Kate Hawley made history at the 98th Academy Awards, winning Best Costume Design for Frankenstein on her first-ever Oscar nomination. Accepting the award from former Vogue editor Anna Wintour and actress Anne Hathaway, Hawley paid tribute to the team behind her work, thanking the Academy for recognising what she described as the craft of 'the artisans, the alchemists, the dream weavers'.
Her Oscar victory comes just weeks after Hawley claimed honours at both the BAFTA Awards and the 2026 Costume Designers Guild Awards. The New Zealand costume designer's film credits include Pacific Rim (2013), Crimson Peak (2015), Suicide Squad (2016), and Frankenstein (2025). This Frankenstein project marks del Toro and Hawley's third creative partnership, following Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak.
Hawley earned Oscar recognition for her richly textured work on Frankenstein, reimagining Mary Shelley's classic through garments that blur the line between monster and man, fear and empathy. Rather than treating costume design as surface decoration, Hawley wove narrative meaning into every fabric choice. Victor starts off as the gentleman and the creature is wild and untamed, but they swap gradually, so Victor's clothes start echoing his own creature, using custom fabrics based on elements pulled from the natural world: iridescent beetles, cross sections of skin cells, and the kind of marbling found in geological minerals.
Mia Goth's Elizabeth is outfitted in printed silk gowns, brightly coloured veils, feathered headdresses, and archival Tiffany jewels like a blue scarab beetle necklace from the early 1900s. The blue dress and beetle necklace, designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and paired with the piece, came after Tiffany and Co. opened its archives to Hawley, with the piece becoming a nod to Elizabeth's connection to the natural world.
Hawley noted that she has done three films with Guillermo del Toro but every time they explore the same language in a very different way, pursuing the question of 'what else could it be, and how else can I do it?' Hawley thanked director Guillermo del Toro for his creative leadership, telling him it had been 'a great privilege' to be part of his vision and journey.
Some costumes took four or five months to develop, with last-minute adjustments also required. 'That's what we're here for,' Hawley said of the pressure to execute del Toro's vision. Frankenstein earned nine Academy nominations, including Best Picture, Actor in a Supporting Role, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Production Design, Original Score, and Sound.
The Oscar recognition marks a turning point for costume design visibility in mainstream cinema. Growing up immersed in opera, with a father who was an opera singer and a mother involved in wardrobe, Hawley began painting sets and assisting with props at a young age, skills that influenced her approach: costumes do not exist in isolation, but as part of a director's universe as a whole. That philosophy shaped her work on del Toro's gothic adaptation, where every thread served the larger story.