Kate Hawley:
The First Part
Is the Dreaming

Film

The First Part Is the DreamingA RIOT original

With

Kate HawleyCostume designer, Frankenstein

Runtime

1:50Directed by MUG5

Filmed

February 2025Tiffany & Co., New York

Released

March 2026The morning after the Academy Awards

Dedication

For Kateand the artists who still dream

Before the fittings and the fabric and the hundred decisions a costume is made of, there is a quieter part that nobody sees. Kate Hawley calls it the dreaming.

Kate Hawley designed the costumes for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and in March 2026, at the 98th Academy Awards, she won the Oscar for it. The next morning we released a film we had been carrying for a year: not a making-of, not an awards-season accessory, but a two-minute portrait of the artist in her own words. We made it for her, and for everyone who recognizes the part of the work she describes.

A RIOT original•Portrait film•1:50•2026

An ode, not a behind the scenes

The conversation at the heart of the film was recorded in February 2025, in the library at Tiffany & Co. in New York, while we were filming the story of the jewelry Tiffany made for Frankenstein. Kate sat with her boards behind her, Elizabeth’s cross and the sketches pinned around a dress form, and talked. Most of what she said was about the film and the jewels, and that was the job. Some of it was Kate Hawley on time, on silence, on instinct, on the fear and the privilege of beginning. We held on to those minutes, and a year later, long after the shoot was delivered, we cut them into a film of their own.

A shared language

She begins with where she comes from. A mother who gave her children fairy stories, always the darkest, grimmest ones. A father who sang opera, so the heightened world was always there. When she first met del Toro, she says, it was her books he responded to, and the years in theatre and opera, and he told her they could work together because they had a shared language.

The film lets her say it against the things she was looking at that day. The Medusa itself, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s necklace, out of its case under a leaded-glass lamp. Beside it, the old Louis Comfort Tiffany volume whose plate was, until the necklace resurfaced, the only image of it anyone knew. And the shelves of a library that smells of a century.

Time, silence, trust

Then the line that named the film. The first part of the process is the dreaming: to sit with a script, alone, without noise or interruption, and be given the time for certain things to emerge. It is an argument for a kind of patience the industry rarely grants, and she makes it quietly.

From there she reaches for a first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and for Shelley herself, a woman in that period who persevered and had to find a way to voice her own artistic self among enormous male personalities. The portrait widens there, almost without meaning to, into a film about women in art and the persistence it takes to protect your own voice.

The rawness and the imperfect

Everyone, she says, can look at the same image on a table or a wall and see something different. She calls herself an instinctive, organic designer, reliant on feeling, and then says the thing the film is really about: that it is the rawness and the imperfect qualities that make her who she is. We cut it over her hands in the fabric, the greens and the crimsons, the moment the material starts to answer back.

New York at dusk

The film ends outside. Kate in a scarf, walking through Midtown as the lights come on, looking up. Over it she wonders what you follow Guillermo and Frankenstein with, says she is not sure, and that she feels she is in a position of great privilege. Then a last line, almost to herself: looking back, she has had some really wonderful moments. The picture goes to black and a single sentence holds: For Kate, and the artists who still dream.

The morning after

We approached The First Part Is the Dreaming like a small art film rather than a promo: textured, intimate, cut to her cadence, with nothing to sell. Its date was decided for us. On the night of 15 March 2026 Kate Hawley won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, and on the morning of the 16th we put the film into the world, so that the first thing people found when they went looking for her was not a podium but the dreaming.

ServicesCreative Direction·Concept Development·Brand Storytelling·Film Production·Editing·Color Grading·Sound Design·BTS Photography