Costume Designer Marie Schley On The Ritualistic Aesthetic Of 'Yellowjackets' Season Three

The Emmy award-winning costumer talks capes, furs, and knitting this world of survival...

Yellowjackets recently wrapped its popular third season and was renewed for its fourth. A thriller series created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson involves a group of 90s teens who survive the wilderness after their plane crash lands. We also follow them present day as we see them as adults dealing with the fallout of this harrowing ordeal. It stars Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci, and a young cast featuring Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher, and Samantha Hanratty. Emmy Award-winning costume designer Marie Schley, who worked on season one creating some of the indelible outfits, returned for season three. Schley recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom about returning to this popular series.

[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]

Let's dive right in and talk Yellowjackets. How did you first get started on this show?

I knew Karen Kusama. I interviewed for the pilot of Yellowjackets, and it was such a great script. It appealed to me with all the past and present dynamics. The trauma of high school reverberated through all these themes and the violence, all of which felt interesting to play with visually. The script was so fantastic. It had a lot of humor, and I love the idea of the ceremony scene at the very end of the pilot, where they're all eating the girl.

It's a rich palette. There's a lot to play with for crafts. I imagine it's hard work, but it's also probably a fun show to be on. Lots going on.

The pilot set us up for a fascinating creative journey, like the ritualistic stuff. In my mind, I thought it'd be great if everybody had an animal, and it sort of symbolized their hierarchy. As we developed the pilot, we knew we couldn't show anybody's faces because we didn't know who would be in that ritual and who would be cast. The masks, including The Antler Queen, evolved because we couldn't see her face. It was fun to come back for season three and fill in all the puzzle pieces from what we saw in the pilot.

I love it when films and shows play with time. Talk a little about the contrast between dressing the young and older cast.

That was another interesting thing in the pilot that evolved. We were trying to create links between the adult and young casts. It talked about wigs and eye colors and how we would link these two actors. We picked iconic costume pieces, like a motorcycle jacket, a plaid shirt, and something from the nineties, but it had a contemporary version. It was supposed to be subtle, and it was supposed to be aided by other things. As the seasons evolved, I would say that now that the adult versions have their own type of masks, so sort of masking in public, they are wearing costumes of who they are fronting to be in the world. I think the younger versions are exposing themselves more to be who they are.

How much do you make versus sourcing and thrifting...

I think for most of the adult costumes we source, we sometimes have to amend them. For the young versions, we make many costumes, and what we do source, we alter in some way. Many of the costumes were bought in season one, and we're just holding onto them and adding to them, aging them down, tearing them up. We need multiples. So many of them are pieces we bought in the store that have a nineties flavor. All the soccer uniforms are something that we pieced together.

The young cast is literally living in the wild. Do you and your team have fun beating the clothes up?

We have a pretty big aging team. You know, three or four people who are just like dying things and then ripping them up and creating all the multiples so they look exactly alike or that they've evolved with blood or vomit or dirt. It really couldn't look dirty enough. This season specifically, I tried to add more capes, furs, and knit stuff out of rags. Trying to create an aesthetic and a ritualistic world for them. Van wears a cape with rag fringes on it while they're telling the story of their survival. It's them creating a society, too, in the wilderness.

Talk a little bit about the changing seasons and adapting the clothes for the time of year in which the show is currently taking place.

This season was supposed to be a complete juxtaposition to the end of season two. We wanted to open up and were in a beautiful, idyllic witchy village; they've already gone through the worst of survival, and now the summer's coming, and things are looking up. A summer solstice ceremony happens in the first episode, putting leaves on their costumes. They've made these capes like The Antler Queen out of rabbit skins pieced together and part of the airplane seats. It was supposed to shock you into a new reality for this group of kids. Also, it shows that they're coming together in terms of community and creating rituals as they each find their place within.

Let's talk for a moment about the cast. The cast is amazing: Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Hilary Swank...

Iconic actors. It's so fun to see them come together in an ensemble. Each one brings so much unique energy; they really set the tone for the characters. Christina brings such a false chipper genius element to Misty. Melanie and the depths of trauma. It gets crazier, stranger, and she gets more despicable, and you're just like, how is she pulling this off?

She's a fantastic performer. The way it unfolds. That's one thing that she does really well as a performer, which is revealing more of herself little piece by piece as the show goes on.

It's been interesting, I think, for all of us because this show had so many mysteries in the beginning. Even for the cast and crew, we didn't necessarily know the specifics of where this storyline was going. We had general ideas, and some of them were changed. I think it's amazing her performance, how it's unfolding, how she's able to find new levels of things to reveal, new depths of paranoia and whatever else she's going through.

To relate it to the costumes, the pilot just establishes a plaid shirt to link it to a younger nineties plaid shirt—it's a real costume. I think I've heard Melanie talk about it in her interviews. This is a character who's hiding under the guise of being a suburban mom, a regular mom, but really, she's a killer and a megalomaniac. It seems to me that that costume has evolved into something much more symbolic.

Any favorites of the costumes?

There are some new favorites this season. I love adult Lottie and her high-fashion version of a priestess. As far as the wilderness, we did a lot of knitted stuff this season, which I really like. I like how we took different pieces of clothing and remade them. I love Teen Van's cloak. I love Teen Misty's crazy seat. She wears just like a full airplane seat around her as a coat at one point towards the end. Those were fun to make. Of course, The Antler Queen and the masks from the pilot will always be my favorite costume in everything I've ever done in my career.

What's the afterglow working on season three?

There's so many storylines that get revealed and tied up in this season. It was really fun for me to come back and do it because it's come full circle, and that's the name of the last episode. It will be interesting to go into season four, into a whole new world now that we've revealed who The Antler Queen is and what all these rituals are.

Yellowjackets season 3 is now streaming at Paramount+