Tiffany × Frankenstein: The Alchemy
of Creation

Client

Tiffany & Co.For Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein on Netflix

Film

Tiffany & Co. × Frankenstein4:34, released 7 October 2025

Shot

4 and 5 February 2025Two days inside Tiffany & Co. in New York

Sets

The Tiffany Archives, stagedThen the Jewelry Design and Innovation Workshop

With

Kate HawleyCostume designer, with Christopher Young

RIOT

Direction, production, stillsPost-production by Netflix and Tiffany

Art transcends time. It bridges past and present, creator and dreamer, and somewhere between light and shadow, that connection endures.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein arrives like a storm long promised: a world where creation, love, and ruin are cut and set with a stonecutter’s precision. Tiffany & Co. steps in not as ornament but as living history, two centuries of craft, archive, and alchemy made visible on screen. Heritage pieces glimmer, Elizabeth’s cross becomes a pulse, and the film stitches 19th-century memory to a modern, macabre romance.

Before the release, Tiffany asked RIOT to film the making of it. We directed and shot two days inside Tiffany in New York with Kate Hawley, the film’s costume designer, and Christopher Young, Tiffany’s Vice President Creative Director. Netflix and Tiffany cut the film below from our footage and their own.

Tiffany & Co.•Netflix•4:34•2025

Crossed destinies

Our treatment, written in January 2025, had a name before it had a frame: Crossed Destinies, a journey of women and timeless creation. Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. Meta Overbeck, a pioneer of Tiffany design who worked alongside Louis Comfort Tiffany. Kate Hawley, weaving archival treasures into modern cinematic art. And one object to carry all three: the cross Elizabeth wears through the film.

Inside the archives

Long before cameras rolled on Frankenstein, we were already inside Tiffany’s history, shoulder to shoulder with their archivists, reimagining how the past could breathe again. We knew the archives weren’t a museum; they were a pulse, a living organism waiting for light. So together, we built one. On 4 February the library on the 14th floor of Tiffany’s headquarters became the Tiffany Archives for a day, designed, lit, and styled so that every surface, every gemstone, every whisper of heritage would sing on screen.

The library

The 14th-floor library in Tiffany’s survey photos, January 2025.

The archive

The same room as the archive we built: stained glass, lamps and books glowing like memory under our light.

Bare shelves

The library shelves in Tiffany’s January survey.

The archive

On the day: Tiffany lamps and archive pieces, with Christopher Young and Kate Hawley.

The window

The arched window in the survey.

Stained glass

Dressed for the shoot with stained glass and Tiffany lamps.

Kate Hawley stepped into that world like an archaeologist of beauty. Around her, the pieces hummed: Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glass, Meta Overbeck’s sketches, scarab necklaces glowing under our light. Christopher Young brought out the pieces. We gave her a world to explore, a space that looked and felt like memory itself.

Elizabeth’s cross

Elizabeth wears a cross through the whole film. Kate found its shape in period portraits, where women often wore one, and then in the archive, where a simple crucifix became many things: jeweled crosses, crosses in enamel with pearls, a green tourmaline she loved. The piece that gave it a heart came last. Going through the archive, she was shown drawings by Meta Overbeck, and in one of them a scarab sitting on a stone. Laid over the design, it changed the character of the cross.

Then the craft took its turn. Kate learned Tiffany’s language as she went, how the stone is always the focus, how the prongs are there to catch the light and not only to hold the stone, and the cross changed with it. “Sometimes the process also defines the design,” she told us.

The workshop

Before the light hit glass, before the jewels met silk, there was the steady rhythm of creation. On 5 February we moved into Tiffany’s Jewelry Design and Innovation Workshop: the benches, a 3D scan, the CAD review, and Kate choosing stones for the cross with Christopher and the workshop’s designers. Tiffany’s artisans worked with the precision of poets and the delicacy of surgeons.

We documented the small miracles: the filing, engraving, and setting of stones that would become part of the film’s living world. Every spark, every reflection, every echo of a tool against metal spoke to a truth we’ve always chased. Creation itself is the real spectacle.

Behind the camera

Two directors of photography, Mark Sherman in the archive and Sam Kretchmar in the workshop, with Richard Shelton on a second camera and Jonathan Hokklo on stills. The day started at eight and the talent arrived at eleven, so every set was lit and waiting.

A legacy immortalized

In the end, it always comes back to light. A shimmer caught on glass. The reflection of a life’s work in the edge of a gemstone. Tiffany’s story has never been about adornment; it’s about creation as an act of remembrance. To make something beautiful is to keep something alive.

Jonathan Hokklo’s stills went to Netflix, and one of them is in the film’s companion book, Frankenstein: Written and Directed by Guillermo del Toro: Christopher Young and Kate Hawley at the archive table, on the spread about the scarab beetle necklace.

In January 2026 Tiffany came back for more of the workshop footage, including a timelapse of a piece being 3D printed. And when Kate Hawley won the Oscar for Best Costume Design for Frankenstein in March 2026, the same two days gave us a film of our own, The First Part Is the Dreaming, released the next morning.

Frankenstein isn’t a monster story; it’s a maker’s story. A reminder that every act of creation carries both danger and devotion. And somewhere between the flicker of a candle and the hum of a camera, that truth found its light again.

ServicesCreative Direction·Concept Development·Scripting·Brand Storytelling·Art Direction·Set Design·Film Production·Branded Content·Editorial Photography·Portrait Photography·BTS Photography