Welcome to Derry’ Costume Designer on 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 he did. 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, soaking in blood. The unnerving image, however, is of him emerging in all his bloody glory in a red outfit. To retain that visual storytelling element, Sequeira needed to show wear, tear, and patina. “If you literally wet something, you lose that patina. It’s just dark,” he told Variety.

Here, he breaks down the process behind the red outfit look, and creating Periwinkle’s clown look and inserting easter eggs that nod to Pennywise’s universe.

Pennywise’s Red Outfit

The first step involved extensive experimenting and camera testing with the show’s key textile artist, Alex Goldman. “It was trying to figure out what version of Pennywise we were going to start with, and whether it was going to be the classic gray color and work from there, or whether we were going to move into a red color.”

The process turned into a side hustle as the pair worked with various color samples, but they kept running into problems. “Everything that was done was being lost.”

In the end, they decided to go with red as the backdrop of the costume. The process involved stenciling all the pattern pieces, pre-staining them, and adding dragon skin silicone, a strong and stretchy mold material, which was painted with glue gel to give it that wet look. “It’s a quick-curing product, and we had to be very fast.”

In total, Pennywise’s red costume was made up of 135 pattern pieces. “It’s stitched down in stripes, and each stripe is a separate component,” Sequeira says. The flexibility was improved after Skarsgård mentioned that, while playing the character in the films, the costume lacked flexibility. Since Pennywise needed to be physically active, Sequeira introduced an underlying stretch component so Skarsgård could extend his arms and perform extreme poses. “There’s a little give for comfort,” Sequeira adds.

Periwinkle the Clown

Sequeira was also fascinated by the character of Periwinkle. In episode 6, it’s revealed that Ingrid Kersh (Madeline Stowe) is the person who has been 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 is a child, Sequeira used silk, a fabric that was tied 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 belted element to give us that silhouette that was not part of the childhood costume.”

Sequeira sprinkled in a little 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.”