When costume designer Sarah Millman was first approached by producer Mary Anne Waterhouse to work on an upcoming indie film, she hesitated. Already on set for another indie film, Turner, she wasn’t sure if back to back indie films was the right move for her.

Then, she heard the hook.

“[It was] a female-driven story about a mall-based coven, complete with an entire brand we’d be responsible for designing,” she tells me via email. “It was too unique to pass up.”

That film was Forbidden Fruits, a blood soaked, campy horror film starring Lili Reinhart as Apple, Lola Tung as Pumpkin, Alexandra Shipp as Fig, and Victoria Pedretti as Cherry–a coven of young women who work at a Texas mall.

“The turning point was my second meeting with the director, Meredith Alloway,” says Millman. “We spent over three hours on zoom diving into her visual deck and the script. The clarity of her vision and the opportunity to collaborate on a project that was women-led at every level made it an exhilarating professional challenge that I couldn't turn down.”

Taking A Bite Of The Apple

Forbidden Fruits, which premiered last month at SXSW and in theaters nationwide follows in the tradition of vibrant and subversive feminist horror and satire–from Clueless to Jennifer’s Body; Mean Girls to The Craft. Those predecessors were instructive as Millman began to cohere a vision for the film’s costume design. “I have a deep love for a lot of [Alloway’s] reference films–Heathers, Mean Girls, The Craft, Jennifer's Body. By the time I made mood boards, I'd already embodied the characters for so long. Meredith is a very visual person, really decisive, and knows what she wants. That provided such a strong runway for getting started on the costumes.”

Those mood boards became the foundation for the film’s candy colored aesthetic and included references to everything from 90’s Anna Nicole Smith and Drew Barrymore to Aaliyah and retailer Bluemarine. “When I build mood boards, it's more world-building, a bit more atmospheric, just trying to nail the essence of the character rather than sketches or a shopping list,” she says. Alloway used mood boards herself to curate aesthetics for individual cast members, and Millman says these she was able to incorporate these into her own mood boards. “I've actually never had a director that interested or involved in the way my boards looked,” she tells me. “Meredith really had such a vision for how she wanted things to feel. She knew the characters so well.”

It wasn’t just the film’s vision that honored early the early 00’s–Millman sourced much of the films wardrobe from thrift stores like Value Village or Goodwill. She also enlisted the help of brands that will look familiar to any 00’s baby who spent their afternoons at the mall. “American Eagle also came on board as a sponsor [through a production arrangement,]” she says. “It was very interesting to have a mall brand help produce a film that takes place in a mall! They sent us a lot of stuff–it was extremely helpful.

A Bloody Fruit Basket

With an ensemble cast like this, costuming is everything; it delineates characters from each other for the audience and complements the script and the acting to create well rounded and distinct personalities.

“It was really already on the page,” Millman tells me of how she envisioned each of the four leading ladies. “The characters were so singular, as were the actresses playing them. They had different traumas, different dreams, backgrounds, upbringings.”

For Apple, Millman says she knew she was going to be controlled and dominating, calling her “the female Patrick Bateman of the group.” She worked closely with Reinhart to get her character’s look just right and Reinhart even brought some of her own clothing to set, including a Mui Mui choker and a Coperni set. “[We] had discussions abotu where and how she got her designer pieces; Lili thought maybe she’d steal them or troll TheRealReal.” They opted to keep her character in sleek silhouettes, direct and to the point; they wanted her outfits to communicate her attitude, which was: “Fear me, I am the head of this hot girl coven,” Millman says.

By contrast, she dressed Cherry in softer fabrics and colors; pastels and magentas. “She was the most experimental of the bunch and the most visibly vulnerable. Her costuming mirrored that.” She also played up her constant need for approval dressing her in outfits that were sometimes provocative and coquettish. “She was based on sort of a classic pin up girl meets 90’s Guess Girl, with hints of Texas.”

Mall goths current and former will see themselves reflected in Fig whose aesthetic was based on the early aughts archetype, dressed in Hot Topic and Rodarte with vintage mixed in throughout. “We found the nuances together with Alex in the fitting room,” says Millman. “My favorite looks of Figs have an almost anime quality to them. She is very earnest, brainy - she just wants to text her boyfriend words, not emojis! She is the very essence of mallcore.

Finally, Pumpkin rounds out the clique–as the crew’s outlier the audience meets her in her Sister Salts uniform which Millman says was one of her favorite costumes in the film. “It was instantly iconic to me,” she says. Once pumpkin joins the coven though, her style shifts. “She begins to speak their sartorial language, using clothing from the store to fight fire with fire and find acceptance,” says Millman. “She wears a lot of Reformation, American Eagle, and some vintage. She always wears her red heart necklace from Gemini Jewels–her signature piece. And toward the end of the film she is coming undone a bit–she falls back into her more tomboy leaning, comfy clothing. A bit Sporty Spice.”

Girls Just Want To Have Fun (With Their Coven)

Horror as a genre has a rich history of taking aim at tropes and delivering subversive or challenging themes with a side of screams and gore. Forbidden Fruits is no exception. Writing for Roger Ebert, critic Zachary Lee says, “It’s clear that the director has not only a vision but something righteous and incendiary to say.” And Millman’s costuming plays a critical role in pulling that off. “The clothing often feels like a living organism, the hues and textures reacting in real time to the emotions of the bodies wearing them,” he says. “It’s one of the many flourishes that make “Forbidden Fruits” punch above its weight in terms of the scale of the story.”

Millman says from the start she knew they had to think big and to build a visual world that matched the outsized presence of the mall and the story; relying heavily on vintage pieces, she says, was key. “There’s a specific texture and history in a thrifted piece that you just can’t replicate with new pulls,” she says. “By mixing those textured, vintage finds with high-concept silhouettes, we hoped to create a look that felt both nostalgic and entirely new.”

Millman’s reverence for horror as a subversive genre, in particular as it applies to gender politics, is apparent too. “I’ve always felt that in horror, the more 'girly' or delicate an aesthetic is, the more visceral the tension becomes,” she says. “For Fruits, I treated the costuming as a form of hyper-feminine armour.”

By using hyperfeminine signifiers like ribbons and lace to create a sense of performative safety, Millman effortlessly communicates with the audience the trap of girlhood. “It’s that coquette or mallcore exterior that young women sometimes use to navigate the world,” she says. “But in a horror context, those clothes become a sartorial entrapment. When the gore starts to seep into a slip dress or some mini Ugg boots, the contrast highlights the messiness of female friendship and the honesty of the genre. The clothes aren't just there to look pretty–they are there to show the breaking point between the public mask and the private, darker reality of the coven.”