Bitchin'.
That really is the perfect word to describe Eleven's (Millie Bobby Brown) new look in Stranger Things season two.
After six episodes spent cooped up in Hopper's (David Harbour), donning mostly huge plaid shirts and overalls, episode seven, "The Lost Sister," focused solely on Eleven's day out, in which she headed out to Pittsburgh to find out more about her past. Once there, she met up with Kali aka Eight (Linnea Berthelsen), her "sister," spending time with her group of punk misfit bandits. In the process, the gang gave Eleven a punk makeover, complete with oversized blazer (with the sleeves rolled up, natch), a ripped t-shirt, and a bandanna wrapped around her wrist.
Kim Wilcox, the Netflix hit's new costume designer for season two, talked to E! News' about the inspiration for Eleven's new punk look, and working with Millie Bobby Brown, a new style icon in the making, to achieve the right outfit.
"What I wanted to do was find something that would be slightly more pop culture but still punk," Wilcox said of her goal with Eleven's episode seven outfit. "If you remember in the '80s, Madonna was famous for wearing these blazers, rolling up the sleeves and popping the collar. Madonna stole that from the punks, so it's kind of a hand-me-down already."
The hand-me-down theme made sense for Wilcox, who reasoned Eleven would be getting the clothes from Eight or one of the members of her misfit gang. Still, Eleven is able to add a bit of her own quirkiness to the look. (Hi, socks!)
"They help her figure out how you wear it so it's cool and then she wears them with her socks," she explained. "She's becoming part of the tribe, but she's doing it in her own way."
The main search was for the blazer Eleven ended up wearing, as Wilcox knew they wanted to go with a strong jacket.
"We definitely tried a few different kind of jackets on and this was the one that definitely spoke the most to us," she said. "It made a lot of sense for her. The thing about that jacket is it feels a lot older than it is. We needed something that we felt like, in the '80s, when you were looking in the thrift store and your parents' closet, the things you thought were cool was from the '60s. So if you were thrifting, that's what you would pick. So we wanted something that actually felt much older than the ‘80s, but that would make sense for her."
Funnily enough, the jacket wasn't vintage: "It's actually a modern jacket that we aged."
As for Millie Bobby Brown, a recent red carpet darling, she was "really excited that she was going to have a new look" in season two, after donning mostly a hospital gown, a pink dress and a plaid shirt in most of the previous episodes. "She came in and she was like, 'I get to do something different today!' The iconic pink dress is great, but she wore it for so long, so this season, she and I had fun just...let's throw on a bunch of clothes and see what works."
Part of the fun of styling Eleven is that her outfit "doesn't always have to make sense because she doesn't really know how other little girls dress."
When it came to her punk makeover, Brown "really liked it," Wilcox said. "When we found the right thing, she was like, ‘Yeah, this is cool.'"
Or bitchin', as Eleven would say.
To hear more about the new punk element in season two, watch our interview with Linnea Berthelsen (aka Eight!), above.
Stranger Things season 2 is now available to stream on Netflix.