Throughout the movie, the vengeful Victorian barber (Johnny Depp) literally gets blood on his sleeve – again and again and again. Atwood ended up making 25 shirts, eight pairs of paints and seven waistcoats for Depp. “The big thing was where was [the blood] going and how are we going to get it off,” Atwood says. “On the days – as we got used to saying – we had a kill, we had the people that ran the shirts up to the washers, the people on set taking care of the people, buckets of towels, changing booths, mini showers set up. We got really good at it.”

Her Sweeney Todd costumes are beautifully conceived and can inspire Lolitas of all stripes. For the Gothic girls, we have Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who bakes the barber’s victims into meat pies. She wears black shoulder-baring dresses with tiers of ruffles on her backside; her frazzled hair is swept in a Mana-like up-do; her skin is ashen with sooty smudges under the eyes. Atwood explains that the darkness is authentic to the time: “When you went out on the streets, it was really dirty, so I wanted to add that layer of grubbiness.”

Sweet Lolitas can relate to Lucy, the barber’s virtuous wife, with her pink and white princess dresses and blonde ringlets. Her daughter, Johanna, wears blue empire-waist dresses in the vein of a Classic Lolita. There’s even something for Sailor Lolis. In the hilarious dream sequence “By the Sea,” Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett unwind in elaborate Victorian beachwear. (Depp doesn’t seem pleased with his cute, full-body, horizontally striped bathing suit.)

I fell head over heels for Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. [Merci Ronan pour le recommendation!] The Golden Compass (the first book in his trilogy and our favorite) takes place in a steampunk society where Victorian fashions and ultramodern technologies coincide.

On December 7, New Line will release the film adaptation of The Golden Compass, starring Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman, and Eva Green. How I envy costume designer Ruth Myers! She tells the LA Times that her work was “the most incredible fun […] We really pushed all the boundaries to create a world that looks familiar, but unfamiliar.” Like Gothic Lolitas and Aristocrats, she takes cues from past eras: Victorian, Edwardian, the Roaring Twenties, the New Look ’40s. Her team created over 600 outfits in-house, opting for inexpensive and unusual materials, such as faux fur and burnt/painted velvet.

When Myers first showed her drawings to Pullman, the author was silent… and then told her, “You have created my world.” From what I’ve seen, she certainly has (take a look at photos here and here.) Myers makes astute choices; a less imaginative designer might have put Lord Asriel in sweeping robes and capes, but she styles him as a professor with three-piece suits, which makes his character more compelling. Lyra, the rambunctious 11-year-old heroine, “makes a complete journey and it was a question of where to start her and where to finish her.” In the first film, she is still very much a little girl. Myers outfits her in Lolita-esque dresses and winter coats with shirred sleeves, high lace collars, and empire waistlines. The images above show the evolution from sketch and fabric swatch to final costume.