Reimagining The Costumes Of ‘Carrie’ For A New Generation

Few fictional teenagers have a wardrobe burdened with quite as much expectation as Carrie White. Since Stephen King introduced the character in his 1974 novel, her story has been adapted for the screen several times, with Brian De Palma’s 1976 film cementing the image of the telekinetic teen as a vengeful prom queen in popular culture. Prime Video’s eight-episode adaptation from modern horror maestro Mike Flanagan honors the legacy of the classic story, but also speaks to a new generation for whom the cruelty of high school can follow you well beyond the school corridors and onto social media. For costume designer Tammy Joe, that meant using wardrobe to chart this version of Carrie (Summer H. Howell) and her uneasy attempts to fit into a world that struggles to understand her. “It was a really exciting thing to try to find ways to make the character Carrie—as well as the world of the show—feel relatable to today’s audience,” she tells The Set Set. 

One of the key changes in Mike Flanagan’s adaptation is that Carrie has been homeschooled until the age of 16, leaving her largely isolated from the outside world. When her father suddenly dies, the secluded life she shares with her mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan), is upended, and she begins attending public school for the first time. On her first day at Ewen High, she arrives in a calf-length pink sailor dress and matching cardigan, a look that immediately sets her apart from her classmates and draws unkind comments and side-eyes. When she gets home that evening, she sits down at her sewing machine to make something “more relatable to her classmates,” as Joe puts it.

Flanagan and Joe conceptualized Carrie as someone who makes much of her own wardrobe, and viewers see her at her sewing machine throughout the series. Carefully considering how competent a dressmaker to make Carrie was was important to Joe, and she imagined Carrie learned to make patterns from her mother and used thrifted garments brought into the house from her father. “We had to really talk about, OK, where is she getting things? Where does the material come from, and what makes sense to Carrie?” Joe says. “And what was a really big part of it was taking things that existed from the very beginning of the story and then gradually adapting them, but keeping them recognisable for later scenes.”

When Carrie is invited to a house party by her classmate, Sue (Siena Agudong) and Chris (Alison Thornton), she relishes the opportunity to make something new. Having spent a good amount of time around her new peers by this point, their influence starts to seep into her wardrobe. She wears a beige Haute and Freddy band tee sourced from the school’s lost-and-found bin—which Tina (Josie Totah) is convinced is hers—that she has reworked to feature plaid sleeves and two vertical purple lace strips. Her ankle-skimming denim skirt is made from her jeans, cut into panels and patched together. 

“That was really fun and one of my favorite pieces,” Joe, who was the real tailor behind the many custom-made pieces in Carrie’s wardrobe, says. “We thought if Carrie is upcycling, where would she find these pieces? So the plaid could have come from one of Margaret’s shirts or a dress, and the lace we used actually did come from a tablecloth and was custom-dyed.” 

After the party, Carrie’s wardrobe begins to absorb even more of the people around her, but Joe was careful not to let that influence erase her individuality. “We like to think that her party is kind of her first introjection into really immersing herself in the world around her at school,” Joe says. “But at the same time, Carrie’s so uniquely herself.”

Color was equally important. Joe and her team custom-dyed almost every piece to establish the right tones for Carrie’s emotional state. “We had this ongoing joke with our breakdown artists that there was a level of levels of sadness that a tone had to reach in order for me to feel like it was right for Carrie. I’d say, ‘Let's give it 10 percent more of heaviness and sadness,’” Joe recalls, adding that they gradually introduced more vividness as Carrie’s world begins to open up.

That shift in color comes to a head at prom in the final two episodes. Joe had the intimidating task of creating something that felt true to this version of the character, while also acknowledging that the prom gown of the ’70s film weighs heavily in the public imagination. Rather than attempt to recreate the pink dress seen on Sissy Spacek in the De Palma version of the story, Joe let everything else she had created for Carrie up until that point guide her. 

Keeping the soft V-shaped neckline, she swapped the thin straps for thicker ones and went for a more draped look than late costume designer Rosanna Norton’s more fluidly falling gown. “We wanted to create something that felt not only realistic in what Carrie would make, but something that felt a little bit more contemporary,” Joe explains. “There were countless fittings for this look, but by the end we all felt that was really the right dress for us.”

Perhaps the biggest change of all is that the dress is pale blue, but Joe notes that there is a homage to the 1976 film’s visual legacy in that. “In the original, we see Carrie at the beginning in a blue dress, and then she ends up in a pink dress,” Joe explains. “It’s actually the opposite in this series, where she starts in a pink dress and then ends up in a blue dress.”