Euphoria costume – As Euphoria returned for its third and final season in 2026, costume designer Natasha Newman-Thomas had to translate a 2019 high school world into fully grown adult identities—building costumes around what each character lived through over the show’s four-year
When Euphoria premiered in 2019. it was a high school drama—glamour dialed up. styles in formation. characters still figuring out who they wanted to be. By the time it returned for its third and final season in 2026, the main characters were fully grown adults. That time jump wasn’t just a plot device. It was a wardrobe mandate.
Costume designer Natasha Newman-Thomas described the challenge during IndieWire’s Craft Roundtables. explaining that the Season 3 costume design process was tightly linked to the show’s storytelling. She collaborated with showrunner Sam Levinson and spent time figuring out what everyone had spent the past four years doing—so the clothes wouldn’t just look different. they’d feel specific to the identities the characters had formed.
“I read the first several scripts, and then Sam and I put a whole day aside during preproduction to just dream together and talk about what happened in those five years and how it would inform their new identities as young adults,” Newman-Thomas said.
In her telling, that “dream together” day wasn’t about sketching garments in isolation. It was about translating time into texture—what people wore because of where they went, who influenced them, and what they learned along the way.
Newman-Thomas pointed to Maude Apatow’s Lexi and Zendaya’s Rue as clear examples of how her approach centered on character detail. For Lexi, she described the look as a progression.
“Lexi felt like the natural progression,” she said. “She probably went to liberal arts college and got really into vintage because someone told her how bad fast fashion into the environment. And then she figured ‘Oh, I can express my individualism by buying pieces that nobody else can find.’”
Rue, meanwhile, required a different kind of costume logic. Newman-Thomas framed Rue as more chameleon than cornerstone—clothes shifting alongside the worlds she entered.
“In my mind. she is just kind of collecting things wherever she goes and assimilates into that world. ” Newman-Thomas said of Rue. “In Mexico, she wears shirts she found in the bar there. When she’s in Laurie’s world, it’s a little more workwear-adjacent. But it’s always very subtle, because you don’t want to feel a big emotional shift.”.
The through-line is clear in the choices she outlined: each character’s wardrobe reads like a record of time spent away from the original setting—grown up, yes, but not flattened into a single adult aesthetic.
IndieWire’s Craft Roundtables are now streaming on the PBS App.
Euphoria Natasha Newman-Thomas Craft Roundtables PBS App Sam Levinson Maude Apatow Lexi Zendaya Rue costume design Season 3 2026