West and Villeneuve began discussing this new direction while she was in London working on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, speaking almost daily before she arrived in Budapest for production. Their three-movie creative partnership is now a well-oiled operation. West begins with the script, followed by long conversations about how Villeneuve imagines each character’s psychological development. From there, she works with her concept artist to develop ideas, bringing sketches and references back to the director.
There has remained an overarching philosophy to the way West dresses the Dune universe. Early in the project, she coined the term “modieval”—a marriage of modern and medieval—to describe the world they wanted to create. Villeneuve, she recalls, was adamant that the designs should remain grounded in reality instead of relying on the conventions of the sci-fi futurist aesthetic. West found her guiding principle in an observation she attributes to Frank Herbert: “to imagine the distant future, look to the ancient past.”
For Part Three, however, even that concept required some reconsideration. “I’ve kept that principle as a flashcard,” she says, “but the story gets darker, and then there’s a redemption. I had to switch from that medieval sense to something almost Renaissance-like. My references got a little more modern in this one.” Her inspirations have expanded to include the paintings of Francisco Goya, the ecclesiastical imagery of the early papacy, Etruscan and North African tribal dress, and the sculptural sartorial language of Cristóbal Balenciaga.
Nowhere is this passage of time more apparent than in Paul Atreides. The young, reluctant messiah of the earlier films has become an all-powerful emperor, haunted by the consequences of his own reign. “With power came enormous guilt,” says West. “He carries the weight of the world on his shoulders.” To communicate this, she turned to the reclusive figure of Howard Hughes, imagining Paul alone at the summit of the Citadel of Arrakis just as Hughes once isolated himself in a Las Vegas hotel suite. West translated that psychological heaviness into robes constructed from substantial fabrics, rich leather, and embroidery.
For Zendaya’s Chani, the approach was almost the opposite. “She’s the moral compass of the story. She’s kept all of her wits about her, along with her wardrobe,” West explains. Now an established leader, warrior, and mother, Chani remains connected to her Fremen heritage through the more traditional stillsuit. That continuity makes the development of the film’s other stillsuits more striking. One of the most ambitious technical undertakings of Part Three was a redesign of the desert survival garment, which West and her team have made more body-conscious. The original suits featured extensive external tubing and multiple visible layers, while the new versions have a scuba-diving quality, with molded acrylic components sitting closely against the body.
