Inside Wildwood's costume department: 200-plus in-house fabrics, embroidered "knits" and 16 copies of Prue's coat

InStyle's Behind the Seams series (Emily Kelleher, October 23, 2026, the film's opening day) visited LAIKA's costume department to look at the wardrobe of Wildwood. The piece is the most detailed public account so far of how the film's puppets were dressed. Earlier coverage dealt mainly with the sets, faces and The General.

The scale of the job is the first point. Wildwood's puppets are roughly 10 inches tall, and the film has more than 200 costumes. Every one of them uses fabric produced in house, with a single exception: one pair of socks made from store-bought textile. Buttons and baby shoes are also made in house, and tattoos are painted by hand. Most shoes take about two weeks each, using thread for laces and miniature irons to fuse the parts together. Extra-thin needles are needed to sew on the buttons.

Head costume designer Deborah Cook explains why the department avoids real knitting at this scale. Hand knitting cannot be relied on to produce matching copies, so cable-knit trousers were made from embroidered fabric instead. Repeatability also shapes the construction inside each garment. Every costume is lined with tiny paper wires so animators can pose it. Jackets get solid backings so that each duplicate creases the same way. Prue needed about 16 identical coats. Lead costume fabricator Nadine Patterson says the team knew every one of them would crease the same whenever the character bent her arm. This guards against "chatter", the term the article gives for a costume detail shifting visibly from one frame to the next. Even a stain on Mac's bib is printed at a measured position so that it can be repeated on every copy.

Some details are built to be animated rather than only to hold still. Mac's hat pompom, zipper pulls, and the tongue inside a pair of Converse-style sneakers are rigged to move with the character. Design motifs also tie characters together on screen. Alexandra's dresses are dabbed with moss at the hem to show she comes from the forest. A fleur-de-lis medallion on one character's armour is echoed in the buttons of another character's coat; both are small enough to need tweezers. RP character lead Morgan Hay believes Wildwood is the most heavily designed stop-motion feature that will ever be made. Durable facts from this piece are folded into the SMDB Wiki pages on miniature costume fabrication and costume engineering for stop-motion puppets.