How Costumer Vera West Took on Hollywood’s Monsters
- Macy Berendsen
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
West, behind the looks for Dracula and The Bride of Frankenstein, birthed a new idiom in fashion horror — but was largely forgotten by history.
Before horror had its icons — the Bride, the Mummy, Dracula’s countess — it had Vera West. The Universal Studios designer draped terror in beauty, crafting the silhouettes that would define monsters for generations and laid the visual language of the horror genre. Her work still haunts Halloween costumes to this day, even though her name and legacy have been eclipsed by her mysterious death.
West was born in New York City in 1897. After graduating from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design), she migrated to New York and designed dresses for a fashion salon on Fifth Avenue. After finding herself in Hollywood in the 1920s, for reasons that are as mysterious as the films she worked on, West rose to prominence and assumed the role of chief costume executive at Universal Pictures. It’s important to note, here, that many details of West’s life are lost to time — we may never know why she fled to Hollywood, nor the granular bits and pieces of her personal life, but we do know one thing for certain: how her spirit appeared in her indelible work.
During her time at Universal, West designed costumes for almost 400 films, a majority falling in the horror genre. From the 1930s to the 1940s, West’s work can be seen in Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Phantom of the Opera (1943), among many other classics.
West designed for the female principal roles while costuming for Universal, which included lots of “damsel in distress”-coded characters, who were often seen draped across the arms of a male actor, but also included dynamic female roles like the Bride of Frankenstein, made iconic by her striking bolt of white hair. Elsa Lancaster, the actress who played the Bride in 1935, was draped in white surgical gowns and bandaged opera gloves. This look is perhaps West’s most popular legacy on horror fashion, reminiscent of 1940s utility and wartime-inspired looks.
It’s almost as if West’s costuming for Lancaster helped predict women’s fashion in the 1940s as the United States entered its wartime era. Although no one was walking around in surgical gowns and bandaged gloves, women were wearing structured, coordinated outfits that were sharp and utilitarian, accessorized by stylized gloves.
The Bride of Frankenstein costume has been replicated and referenced hundreds of times in popular culture, becoming synonymous with the character itself. In 2022, Kylie Jenner wore a copycat look of West’s monster design for Halloween.
The 1930s were defined by bias cuts and elongated silhouettes in women’s dresses. In the 1931 version of Frankenstein, Mae Clarke, who played Elizabeth, was exclusively dressed in white throughout the film. Her bridal gown in this film, designed by West, echoed these popular 1930s trends and drove the high-end bridal design, transitioning them into the shadowy corners of horror. Clarke’s dress was so popular and favored by audiences that it was replicated in department stores.
Lots of West’s costumes could be categorized as glamorous formal dresses or silky lace-trimmed nightwear. Helen Chandler, who played Mina Seward in Dracula (1931), is seen in one of West’s biggest successes in film sleepwear. Chandler’s costume is soft and romantic, a complete contrast to her monster co-star. The chemise slip lightly grazes the body, instead of constricting it. The dropped waistline and straight cut are distinct features of 1920s fashion elements. Her overlay jacket consists of long, flowy sleeves that emphasize a ghostly fluidity to Chandler’s role.
This boudoir-inspired costuming can be seen in more of West’s sleepwear, like The Wolf Man (1940) and The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). Although West didn’t have a defining, recognizable, overarching aesthetic to her designs like some other designers, sleepwear was definitely one of her strong suits. The She-Wolf of London (1946) is a prime example of West’s sleepwear expertise, featuring more modest sleeping attire than Dracula, but still expertly crafted and elegant.
West, along with makeup artist Jack Pierce, created what would become the blueprint for monster aesthetics — an intricate blend of the grotesque monster and the glamorous damsel. West’s costuming transformed archetypes of fear into icons of style, her use of draped fabrics and elegance lending the unsettling horror an unexpected beauty. Pierce’s transformative makeup techniques and hair styling completed the vision, fusing fashion and fantasy in a way that still resonates as inspiration today. Before the CGI era, Pierce was crafting monster features by hand out of cotton and putty, instead of latex, to create realistic and haunting monsters. He used yak hair and shoe polish on Frankenstein to enhance his gruesome nature, as well as putty across the skull to create a distinctive flat forehead. Although his techniques were later surpassed by newer methods, Pierce set the design standard for creating distinguishable characters by hand for the screen, leaving no detail untouched, making sure that the fantasy was as believable as possible.
Modern brands like Christopher Kane and Viktor and Rolf have taken inspiration from West and Pierce on the runway, referencing the gothic romanticism and striking color and silhouette combinations. Viktor and Rolf’s FW13 Ready-to-Wear collection is filled with dark, gaunt looks, enhanced by distinct silhouettes and intentional draping. Christopher Kane’s SS13 collection features actual screen-printed images of Frankenstein on tops, jackets, and bottoms. Both brands have drawn from the original creators of horror monsters for inspiration.
West’s story, once marked by the glimmer of ambition, took on a darker legend in its final chapter. One morning in June of 1947, she was found lifeless in her swimming pool on Bluebell Avenue by Robert Landry, a photographer living in West’s guest house. Scattered nearby were notes hinting at a secret that had shadowed her for decades: claims of blackmail that stretched across twenty years.
“This is the only way. I am tired of being blackmailed,” West wrote in a potential suicide note. “The fortune teller told me there was only one way to duck the blackmail I’ve paid for twenty-three years… death.”
West was alone at the time of her death. Her husband, Jack West, was out of town, following a quarrel the couple had the night before West’s death. During this fight, West threatened her husband with a divorce. Decades later, the circumstances of West’s death remain a mystery. Conspiracy theories and whispered rumors persist, each attempting to explain what happened to such a prolific, though arcane Hollywood artist. In the fixation on her death, rather than her work, much of her legacy has been obscured — the artistry of the woman who dared to challenge her era’s sartorial definitions of power and femininity has been lost to time.
The media coverage following West’s death was plentiful for a few days, but suddenly, the information on West, both pre- and post-death, seemed to stop. In 1947, West’s husband had their Bluebell Avenue home destroyed not long after his late wife’s death.
After her time at Universal and shortly before her death, West opened her own boutique in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, catering to celebrities and the upper class. What could’ve been if West had lived? Maybe a new trend in wedding gowns, evening attire, or sleepwear, but, like West, that remains a mystery.
In many ways, Vera West was doing for horror what Schiaparelli and Vionnet were doing for couture — taking familiar silhouettes and pushing them into the realm of the surreal. Though her life ended in mystery, her designs endure, and her fingerprints show. She may be a ghost in the annals of fashion history, but her work remains vividly alive. 🌀
Macy Berendsen is a writer based in Chicago. More of her work can be found at macyberendsen.com.