How fashion became the star of the show on Killing Eve

You can tell a TV villain has made their mark on popular culture if they become a Halloween costume. This week, for every Trumpian wig or handmaid’s bonnet seen at a Halloween party, there was a giant pink dress based on the one worn by the assassin Villanelle, Killing Eve’s antihero.

It has become impossible to talk about the BBC’s eight-part hit – the final instalment of which airs on BBC One on Saturday – without talking about the clothes. Yes, the pink organza dress by Molly Goddard worn with black Balenciaga boots in episode three that subsequently broke the internet, but also what was to come.

Each week we have devoured the fashions. See the Dries Van Noten suit worn by Villanelle to murderous ends in Berlin, or the girlish Paige denim cut-offs worn to shimmy up a drainpipe in Tuscany. And then there is Eve, the brilliant MI5 operative whose ineptness when it comes to getting dressed is partly what attracts the assassin. The green scarf that becomes a prized trophy, the scene-stealing jumper-attached-to-the-shirt and then, of course, the monochrome Roland Mouret one planted in her suitcase, which flipped the power between hunter and hunted. Clothing repels and attracts them, leaving Villanelle torn between trying to hunt her and style her.

Based on the novellas by the journalist Luke Jennings, Killing Eve follows Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), a semi-happily married desk-based MI5 operative searching for the young assassin played by Jodie Comer. It begins with ice cream, a Lanvin dress and a murder in Vienna, but as the body count goes up, so too do the costume changes.

“Fashion is used as Villanelle dresses carefully for her kills. It’s important to her, part of the ritual,” explains Jennings. Jennings had sent a Pinterest board to the producer and writer, Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge, suggesting everything from bridge card rooms to Russian fur hats. It all goes back to the books. In one of the narratives, she murders a mafia boss in “a silk Valentino dress”. In another she wears Vivienne Tam to murder a Chinese hacker. Jennings describes Villanelle’s aesthetic as “goofy couture”, and Eve’s as “defined by her incompetence at shopping”.

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