‘Agatha All Along’ Costume Designer Daniel Selon

Having worked in the costume department for WandaVision, it’s no surprise that costume designer Daniel Selon was excited to jump back into the world of Agatha Harkness for Agatha All Along. When he first pitched his ideas, Selon chose to focus on the queer perspective of Teen (Joe Locke), as someone trying to discover who he is while surrounded by creative women.

Agatha All Along follows Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), who has just regained her freedom from the events of WandaVision thanks to a mysterious teenager’s help, in return for bringing him to the Witches’ Road. Similarly to WandaVision, Selon was able to play with costuming the characters in different genres for each of the trials on the road, while keeping consistent through lines of color and accessories.

DEADLINE: What were your inspirations for the different styles of the witches?

DANIEL SELON: Well, we went to the source material, which there was a lot of really great character stuff that was written in the outline and the scripts. For each witch, we really hung our hats on the color story that was connected to whatever their magic was, and then those would coordinate with each of the trials in the show. So, we were really crafting it from a large-scale scope of how it would look and feel, and connecting that deeply to the actual theory behind magic and occult. From there, we built out their stories. 

Some of these witches existed previously in the Marvel Universe, but their stories were not exactly fleshed out completely, so this was our opportunity to do that, which was very exciting. We went deeper on Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone) and set where she would grow up and where we would see her meet with her Maestra again later at the end of her life, and that gave us a silhouette and a time and a place to really delve into. Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) is more of a modern witch, where we were able to pull a lot of the inspiration from, I would say, more of the products and things that are in the land of Goop.

DEADLINE: Goop is the first thing that came to mind when I saw her.

SELON: Exactly, with a lot of the spiritual materialism that is slung around and filtered through skincare and things like that. And Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn) was a really great character that we got to flesh out, saw a lot of darkness and pain, and also a bit of a rock and roll background. She had seen a lot of things on the road as a roadie of her mother so we pulled a lot of inspiration from there for her. And of course, Agatha, we had laid a lot of groundwork in WandaVision with her history, and this was just a full-on deep dive into all the layers, going deeper and deeper and uncovering where her motivations came from and why she’s so tortured and why she can’t, or doesn’t, hang out with a coven all the time.

DEADLINE: Can you talk about how Rio (Aubrey Plaza) changed throughout the season?

SELON: Rio was such a fun character to develop because we had to introduce her shrouded in mystery in a way, but give little hints as to who she would be revealed to be. We knew that we wanted to get to the place where we would reveal her as being this all-powerful entity that is the life and death process, but we had to slowly give the hints as we went and also slowly reveal that there was some past relationship with Agatha. So, there was a lot of embedded conflict and we did that through the costume by slowly taking the greens from a dark olive, which was very appropriate and business professional when we meet her as the federal agent, then slowly those greens became more and more vibrant. When she arrives on the road, she emerges through Mrs. Hart’s grave, and she’s covered in dirt and bugs and twigs, and she shakes it off and they realize like, ‘oh, she’s so cool and sexy and I want to be her, want her phone number…’ It really puts a wrench into the gears for the witches and what they think is happening, and she seems to be this creepy spectator who is having a joyful time when all of them are really experiencing a lot of fear and anxiety. If you watch Rio throughout the show, she really is having a totally different experience, a bit of an omniscient member of the tour.

DEADLINE: And for Teen?

SELON: He’s on a journey of self-expression and self-discovery, and the audience is on that journey with him, so it was very important to establish him as a young teenager who has the interest in witches and the occult, but not necessarily all of the knowledge. He’s there to learn, he’s there to be a passionate fanboy, and we come to know him as a very powerful world builder sort of entity. He’s described as a gothic teen, so we brought in some elements like eyeliner, piercings, he’s got a slash in his eyebrows… these things that are leaning into a fashion choice. But really, I wanted to tell the story that he is a creator. He, as many artists do, tried on lots of different selves as he was understanding himself as a teenager, we thought maybe he would knit for a while and maybe he knits his own sweater, and then he puts these symbols and these runes all onto the sweater, which is what he wears throughout a lot of the show. Even his jeans, he’s got marker doodles on the side, and those eventually transform and become the galaxy print and all of the powerful glowing runes on his superhero costume when he becomes Wiccan. So, every single thing that we designed on the costume both had a function as an everyday teenager who is exploring himself and his fashion choices, but then they would pay off as we would come to know that he is actually a powerful being operating chaos magic for the first time.

DEADLINE: With all of these costume designs as the basis, how did you change them for each trial? Were there colors or items that you needed to keep on each character as a through line?

SELON: Yes, exactly. We really decided that the road is a character, so I like to think of it through the perspective of how the road is designing their new costumes and holding onto certain elements, like Agatha’s tailored jacket that she wears on the road. She always has some sort of tailored element, a shoulder, a blazer, something like this that really always keeps her silhouette consistent, and we definitely kept their color story consistent. There were also these certain elements. Each of them has an heirloom item – Agatha’s broach, Rio’s dagger, Jennifer Kale’s potion bottle, Alice’s amulet that she inherited from her mother… Those items are established on their road witch costume, and for every trial, those items stay the same, but they change locations or they’re used in a different way and we could start to tell the story to the audience that there’s certain elements here that are just being scrambled and repurposed. 

It was really jumping through genres in the same way that we did in WandaVision, where we jumped through historical celebrated sitcoms through time. This was jumping through different genres, so we got to stretch our wings in all these different avenues, and it was just a joyful process. It requires the audience to turn their brain on, really tune in and slowly unpack the mystery that is crawling forward. I think that’s the thing that made WandaVision so unique, and we knew that we needed to hold onto certain bones from that storytelling. Instead of specific television references here, we were essentially doing film genres and that was just delicious to establish strong characters, have these iconic actors playing these parts and then play dress up and give them makeovers again and again and again.