Costume Designer Jacqueline Demeterio on Dressing the Twists And Turns of ‘Verity’

There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), the titular bestselling author at the center of Michael Showalter’s psychological thriller. She lives in a secluded, sprawling modernist mansion, she writes page-turning but twisted books, and, depending on which version of her story you believe, she may also be harboing a deeply disturbing secret.

For costume designer Jacqueline Demeterio, Verity’s slipperiness became key to dressing her. “There are three different Verities in this story,” Demeterio tells The Set Set. That meant dressing Hathaway’s character was no straightforward task. There were several versions of her to consider: the younger woman struggling to get by and get published; the glamorous author whose success has afforded her an enviable wardrobe of designer pieces; and the present-day Verity, whose clothes are largely selected for her as she lies incapacitated in a wheelchair.

Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), the struggling author whom Verity’s husband has hired to ghostwrite Verity’s final books, meanwhile, has a distinctly limited wardrobe that reflects her resourcefulness and life as a New Yorker. Her layers are practical, familiar, and frequently reworn. But as Lowen becomes increasingly absorbed in the Crawford family’s secrets, the distinction between the two women—and their wardrobes—begins to blur.

Demeterio wanted Verity’s wardrobe to communicate the success she had achieved as a bestselling celebrity author. For her appearances on Hot Ones and Call Her Daddy, as well as an interview with news anchor Gayle King, Demeterio dressed her in bold, structured dresses and knits that read as unmistakably expensive. “She’s very luxurious. She’s put together. She’s very chic,” Demeterio says of the image she wanted to convey.

There’s another side to Verity’s life before the accident. Having worked with Hathaway on four projects, beginning with 2015’s The Intern, the two collaborated closely to imagine the private, writerly version of Verity, who sits behind her desk and dashes out dark, twisted stories. They drew inspiration from Joan Didion’s minimalist wardrobe and old Missoni runway shows, building Verity’s looks around textured knits and rich colors. One of her most recurring pieces is a pillar-box-red cashmere cardigan from Guest in Residence. For a scene at her desk, Demeterio paired it with a burgundy Gabriela Hearst set, reinforcing the deep reds and burgundies that run throughout the film.

“And then in the flashbacks, when she’s younger, she’s a little more girly in a way,” Demeterio says. She describes this version of Verity, filtered through Lowen’s imagination as she reads Verity’s secret memoir, as more delicate, with a “coquettish” sensibility and a softer color palette of yellows and pastels.

Finally, there’s the woman at the center of the film’s mystery: wheelchair-bound Verity, who still has access to her existing wardrobe. For the moment that first makes Lowen suspect Verity isn’t incapacitated at all, Demeterio dresses her in silk Toteme pajamas, a vintage ankle-skimming fur coat, and YSL oval sunglasses, heightening the drama of the scene. Elsewhere, Demeterio leans into the idea of turning Verity into a spectral version of herself, dressing her in vintage white nightgowns that make her appear fragile while maintaining a connection to the woman she was before the accident.

If Verity’s clothes are all about abundance, Lowen’s initially communicate restraint. Demeterio describes her as having a “Lower East Side type or Brooklyn-esque” sensibility: cool, slightly edgy, and built around a relatively small number of pieces. She arrives at the Crawford residence in a vintage leather jacket, Prada sunglasses, lived-in Levi’s, and a sweater layered over a basic white tee. “She comes sort of protected,” Demeterio says. “Her clothing is like armor a little bit. When she gets there, she has these layers on.”

As Lowen becomes more comfortable in the house and increasingly close to Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), those layers begin to come off. When Jeremy proposes going out to dinner to celebrate her birthday, Lowen ventures into Verity’s closet to find something outside her usual sweater-and-jeans uniform. She lands on a red, ribbed-knit dress that communicates sexiness without feeling entirely out of character. “I feel like just the style of it would be something that Lowen would say, ‘I would wear this,’” Demeterio explains.

The red dress also draws a clear parallel to Verity’s own seduction of Jeremy. Through her manuscript, Lowen learns that Verity wore a red dress the night she met her future husband. Demeterio and Hathaway went through an exhaustive search before landing on a vintage Versace gown for the flashback. “It was such a hard thing because in the book Jeremy describes it as the best red dress he’s ever seen,” Demeterio says. “And it’s like that’s quite a statement.”

Lowen’s red dress is also Versace, though the connection between the two dresses was a coincidence. “I thought it would be strange that after all these years Verity would still have that dress in her closet, but I wanted the one Lowen wears to have a nod to it, to be similar in color and tone of the red. And that one was also Versace, so that connected it,” Demeterio says.

It’s not the only piece of Verity’s wardrobe that Lowen wears. During a dream sequence, Lowen dons Verity’s robe as she creeps down the hallway to join Jeremy in Verity’s room. Inspired by Agent Provocateur, Demeterio made it specifically for the film, complete with an embroidered Verity Crawford monogram. She conceived the silk charmeuse garment as one of Verity’s earliest luxury purchases, making Lowen’s decision to wear it feel like more than an aesthetic choice: it sees her cross the line into physically inhabiting something that once belonged to the woman she has become obsessed with.

The robe appears again at the end of the film, once more on Verity. “It ends up in the water at the end and I wanted it to really flow in the water and I wanted to see a lot of movement,” Demeterio says. To achieve this effect, the team made a second version with “extra gussets” added by the tailor, allowing the fabric to move more freely in the water. “Cinematically, it was a beautiful thing.”

By the end of the film, Lowen returns to the Vermont house looking markedly different from when she first arrived. Following the publication of Verity’s final novel—which bears her name on the cover, an upgrade from her initial ghostwriting offer—Lowen wears a blue Proenza Schouler knit dress beneath a suede trench, Gianvito Rossi suede boots, and an Anita Ko diamond ring on her left hand. Her look is unmistakably more sophisticated, but Demeterio was careful not to let the transformation erase the character Lowen has been all along. “It wasn’t so outside of who Lowen was,” she says. “It still felt Lowen to me, but definitely like the very much more successful, polished Lowen.” Lowen hasn’t simply become Verity. Instead, her clothes suggest that she has absorbed some styling notes from the woman she has spent so much time studying, fearing, and ultimately becoming.