written by Rachel Elspeth Gross, Forbes
The Penguin is more neo-noir than the typical superhero odyssey. For those of us who love clothing, please know it is packed with beautiful costumes; vintage apparel, high-end ready to wear and a ton of bespoke pieces that costume designer Helen Huang made specifically for the show.
The first episode of the HBO Max miniseries debuts on September 19, with a total of eight weekly episodes airing through November 10, 2024. Every chapter is beautifully produced, and quite possibly the most fashionable show you’ll become obsessed with this fall. And while a great team makes any production more than the sum of its parts, Huang’s excellent work brings a familiar cast of characters to life in a way that’s distinctly different from any previous incarnation of DC Comics’ infamous Extended Universe.
The show picks up the story a week after Warner Bros. Pictures' 2022 film The Batman ended, a gritty reboot directed by Matt Reeves, which reframes the iconic adventures of one of the world’s most beloved masked vigilantes. The film brought in more than $770 million from box offices worldwide, a massive success in a post-Covid world that has forced many quality films quickly out of theaters and onto streaming channels. Due to the film’s success, a sequel is already in development, to be released in October of 2026.
When I met with Huang I asked her about the connection between the film, which introduced Oz Cobbs, aka the Penguin, played by a completely unrecognizable Colin Farrell, as well as a huge cast of criminals and gangsters. Produced by Reeves, and written by showrunner Lauren LeFranc, The Penguin series focuses its lens on the eponymous villain and explores the underworld of Gotham from a completely different point of view.
“In the beginning,” Huang told me, “we talked a lot about The Batman, but we were also inspired by Scarface (1983), The French Connection (1971) and Klute (1971).” When she began working, the goal was to achieve the sort of timelessness she associates with the detective and gangster movies of the era. “Gotham feels a little bit like New York in the mid 1970s, or late 1980s,” Huang explained. “Obviously, this is a very sought after intellectual property, and it's one everyone has seen.” With eight (mostly) hour long episodes, there was time and space to dedicate to character development.
“There is a sense of building,” she said. “We did a lot of work to keep it feeling timeless and grounded, but then amping it up to a heightened sort of reality using certain color elements, especially with Sofia Falcone,” the daughter of the well-known crime family who is portrayed here by the excellent Cristin Milioti, and “even more subtly with Victor Aguilar [Rhenzy Feliz],” an original character who gets caught up in the power struggle among the crime families that Gotham is left with at the end of the 2022 film.
“With Victor,” Huang explained, “if you watch the transition of his palette, it goes from colorful to dark. We paid a lot of attention to the emotional arc. I always like to talk about Victor, though he doesn't get asked much about because his wardrobe is relatively simple compared to everyone else's.” Readers, don’t dismiss the character for a lack of fancy labels, a massive amount of work went into his costuming. “Everything he wears from episode one through four, that was made from scratch by us,” Huang explained. “It's a starter jacket from the 1990s that we remade in detail. I felt like that silhouette of the 1990s, next to Oz's very figure hugging straight silhouette, helped them contrast each other. His red jacket was inspired by a vintage FILA. His tee shirt was hand printed with a Gotham basketball team on it; it felt important to have something that's grounding like a shirt for a Gotham team.”
One of the ways this story differs from other franchises was an element personal and important to Huang. “I do really want to talk about black and brown people in this space, and how they never get to be the main character in these sorts of stories. Or how their stories never get fully told. I really wanted to pay equal attention to Victor as I did with Oz or Sofia. And I did. We really took the time. I really wanted to bring it for the show.”
To build the wardrobes for so many Gotham characters, Huang looked to street photographers, especially from the early 1980s, for inspiration. “Frank Hovart was a big influence, he had this beautiful series called New York Up & Down, where he took pictures of people in subways between 1982 and 1986. We looked at [photographer] Jamal Shabazz a lot, and there were a lot of conversations between me and Lauren about showing joy from Victor's neighborhood, Crown Point. They might be people without money, but that doesn't mean they are living a life without joy.”
Oz makes for a compelling anti-hero. “You really feel Oz,” Huang said. “You feel his history, you feel how he connects to people. I think specifically in this series, there is this idea of institutions, whether it's the Falcones, who are like a crime institution, or Gotham as an institution that is failing the people. We see how crime, even when manipulated and utilized by Oz, can be a way that people without a lot of options gain upward mobility. It’s from Oz's point of view, not from Batman's point of view, where crime is bad.”
From the very first time we meet Oswald Cobb in this show, it is clear that he has physical disadvantages that make other, more able-bodied criminal minds dismiss him, often fatally. In the first episode we learn why he walks with such a distinctive gait; there is something very wrong with one of his feet, which requires him to wear a leg brace. Of course this affected the costumes that our Penguin wears. “We did have to make his pants a little bit wider,” Huang explained, “so it was more of a straight leg through his silhouette. I think it helped to balance out his upper body. I felt like that silhouette was probably what Oz would think of as very handsome. Then on purpose, we gave him very pointy, sort of narrow shoes.” The idea, she told me, “was that he would pour himself into something that's super uncomfortable, just so he could get that silhouette. It's almost like a triangle. He has a powerful upper body with a very straight trouser and a very pointed narrow shoe.”
Flushing out the main character meant resolving a lot of clothing questions. “Does he have good taste? Does he have bad taste? Like, what is good taste? What is bad taste? I think with Oz, his look is always about being powerful.” Huang wanted to make that aspiration towards power come across in his wardrobe. How was that achieved? “There are things that the character sees as powerful,” Huang told me. “Things that others might find not appealing, like his purple car [a plum colored Maserati], dashes of color, the fact that he wears big gold jewelry sometimes.” In the planning stages there was an idea tossed around about a purple jacket, which was dismissed after Huang met with Farrell. “Colin and I,” she explained, “in our first conversation, we talked about where he wanted to go, how to make his silhouette and his image specific, and he did not want it to seem cartoony.” Keeping that in mind as she worked, the costume designer found ways to bring hints of the Penguin into the apparel Oz wears.
“The key to his color palette is subtle,” she said. “Subtle colors in his suits, the subtle textures in his big leather jackets, which we remade from leather jackets from the 1970s. His racer jacket was remade from a piece made in the 1980s. We spent a lot of time just looking at the proportions, how lapels work on his frame. Oz, he has a wide imagination in the way that he solves problems. I feel like there is this conservative way that he thinks about presenting himself, which makes him look good and feel powerful.” Huang told me that the character is often dressing for someone else, like he's almost hyper-conscious of how he will appear to whoever he is interacting with. “Purple,” Huang explained, “is Oz's favorite color. We tried to repeat it throughout the whole series. We like the hypothetical that it comes from his mother.” There’s a certain purple dress you’ll see in the series, watch for it. My regular readers will know I don’t do spoilers, but I promise that it will matter.
Dresses are a big part of the main female character in the series, though not the one I’m so obliquely referring to above. Sofia Falcone is a major character, and one who Huang and her team dedicated as much time and attention to as they did with Oz and Victor. “Sofia [Cristin Milioti] was a particular challenge,” Huang told me, “mostly because I'm always very serious about how female actors present on screen. I feel like female characters in this type of space have a particular look. And I wanted to break that look a little bit. Black and Brown people,” she went on to explain, “their space in this world, I wanted to break that mold too.”
Sofia gets very good clothing, some truly beautiful pieces, a wardrobe which makes sense given her role as daughter to such a successful crime family. “In the beginning, I looked at Edie Sedgwick, at a lot of 1960s references,” Huang said. “I really wanted her to have a very feminine side, because her whole arc, the whole thing that Sofia represents, is a woman in a very masculine world, and what that does to her. In the beginning, we wanted her to feel feminine, because her role in this family is to be this feminine creature, not one with her own power. But I didn't want her to be in that form-fitting silhouette. I wanted her to feel polished and considered, but still kind of rebellious and girly at the same time. And I feel like 1960s silhouettes really do that. We put her in vintage Hermes trenches, vintage Celine, from the Michael Kors era. We sourced vintage Marni.” There is also a truly beautiful Vivienne Westwood dress which makes an appearance at the exact perfect moment, when Sofia needs to make a specific statement.
As with Victor, Sofia’s costumes were sometimes made specifically for the character and series. “The two piece red suit,” Huang told me, “was built for her to look like 1990s minimalist Prada. We put a lot of attention into building pieces, sourcing vintage while putting her together. So you don't really know where her clothes are from, but she always looks amazing, but very buttoned up.” Sofia’s look stays that way until a change happens in the narrative. “When that happens, you’ll notice she gets a lot more textural, there was a lot more visible skin. And a lot more faux fur involved.” While the series does use vintage fur, anything made or acquired new was faux. For the vintage pieces, Huang explained, “we sourced a lot from The RealReal. We were trying to source in an ethical way, and Cristin [Milioti] made it very clear she does not want to wear new fur. So, anything new was faux. You try to think through it and do the job in the best and most ethical way you can.”
There are a lot of players in Gotham, and remembering who is aligned with who would have been difficult for even the most attentive audience without assists from the costume department. “The Falcones,” Huang explained, “it was very important for them to come across as old money, institutionalized money. I really wanted to make it clear that their family is structured. For Luca [Scott Cohen] we did a lot of old Armani. The people on top are old money. And the people who are working for them are very different.” The other families and gangs got equal attention, Huang and her team put in an incredible amount of work. “Their number ones,” Huang explained to me about the various criminal groups, “are dressed almost like a different era than their number twos, because this shows how these types of organizations function. With the Falcones, we looked at a lot of Truman Capote, like his Black and White Ball, very New York Society from the 1960s and 1970s. We wanted to capture the element of them, they're not cheap suits and tracksuits, that kind of stuff you've already seen. They are elegant and put together and they present like an institution. Also, I really wanted to dress men beautifully in the series.”
