INTERVIEW: Daniel Selon – ‘Agatha All Along’ Costume Designer – SDCC 2025

A good costume looks cool. A great costume tells the audience a lot about a character just by looking at them. An excellent costume does both — and might just inspire thousands of people to try and recreate the outfit at home, too. Agatha All Along’s costumes fall firmly into that final category, and costume designer Daniel Selon (and, as he’s always quick to point out, his brilliant team) is to thank. After acting as an assistant costume designer on Marvel projects like WandaVision, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Thor: Love and Thunder, Selon gets the chance to lead the charge down, down, down the Witches’ Road.

Fanversation got the chance to speak with Selon about his recently Emmy-nominated work at San Diego Comic-Con. During the conversation, he reveals what Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza brought to their respective looks, why he believes Agatha doesn’t have a crown, the wildest materials and research he integrated into the costumes, his favorite fan art, and much more.

FANVERSATION: As a writer and director myself, something I really love is when actors interpret something in a way I never thought of or just bring something to the character I never would have guessed. Were there any instances where you encountered that while working with the actors on their costumes?

DANIEL SELON: Oh, yes. Totally. We had such an incredible cast, and every single one of them is a heavy hitter in their own avenue of how they perform and what kind of actor they are. Starting with Kathryn Hahn, she’s such an icon, and she brings so much emotional depth to even the lightest comedic moments. I think that’s part of her power, and that’s been such a successful element of Agatha Harkness. So our fittings tend to be total play time, and we get to really dig in because it’s time when it’s just us — me and my assistant designers and Kathryn in the room trying things on and fitting them. Kathryn likes to take her time and look in the mirror and walk and sit and kind of posture. She is embodying the character and figuring out how the costume either helps her or hinders her, and so there’s lots of playtime there.

Patti LuPone does the same thing. I will never forget this moment when we were fitting her Glinda costume for Episode 7. It was all about these layers of poofy skirt and all this crinoline. Patti’s been wearing costumes forever, so she knows them very well. She knows exactly how she needs it to be, so she was very specific about the length of the skirt here and “I need more poof here,” so we were able to do that. And then she took her wand — because we had the mock-up of the wand, which actually didn’t make it so much into the show — and she was walking around the room, and she would bless the chair, and then she would poof her skirts and sit in the chair. There was always really precious creation time that happened in the fitting room with the actors. That’s just a magical space of transformation, really.

Speaking of the wand, every single one of these costumes and props is amazing, but was there one that you were really proud of that either got cut or that you wish had gotten a little bit more screen time?

There are these flowers that Rio shows up carrying, or she blooms them out of her hand, or she sort of plays with them, and that was born out of a fitting, actually. The Green Witch costume originally had a flower right at the neckline, and the jacket was closed, and all of the vines sort of grew towards the central flower. In the fitting, it very quickly became evident that it was too closed off, and she was too hemmed in by it, so I was like, “Okay, take the flower off, and just hold it for now while I work on this.” And so she’s holding the flower, and she’s kind of twiddling it in her fingers, and she was like, “Oh, I love this. Give me something to do. I have nervous fingers.” 

We always imagined that the Green Witch could walk through the forest and just bloom things, and she has control of the fungi, and the trees would bend to her, and so she’s like, “What if I just bloom a flower out of my hand?” I was like, “That’s cool — yeah, keep the flower.” So we hatched that idea right then and there to create these fantasy flowers for each trial. Every time she shows up, she has a different flower, and you can see them in the show, but I kind of wish we were able to get some close-ups or something. But it’s in there if you zoom in, and it ends with what we call the Death Flower, and it’s all black and white, and it has these long tendrils sort of inspired by orchids. It was really fun to imagine total fantasy plants with no limits.

I have looked through the art book so many times, because there are so many details in that, and something that I found really interesting is that the original Detective Agnes designs were a lot more feminine and The Closer type of vibes. What was the process of finding Detective Agnes like?

Yeah, it was so different. That section of the episode, where we’re still in her fantasy, needed to feel like a carryover from WandaVision so that there was a little bit of continuity, and we were also diverting the audience’s understanding of where we would go by starting out inside another television show. So we tried to emulate very closely Mare of Easttown and Broadchurch. Those women wear very functional clothing, especially in Mare of Easttown — it’s clearly time and place: the Northeast, flannels, it’s winter time. It was really about making it feel very real and grounded. 

And we tried on a bunch of different flannels and sweaters as well, and that flannel that we landed with was Kathryn’s favorite because the collar wouldn’t sit quite right, and she liked how sort of sloppy it was. And instead of doing our normal thing of being costumers and going in and making sure it’s perfect on camera, she was like, “Let’s just let it be. Let’s just let it live.” And it turns out to be a beautiful contrast to the very orchestrated, executed things later.

Speaking of the masculine and feminine aspects of it, I have a history nerd friend who is very eagle-eyed and noticed that Agatha’s battle outfit has a stock tie, which is traditionally a male accessory. I’m curious if you can talk about combining the more masculine and feminine parts to her costuming.

That’s really something that I think Kathryn led the charge on. She always really felt like Agatha was beyond gender in a way — not that she’s gender nonconforming, because she’s very female presenting, but that she’s lived so many lives, and she’s always “wearing the pants.” She’s in charge of the relationship. She’s in charge of the con. She is the one pulling the strings behind the scenes or under the radar, so for her, she always wanted to strike the balance of, “Is this men’s clothing?” So we brought in the tailored elements of tailored menswear, certainly into her main Road witch coat, and carried that through. You’ll see she’s always wearing some sort of blazer or something with a structured shoulder or a strong collar, and that was just enough to give her what she needed to sort of feel like we were touching on that point. I think it allowed her to step into her physicality as well. There’s sort of a swagger to her, and then you see her softer at other times as well, so it gave her the spectrum to play with.

Speaking of that coat, I feel like everybody now knows about the amazing runes inside of it, but I’m curious if there are any hidden details or Easter eggs that people haven’t so much picked up on or that you wish you could talk about more.

The inside of the Green Witch’s coat, the blazer that she wears when she is first on the Road with them, is actually stunningly beautiful as well. We used this technique called ice dyeing, where you use actual ice cubes. It’s all silk interior, and we placed the dye — we used different greens and oranges and ochre and yellow — and as the ice melts, it sort of very organically spreads the dye. So it’s almost as organic as the exterior of the coat, but it’s just a dye application, and it was beautiful in its own right, but we never see that.

There’s also, on Jennifer Kale’s pink dress, all these little symbols, and they are all artwork that we created, and it’s all the different elements that she uses in her potions to create her skincare. There’s lavender, and there’s a mortar and pestle. And the mortar and pestle is actually being held by hands that are tied at the wrist, so it was like a little Easter egg that she’s already bound. And then there were the celestial sparkles and things like that. We incorporated the crown that the comic book character Jennifer Kale wears into her earrings and on her belt, and so those are interpretations of that shape in our own way. Those are things that I think are more subtle, but they are there, and that was where they were born from.

Also, on the back of Alice Wu-Gulliver’s jacket, there’s an image of this barn on fire, and in the flames of the image, we embedded the word “burn.” It was based on this 12th-century Japanese samurai poet, Masahide, and he has this poem that says, “Barn’s burnt down, now I can see the moon.” That was something that has always captivated me, and I was always sort of like, “Where can I use this?” And this was the place, because she really is at a place in her life when she’s seeking meaning, she’s seeking a path forward, she’s lost her mother, and she has this power of fire but also fear of fire, and so it was kind of like wearing this emblem of fire and a home burning down and sort of restarting and reclaiming.

You mentioned Jennifer’s crown. Billy has a crown. Rio has a crown of sorts. Wanda obviously has one. Do you know why Agatha does not have one?

Oh, that’s a good question. You know, Agatha is such an interesting character, and it’s been so fun to specify her within the MCU, because when she first shows up in the comics in the Fantastic Four, she’s sort of seen as a bit of an older crone. She’s a babysitter, essentially, and pictured in a bit of a Victorian silhouette, which was something that we tried to always carry through. I think that her power transcends needing a specific element or visual qualifier to show what it is. She’s not royalty. She’s a bit of a chameleon, and so I think she would maybe refute needing it. She’s like, “The power is me, baby.” 

Speaking of Easter eggs, the black heart line is so famous. Obviously, that’s incorporated into the Death outfit. Can you talk about deciding to integrate that into the costume? That is something that people really latched on to — the black heart.

That was sort of going back to that flower that I’d originally designed for her Green Witch jacket — everything was green and growing, and there was this bloom at her chest. And then, when we see her as Lady Death, it was something that was hard and encrusted and petrified. Knowing that the black heart line is planted in the first episode, that at the very end, we would pay off, and we would get to see her with a black heart [felt important]. And what that black heart would become, I didn’t know right away. But once we started to design her crown, the Lady Death crown, I really wanted to bring in obsidian, because I think it’s such a beautiful sort of glasslike stone, and it has all these facets. It’s shiny, and it’s beautiful, but it’s also very sharp and dangerous. That felt like the right thing there.

When I was working with Adrienne Martinez, my specialty costumer who worked a lot on that costume, we found a piece of obsidian — a shard — and we just kind of used it as a placeholder as she built the costume. And then eventually, it was like, “Oh, this is perfect. What can we do?” And she took it home over the weekend, and her son, who liked to make molds and casts of things, molded it and cast it and made us multiples, too, and that’s what we used in the costume. It was really this whole family affair. It was really a beautiful moment to bring that in.

I love hearing about the different textures and materials that you make things out of. I know plants were obviously a big part of the Green Witch, and we had a lot of metals with Billy’s stuff. What would you say is the most interesting or surprising material that you worked with for one of these costumes?

Well, for the ghost Agatha costume, we wanted to figure out how we could level her up, because she dies and is reborn and given new life. And what is that new life? And how could Agatha maybe be liberated from the aesthetic or the self that she was carrying around when she was alive? And when she was reborn, I was like, “Well, what if she’s just energy and light and electricity?” Because we did so many of the effects practically in the show, we were always looking for ways to contribute to that as a costume department, and I said, “Well, what if we do practical lighting inside this costume?” 

So we worked with this company in Italy called Dreamlux, and they actually created fabric for us that was woven with fiber-optic threads in it — like glass fibers that could then have a light source and light it all up. So we created the pattern, we worked with them, then they made those fabrics to our patterns, and then we implemented that into the costume, and we hid batteries and light sources all on her back. So there are all these areas that are being hidden by that beautiful shawl, where she’s just loaded up with batteries and these super warm lights that are lighting up her skirt, and the whole bodice is lit from within.

In the art book you likened it to a stained glass window, which I thought was cool. That makes a lot of sense now that you’re describing how it actually worked. 

That was a very unusual material — a very unusual way to work — and very challenging because it was actually very delicate material. They were glass threads, and so we had to be like, “Don’t sit on that chair!”

I know that the pop culture witch costumes in Episode 7 were some of your favorites to work on. Alice and Rio were obviously not there, but I’m curious what you think would have been fun to dress them in if they were in that trial.

Oh, that’s a good question. I love that. Alice, I almost think she would be somewhere in the Studio Ghibli world. One of those iconic characters [Mary and the Witch’s Flower], I think she could probably embody. And then, for Rio…who’s green and messy and sloppy? Or Aubrey has such a wry sense of humor — what was the name of the rock guy from The NeverEnding Story? Who is the mountain? The boulder gobblers or whatever? [Rockbiter.] I think she could show up there. I would love to see Aubrey in a costume that’s super unwieldy and having to walk around on set.

I love that. There needs to be art. We will make someone draw those for us.

Yeah, that would be great.

I read that Lilia’s Road jacket was meant to be handed down through generations. This is a very specific question, but did you have in your mind who the original owner of it was, or who originally made that? I love the idea of history with her. 

When we talked about that, it was me, Jac Schaeffer, Mary Livanos, and my assistant designers, Christine Casaus and Maddison Carroll. We really thought back to her lineage and all of the women that came before her and her maestra — the teacher, the mentor that we meet in Episode 7 — who I think was maybe not necessarily a family member, but she was in that coven. I like to think that the jacket came from Lilia’s mother, and that came from her mother, so we’re thinking triple grandmothers back. I always like to think that they were adding to it — that it was sort of patchworked, and they were stitching their stories and their whole lifetime into it and then passing it to the next woman, the next witch.

I also really love her bar mitzvah outfit. It almost looks like a puffy quilt. What was that made out of, and can you tell me more about that? Because I am obsessed with it.

For sure. That was actually a really great vintage find. It’s a cocoon coat technically, and it is quilted. It’s like a gold metallic fabric that’s quilted, and it was a style from the ‘20s and ‘30s, but it was a reproduction from the ‘50s or ‘60s, really. There was a period of fashion in the ‘60s where they were sort of looking back into the ‘20s and ‘30s, and a lot of things were recreated, and so that’s when that coat was born. And we found it, and it just matched her color story, and it just felt really right with the way that it was embroidered, and it has this big, dramatic collar that she wore so well. It was one of those moments where you find this thing in a thrift store, and you’re like, “I can’t believe this is it. We’re using this.”

I read that Billy’s cape is a tribute to Wanda on the outside and Vision on the inside. Can you go into a little more detail about that? Because I thought that was a really cool way to pay homage.

When we were developing the cape and cloak for Wanda in WandaVision, it was a very complex design. It was a very intricate graphic pattern, and I remember thinking how sometimes cumbersome it was, and I didn’t want that to be the case because he’s a very slender guy. His character is not full superhero yet. So I wanted it to still feel like the teenage adolescent version of the superhero he could become and give the character somewhere to go. So the cloak is actually very narrow, as far as cloaks go and capes go, and so it wasn’t a ton of real estate. And so I thought, “Well, the last time we saw Wanda was in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” and what they did in that movie was take the graphic that we designed for WandaVision, and they abstracted it, and they gave it this sort of scattershot of it, as if the evil that she was embodying was sort of crackling that pattern. I really thought it turned out very beautifully, so I wanted to use that, so we grabbed that from the Doctor Strange vaults and applied that graphic to the outside. And then we recreated our own sort of simplified version of Vision’s cape, which is also equally beautiful and complex, and printed that on the inside, so it was a complex print of two graphics on one piece of fabric, but we figured it out.

I imagine there was so much research, from historical things to the occult. I’m curious what sources you used and what the most interesting fact you learned through this process was.

We did a lot of deep diving. We read a lot of accounts of different practices of the occult. In particular, I went back to Salem and the Northeast of North America in that period, because that’s really where we sort of pinpoint the beginning of Agatha’s life, and then I wanted to know what influenced that time and place in America. A lot of that was stories from the Netherlands and Norway and Sweden and the Norse mythologies and paganism. 

I do remember there was this one in particular — it’s not exactly of the occult, but it’s a very creepy visual reference for the Salem Seven — silhouette that is worn by women in the Azores, which is actually this island nation. They wear these, and it’s really for sun protection, big, dark dresses that have a large hood, and it’s sort of belted at the waist, and then the skirt portion. And that was really our jumping off point for figuring out the Salem Seven when they had their hoods up and figuring out that we could create a way that they would sort of break out of those, and that hood would become the top layer of the skirt. So that was actually from a real reference to a time and place, and then we made it our own. I just love these images of these women in the tropics, essentially wearing these black dresses.

You’ve talked a lot about designing the Road outfits for each character. Kind of a silly question, but what would your Witches’ Road outfit look like?

Mine?! Oh my gosh, no one’s ever asked me that. [Laughs] I feel like it would be something with a lot of pockets. 

Yes! Functionality! 

I always need so many pockets, and I would probably have some thick-soled boots so that, no matter what part of the Road — whether it’s swampy or sandy — your feet are protected. And definitely some kind of fabulous hat. I need a hat with a visor — maybe a veil — and some kind of voluminous scarf that I can wear as a belt or as a scarf or as a hat.

What does it feel like to see people cosplaying things you’ve made and even to see merchandise mass-manufactured?

Every time I see somebody wearing a costume, or I just saw somebody in the hallway here at Comic Con who has the most beautiful tattoo of Death and the Green Witch combination, it’s kind of like getting hit by this strong wind or something. I feel it in my body where it’s almost this blast of shock and disbelief and then pride, and I kind of tingle all over. It makes me so happy to know that my team and I created something that has lived on, and I think it will live on, and people are so jazzed about these characters that they want to wear them, they want to embody them, they want to put them on their bodies, which is the greatest compliment.

Do you remember the first time you ever saw someone in public cosplaying one of your costumes?

It was actually a couple of years after WandaVision, I went to LA Comic Con with my cousin. We were walking around on the floor, and someone was dressed as a Scarlet Witch, and I stopped her, and I was like, “Hey, I was the assistant designer on this costume!” And she couldn’t comprehend it. She was like, “What? What do you mean?” I had to really explain myself, so I wasn’t just this creepy guy stopping this person. I feel like I have a little more authority now.  [Laughs] But yeah, it was a trip. It was also a trip that I had to explain who I was because people don’t always know that there’s a costume designer behind the character, and so I think it’s both exciting and a little mystifying to have to convince people that this came from somewhere — this came from someone’s brain, this came from a group of people who got together to really make some choices and create this character that you are in love with.

This is a very nitty-gritty question, and I’m sure it’s out of your power to an extent, but people love that ring Agatha wears. I love that ring. A) Do you know if it might be manufactured somewhere, and B) Can you talk a little bit about choosing that?

That’s actually a vintage ring that I found one very sunny, sweaty Sunday at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena. I found a grip of really great jewelry there. I found Lilia’s earrings there as well, and I found that ring, and I thought, “Oh, this is really good. This is really kind of perfect.” But there was only one, which is really dangerous when you’re making a show. So I went to Russell Bobbitt, the prop master, and I was like, “Can we reproduce this ring?” And he so graciously took it on as a project and worked with a really fantastic jewelry maker outside of Atlanta, and we recreated it. We’ve made some alterations to it, so it’s really our own design at the end of the day. It’s not reproduced anywhere, but you know, maybe that’s the golden fleece to be chased forever.

I love so much that you highlight fan art on your Instagram and are very generous with speaking to fans. Why is that something you feel is important to do, and why is that something you enjoy doing? That’s not something you get in every fandom.

I was so surprised by the fan response. I didn’t fully expect it to be so boisterous and so robust a reaction. For me, making costumes is really about making wearable art. My greatest goal and intention with creating characters is really just to inspire other artists, and to then see the product of our inspiration coming at me in a deluge in my email of art that people are inspired to create, there is no greater gift as a costume designer for me. That is the biggest win beyond all awards. It’s why I do this. And so to reach out and connect with those fans and share their beautiful work, from things that are sort of rudimentary like crayon sketches to incredible masterpieces by artists that I admire, it’s a conversation. We make art, you get inspired by it; you make art, I get inspired by it. We pass that back and forth. That’s really what it’s about.

They’re all so amazing and touching, but is there a particular piece of art that sticks out in your mind?

There are so many. There are some really beautiful portraitures. There are a couple of Agathas, and there are a couple of Rio. There’s one that’s on my Instagram where there’s the stiletto heel poking in.

That one’s great.

[Laughs] I love that one, because it’s just such a good distillation of their dynamic and the femme and the power and the sex and the sort of antagonistic quality of their relationship. It’s chef’s kiss.

Agatha All Along is available to stream on Disney+ now.

— Taylor Gates