“Dune” is one of the densest sci-fi worlds out there, richly descriptive and sprawling across generations over six books, three movies and two TV series. For Bojana Nikitović, costume designer on the new HBO series “Dune: Prophecy,” that meant delving deeply into researching the world before she could begin any designing.
“It’s a lot of exploring before you start making the costume and a lot of drawings before you get the right look — at least the one that you think is right for the character,” Nikitović said. “’Dune’ is such a big thing and so many people know so many things about ‘Dune’s’ world. So many people are totally fascinated with that. So when I started working on it, I really wanted to get into that world completely. It was a lot of research behind the drawings first and then making it into the costumes.”
The series takes place 10,000 years before Paul Atreides, the character and the story most viewers will be familiar with. But it’s not that straightforward, Nikitović said: “It’s 10,000 years before [the more familiar worlds of ‘Dune’], but it’s still the future for us.”
The real scene-stealing outfit from “Dune: Prophecy” was the engagement dress Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) wears while meeting her very young husband for a marriage arranged by their two families. The red dress features a weaving mesh of different fabrics and a striking ringed veil. Nikitović went through a mountain of drawings before she arrived at the final product, but her prevailing idea remained throughout: She wanted the dress to evoke how trapped Ynez felt by the marriage.
“We made this fabric out of layers of silk,” she said. “Then we did the laser cut of the other piece of fabric, and we glued it with a special technique. That’s how you get all the texture. We wanted to create something that’s ours. For the veil, we had the upper part where we created a kind of net. I wanted to show that she’s trapped in the whole situation, in this marriage and this engagement. She’s forced to get married to this boy, and then she’s going to be sent to a totally different planet and live in the [mystical Bene Gesserit] Sisterhood. In a way, she’s like someone’s doll that they’re just moving her from here to there.”
Creating Ynez’s veil, and that “caught-in-the-net” look, required mountains of drawings and constant discussions between Nikitović and the show’s small department dedicated to the metals in the show, some of which ring Ynez’s face as part of the veil. Once they had the drawings down, she admitted a lot of it came down to her just finding a piece here and there while out shopping. “You never know where you are going to find something that will inspire you,” Nikitović said. “Sometimes I go walking and shopping for something totally different, and then I say, ‘This could be helpful.’”
Ynez’s engagement dress is just one of the many unique looks the designer and her team made for the show while juggling various royal families, factions like the Bene Gesserit and more. Nikitović thinks their end products honor the world of “Dune” while also being uniquely their own. “It’s really tricky and difficult,” she said, “but I think and hope that we manage to create our own world.”
This story first appeared in the Below the Line Issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
