When Bella Swan first arrives in Forks, Wash., she’s wearing a plaid short-sleeve shirt over a waffle-textured long-sleeve shirt with low-rise denim. For the first day of school, she opts for that same long-sleeve and low-rise denim combo, this time layering it with a vintage bowling shirt and an oversized duffel coat. Bella’s trusted long-sleeve makes yet another appearance later in the film, when it’s layered beneath a baggy plaid button-up, likely pulled from her dad’s closet. She’s nothing if not consistent.
Over the course of Twilight’s two-hour and two-minute runtime, Bella debuts a series of similar-looking outfits, consisting of a few signature pieces that are often layered and in constant rotation. Her mid-aughts closet is small but reliable — a capsule wardrobe before capsule wardrobes were even a thing.
Wendy Chuck, the costume designer of Twilight (as well as Lilo & Stitch, The Holdovers, Spotlight, Nebraska and more), establishes a formula for Bella’s layered look early on: a shirt over a shirt — or a sweater over a sweater — paired with bootcut flares and topped off with either sneakers or hiking boots. That Bella seldom wears anything actually waterproof, despite living in the Pacific Northwest, is also by design.
Yahoo spoke to Chuck ahead of the film’s theatrical rerelease earlier this week. All Twilight movies are back in theaters for a limited time in honor of the 20th anniversary of author Stephenie Meyer’s original book.
“I always do my local research,” Chuck told Yahoo over the phone. “It’s fun to see, you know, what the zeitgeist is of the culture of the kids up there. And surprisingly, one thing I did learn is they really didn’t have coats and jackets. A hoodie was good enough. Like, it was almost taboo to have an overcoat or a raincoat.”
Chuck described Bella’s style at the start of the film as “vintage Southwestern.” She’s coming from Arizona, where the climate is milder and drier, and where warm, more sunbaked hues are the norm. This all begins to change, however, the more drawn to Edward she becomes.
“As she gets closer to Edward, you know, I put her more in the purples and the grays. That was my idea to have that arc for her,” Chuck said, before elaborating on what this tonal shift in Bella’s style signifies. “It’s like a blending, you know? A soul connection as [she and Edward] become a couple.”
In addition to rocking cooler, moodier tones, Bella also begins to wear clothes with a more utilitarian vibe. Clothing becomes a metaphorical measure of protection for Bella as her life becomes increasingly dangerous.
“For Bella, I was kind of looking for just interesting utility looks, which were maybe a hybrid of, like, still being masculine in their finish but also being a little soft armor for her, because she was, you know, going into this uncharted, scary territory of vampires,” Chuck said.
While much of the wardrobe from Twilight was sourced in Los Angeles from familiar chains like T.J. Maxx and Anthropologie, key garments were either found serendipitously or constructed by the film’s costume department. Bella’s prom dress, for instance, was sourced from a local thrift store in Washington state. Her beloved tan duffel coat (the result of a mid-’00s collaboration between Puma and supermodel Christy Turlington) was a rental from the studio’s costume department, which Chuck had replicated. Edward’s gray tailored peacoat, which is one of the film’s defining pieces of clothing, was designed by Chuck herself.
Chuck had a clear vision for both the coat and Edward’s approach to fashion. Vampires in pop culture are often depicted as brooding, sun-shy creatures with a thing for monochromatic dressing — think Angel and Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer — but Chuck wanted to distance herself from the dark and edgy. Instead, she chose to highlight Edward’s softness. “It’s a classic coat with a modern twist,” she said of the garment. “Gray was a good medium.”
The muted, cool-toned colors that Edward and the rest of the Cullen family wear are meant to emulate the harshness of immortality.
“These were characters that were caught in time,” she said. “Ice was a metaphor for that. For being frozen in time. I was drawing from just, you know, ideas of time and people stuck in time, and the glacial movement of time.”
Five films and nearly two decades later, Chuck’s costuming on Twilight remains a blueprint for melancholic, mid-aughts dressing. If the sheer number of “Bella Swan Outfit” videos on TikTok is any indication, the film’s sartorial influence is here to stay.