience as costume supervisor on blockbusters like Inception and Man of Steel also meant he knew what it took to work on the epic scale Dune required. “In our department alone, almost 200 artists came in, all for the love of this,” says Morgan. “Jacqueline and I know each other so well that everything ebbs and flows, and that’s important. We were constantly bouncing ideas off each other, and communication was crucial because of the scope of everything. There are hundreds of small decisions that have to be made [on our end] and with Denis, who gave us a wonderful framework and let us be creative within that space.”