Welcome to Derry’s costume designer for Pennywise’s red outfit

“It: Welcome to Derry” costume designer Luis Sequeira had previously created the wet, bloody look for “Carrie,” so he already understood what it would take to recreate it for Stephen King’s killer demon clown.

Or at least he thought so. Having worked on the film ‘It: Chapter Two’, he was already familiar with the universe.

In the season finale of ‘Welcome to Derry’, Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) is seen hibernating in human remains, soaked in blood. The unnerving image, however, is him emerging in all his bloody glory in a red outfit. To maintain that visual story element, Sequeira had to show wear and patina. “If you literally wet something, you lose that patina. It’s just dark,” he said Variety.

Here he breaks down the process behind the red outfit look, creates Periwinkle’s clown look, and places Easter eggs that reference Pennywise’s universe.

Pennywise’s red outfit

The first step involved extensive experimentation and camera testing with the show’s lead textile artist, Alex Goldman. “It was an attempt to figure out which version of Pennywise we would start with, and whether it would be the classic gray color and work from there, or if we would move to a red color.”

The process turned into an afterthought as the pair worked with different color swatches, but they continued to encounter problems. “Everything that was done was lost.”

Ultimately, they decided to go with red as the background for the costume. The process involved stenciling all the pattern pieces, pre-coloring them and adding dragon skin silicone, a strong and stretchy molding material, which was painted with adhesive gel to give it a wet look. “It’s a quick-drying product, and we had to be very quick.”

In total, Pennywise’s red costume consisted of 135 pattern pieces. “It’s stitched in stripes and each stripe is a separate part,” says Sequeira. The flexibility was improved after Skarsgård said that, when playing the character in the films, the costume lacked flexibility. Because Pennywise needed to be physically active, Sequeira introduced an underlying stretching component so Skarsgård could stretch his arms and perform extreme poses. “There has been some consolation,” Sequeira added.

Periwinkle the Clown

Sequeira was also fascinated by Periwinkle’s character. In episode 6, Ingrid Kersh (Madeline Stowe) is revealed to be the person stalking Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack) and her friends as her alter ego, ‘Periwinkle the Clown’. All Ingrid/Periwinkle wants is to be reunited with her father, Bob Grey, aka the original Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

He looked at how the character had a longing aspect. The character appears as a child, Ingrid and Periwinkle. When Ingrid/Pennywise was a child, Sequeira used silk, a substance connected to the ‘Pennywise universe’.

In one scene, where Periwinkle is in the shadows, showrunner Andy Muschietti and Sequeira talked about how they wanted viewers to think it was Pennywise. Sequeira says, “We added this whole belt element to give us that silhouette that wasn’t part of the child’s costume.”

Sequeira sprinkled some easter egg elements into her outfits through the different timelines that nodded to Pennywise. “It was gray and we added a little bit of red.”