Thursday, February 13, 2025

Chasing the Gold: ‘The Substance’ and the Use of Color in Costume Design

Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for The Substance. Proceed with caution.

The Substance is the kind of film that commands attention, not just for the brilliant performances by Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, who play both sides of the same feminine mystique. Director Coralie Fargeat and her crew should be commended for their meticulous craftsmanship and attention to detail. From Margaret Qualley’s metallic pink leotard to Demi Moore’s yolk yellow coat, The Substance uses strong, primary colors to not only tell a story of bodies ruptured and screaming faces grotesquely protruding out of decaying bodies, but also of how women present themselves into the world, through their careful choice of clothing items.

Elizabeth Sparkle (Moore)’s yolk yellows, matte blues, and crimson reds command grounded acceptance. Costume designer Emmanuelle Youchnovski brilliantly picks the colors, shiny and metallic or muted and matte, to prove a point. Alongside Fargeat, she brilliantly isolates every woman in her shell of a patriarchal world governed by aesthetics, slipping through Elizabeth’s fingers only to land in Sue (Qualley)’s lap. This body horror masterpiece touches on ageism not only through the women’s costume choices but also how they choose to wear them and why. 

Elizabeth’s colors are always on mute. Her matte blue body suit is her daily routine, her celebrity image. A woman is stunning even as she ages, commanding the lonely women watching and trying to imitate her from behind their screens, dreaming of being like her while she dreams of her younger self. The form-fitting suit encapsulates Elizabeth, using Moore’s stunning body as a frame for her empowerment to the average viewer, but her desperation as a woman governed by a merciless industry, unattainable beauty and body standards, and low self-esteem precipitated by constant judgment and appraisal from scowling network heads and predatory producers. Her matte blue is stunning but sad, like a swan song to a once thriving career.

On the other hand, Sue’s pink neon leotard is a modern pop star’s dream. She’s made for internet aesthetics and Pinterest color boards. She commands copying and extracting, adding hues and filters to her bubblegum dreamlike presence. Fargeat makes great use of Qualley’s playful, voluptuous lips, and sensual nervous tic, her lower lip bite. Sue plays on older men’s dumbfounded infatuation with what she sells them, a cute pixie hot babygirl with a smile plastered on her face, hiding an underlying sense of cold and calculated ladder climber. A woman in power slowly in the making, and a ruthless young vidette coyly masking her tremendous ambition behind her swaying hips.

Elizabeth’s oversized yolk yellow coat works as her armor against the outside world. It brings to mind how celebrities usually hide in plain sight when taking a stroll or going out of their cold, isolated mansions to buy coffee or walk their dogs. I’ve always been fascinated by why they sometimes cover too much even in the heart of summer, with caps pulled low to hide their eyes, giant hoodies, face masks, oversized clothes, and baggy pants. And yet, people recognize them. Even paparazzi catch them in their desperate, not-so-desperate attempts to blend so they overdo it with the disguise. Elizabeth doesn’t come as a surprise, her huge coat along with her sunglasses, and orange gloves are her celebrity camouflage. She wears it on every trip outside her luxury apartment. Every time she looks fragile, scared, and cornered. It is a brilliant allegory of how celebrities are vulnerable creatures in the real world without the entourage and the cameras to accentuate their acquired powerful statuses, yet they crave that sneaky recognition, their grasp on their raw power, even when invisible and masked. It perfectly encapsulates Elizabeth in this yolk-verse, this wild adventure she’s about to embark on to extract another younger self from her body. 

Sue’s sequined velvet robe, with the dragon embroidered on the back right where the spine exists, is a powerful testament to her looming presence. Her identity slowly and reptilian-like devours Elizabeth’s prior existence. She stands over her original body host, and it’s a better interpretation of the Monster going against Dr. Victor Frankenstein than ever before. Sue never wears primary colors but more of a mix and mash of all shades of a particular color. She breaks a midnight blue fabric with a gold sequin embroidered dragon. Not only is she bold, but dangerous. Her t-shirts and tennis skirts are a testament to her playful, Gen Z youthfulness, a carelessness that we associate with a young generation of rebels, not just on older rules and traditions but on grander facts of life like the validity of hard work and financial stability. Sue’s snakeskin black leather body-hugging suit is another attempt at control. Sue desperately tries to shed her older identity and that she’s not tied to her “older” former self. She no longer wants to be an extension of that crone but she’s also worried. She fears what that self would do to the path of glory she is slowly carving for herself. 

Elizabeth’s last shot at having a grip on her world is bittersweet. As she prepares for a date with an older classmate who still finds her hot, she puts on a stunning crimson dress and wears red lipstick that makes her lips look stunning. But as the preparation for the date lingers, Elizabeth becomes less and less excited about the date, and more depressed about…Elizabeth. In the mirror, despite all the reds, and the attempts to chase the vitality of youth, Elizabeth doesn’t see Sue, but her original self. Although that “self” is stunning, a dream girl ever since they were young to her date, a former high school colleague, to her, it’s a monstrosity, suddenly her crimson dress becomes her bloodbath as she smears her lipstick all over her face, nearly tearing the skin apart. 

Elizabeth’s crimson mess foreshadows the collapse of Sue’s Cinderella dress. A light blue, layered dress that sees her decay rather than her slay. Despite Sue’s attempts to keep it together, everything is torn apart, from her to the dress itself. Her attempts as Sue to become a modern-day television princess are crushed as the Elizabeth in her drags her down in the mud, breaking her, as their selfish wish for separation, becomes their tool of self-destruction, and their mitotic division at the beginning of the film turns into a full body dismemberment, not on her part, but on the part of the magic drug she betrayed by rebelling against her older self.The Substance‘s costumes and colors tell stories of women trapped in tutus, leather, cashmere, and skin. It comments on women’s sadomasochistic pleasure in tearing each other apart, fabric by fabric, and in the process, destroying themselves.

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