Marie Schley Created Yellowjackets' Antler Queen Costume—She Came Back to Finish the Job
Season 3 brings everything full circle, right back to that snowy hunt from the very first episode.
[Spoilers for Season 3 abound!]
Yellowjackets audiences have been waiting to learn the identity of the Antler Queen ever since the pilot premiered way back in November 2021—and in the Season 3 finale, we finally found out who wore the horns. That costume, somehow medieval and otherworldly, became an instantly iconic look so potent that almost a full year later it became a popular Halloween costume.
That look and the rest of the Yellowjackets (both adult and teen) came courtesy of costume designer Marie Schley. She returned for a handful of episodes at the end of Season 1, then came back for Season 3 to revisit the looks she created.
“I think one of the main reasons I came back for Season 3 was to tie it all together with the pilot,” Schley said in a recent interview in the aftermath of the finale. “We had several more [Yellowjackets] team members left over by the end of Season 3 [than were seen in the pilot], so we had to make quite a few more. It's a little bit of a puzzle.”
(For those who haven’t heard a single word about the zeitgeist-capturing Showtime series in the last three-and-a-half years: Yellowjackets unfolds in two timelines, one of which follows a group of soccer players stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash in the ‘90s and the other the adult versions of those teens, still grappling with their traumas and the occassional attack of bloodlust. Now! Back to Season 3.)
Revisiting the costumes from the first episode entailed working backwards for the costume department, but then the writers, too, had to fill in some blanks. And one of the most shocking was where, exactly, the tassels on the Antler Queen’s cape came from: the iconic Pit Girl from the pilot, whom we discover to be Mari in this episode.
“When we created that Antler Queen costume, we put that in 'cause it looked cool,” Schley said. “And there was a lot of discussion about, ‘Well, what is the hair?’ And we kind of left it open, so the writers had to write backwards into it. Then we had to figure out how they could put the hair on, which was another thing that took us a little bit of time.”
Ultimately, Schley and her team landed on attaching the tassels to bits of bone that stick into poles within the cape, while the onscreen embellishment of the garment becomes a ceremonial moment. Nothing like sewing your murdered teammate’s hair into your terrifying leader’s cape to really bond a group.
That team-building exercise was a far cry from earlier in Season 3, when the girls had finally reached summer and no longer had to worry about freezing to death. “I knew that we were gonna end on the feast scene from the pilot,” Schley said. “So we wanted that first episode to have a summer solstice vibe. It was supposed to have a witchy look to it, a much more uniform look, because they've come together and created a community. And then as the season goes on, it degrades into more animalistic.”
Schley has long proven herself particularly adept at tracing how wardrobe can mark a character’s personal growth; she won an Emmy Award for her work on Transparent and handled costume design duties on everything from Season 2 of Minx to the pilot of The Americans (talk about designing an instantly iconic look).
Her work on this season of Yellowjackets is particularly impressive as the storylines grow increasingly complicated in both timelines, where clothes must act as easy identifiers, even if those identifiers are red herrings. “Talking with the showrunners [while working on the pilot], I was like, ‘It'd be great to establish the pink sneakers. We need to establish this pink raincoat because we know it's gonna be in the [hunt]. We need to establish a sweater that we know is gonna be a mask,’” Schley said. “And the pink raincoat was something that the pilot director, Karyn [Kusama], wanted. Everything has to be a little bit teen girl, a little bit wild, you know? So there are things that we established as Easter eggs in the beginning that now we get to finally reveal to the audience.”
One of those is, of course, the veil on the Antler Queen’s crown. “[That’s] like a ’90s knit dress made out of silver thread,” Schley said. “So we remade that, and Lottie is wearing it as her priestess garb throughout the season. She goes into the caves in it, and she has bones and little talismans attached to it. I wanted it to be there so we could see it [gradually] being made into the veil, if you're paying attention.”
That attention is also rewarded when it comes to the adult Yellowjackets, still embroiled in infighting and murder all these decades later. (If only some of them had made it out of New Jersey!) That Misty wears Natalie’s leather jacket in the aftermath of her death was in the script, but it was Christina Ricci’s idea to wear it throughout the season. And just as Misty’s clothes indicate some personal growth (albeit one that still relies on kitten sweaters), Taissa’s clothes trended more towards Dark Taissa. “Her style changes a little bit this season,” Schley said. “Season 1, she wore a lot of dresses, and last season she was wearing [her lover] Van’s clothes. This season, she is very much Dark Tai, and she's a little more streetwear. She has this black leather trench she wears a lot, which is sort of the evil version of the trench she wears in the beginning.”
And after three seasons, Schley was also on hand to dress the debut of a new adult Yellowjacket. Melissa first grabbed our attention in Season 2 when she declared that “it would be disrespectful to the wilderness to waste it” (“it” being Crystal’s dead body), but she really distinguished herself this season as Shauna’s devout follower and only confidante. Then she finally showed up as an adult in Episode 8.
Played by Jenna Burgess in the wilderness and Hilary Swank in the present day, Melissa’s presence comes as a shock to Shauna since she faked her own death—yet it needed to be plausible that Shauna could still recognize her decades later. And yes, sometimes that’s as easy as establishing a penchant for backwards baseball caps.
“The important tie-in factor was that baseball cap that she wears,” Schley said. “So we made up that she was a Little League softball coach, and we had that on her hat just to kind of mirror the wilderness.
“I mean, listen, we've all been to our high school reunions,” she added with a laugh. “And I can't recognize anybody, and no one can recognize me.” Of course, most reunions don’t involve biting off and then spitting out a hunk of a classmate’s flesh, but that’s Yellowjackets. And we’d want nothing less.
Marie Schley’s credits include Transparent (Emmy Award), Minx Season 2, I Love Dick, Neighbors, and Sorry for Your Loss. (This short list is representative of nothing but my own idiosyncratic fandom.) Her go-to at craft services is “always chocolate. Always. And a nice iced coffee.”