A24’s latest genre-blending horror film “Mother Mary” opens on a simple premise: a global pop star (Anne Hathaway) arrives unannounced at the atelier of her ex-costumer, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), seeking the perfect costume for her return to the stage. As the estranged friends progress towards a final costume design, Mother Mary’s psyche begins to unravel.

For real-life costume designer Bina Daigeler, the design process for “Mother Mary” began where the film ends. Daigeler and the film’s director, David Lowery’s first port of call was to travel to fashion designer Iris Van Herpen’s studio in Amsterdam to collaborate on a custom dress. During their initial meeting, the trio of creatives spent hours discussing Van Herpen’s prepared selection of dress designs. “We didn't choose the most amazing Iris van Herpen dress. It was not about that. It was really choosing the perfect dress for this moment,” Daigeler says. 

The end result is a sculpted red gown that resembles a living, breathing organism more than it does a red carpet look. “For me, it is very grounded but symmetric, something that gives peace and freedom and is not distracting at all. It is like [it is] lying in itself and it's a beautiful expression,” Daigeler describes.  As a counterpart to the final Van Herpan look, Daigeler was tasked with designing the “companion” costume that Mother Mary rejects before fleeing to Anselm’s atelier. Like the rest of Mother Mary’s ornate costumes, the rejected costume was based on natural landscapes, leaves, and “mermaid ocean colors.” Despite its natural origin points, Daigeler made an effort to embed contrivance into its construction. “It is very artificial because it is 3D printed and very, very stiff,” Daigeler says. “What Iris did is soft and really draped around [Mother Mary’s] body. The other one is like an armor, nearly like a prison.”

In addition to the rejected comeback costume, Daigeler was tasked with creating five to six tour outfits that would span the full arc of Mother Mary’s 15-year career. Her approach for the pop star’s signature tour used nature and religion as a unifying source of inspiration. “I'm not typical... I didn't start with Madonna,” Daigeler laughs. “I started with Mother Mary and very ecclesiastic images—how Mother Mary was painted in the beginning of the centuries—and then I started to mix them with fashion designers and pop stars.”

The sensuality of Daigeler’s designs becomes immediately visible in the film’s opening, which lingers on a close-up of Mother Mary’s cape, its fabric rendered in an intentionally ambiguous way that evokes the natural world. “What do I see? Is it a landscape? Is it an ocean?” Daigeler recalled thinking to herself when watching the film. “And then you discover that that is the cape of a pop star,” Daigeler says. The costume designer found it “quite amazing and symbolic” that the film’s opening shot mirrored her design process by obscuring the artificial “pop star” of it all.

On the most basic level, Mother Mary’s costumes function as a glitzy and intricate spectacle, but as the characters uncover the details of their past relationship, their emotions are literalized through costume. The stage costumes were “designed according to the lyrics or what's happening in the scene when she wears it,” Daigeler says. During the film’s most climactic scene, when Mother Mary falls into the audience, she sports a nude bodysuit adorned with Swarovski crystals. “[The costume] has so much to do with her inner self that I created this nearly skin colored circle that then was embroidered with a lot of standing pearls, and it really looks like it goes in, but it also goes out,” Daigeler says. At face-value, the design appears to be “a star with a lot of sparkle,” but at the same time it literalizes Mother Mary’s tortured psyche by providing a portal for her spirit to exit into and out of during the performance.