‘Euphoria’ Costume Designer Natasha Newman-Thomas Explains How a Four-Year Gap Impacted Everyone’s Sense of Style — Watch

When “Euphoria” premiered in 2019, it was a high school drama. When it returned for its third and final season in 2026, all of its main characters were fully grown adults. That time jump created an interesting challenge for costume designer Natasha Newman-Thomas, who had to figure out how to adapt everyone’s style from the glamorous homogeny of high school into the adult world where everyone has a (slightly) better sense of who they are.

During IndieWire’s Craft Roundtables, Newman-Thomas explained that the “Euphoria” Season 3 costume design process was deeply intertwined with the show’s larger storytelling. She collaborated with showrunner Sam Levinson to figure out what everyone had spent that past four years doing, which allowed her to dress each character with more specificity.

“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,” she said.

She cited Maude Apatow’s Lexi and Zendaya’s Rue as two specific examples of her character-driven costuming process.

“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.'”

She went on to explain that Rue has always been more of a chameleon whose clothes reflect the people she currently spends time with — though the team had to be careful not to overdo that effect.

“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.”

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