The Fairest of All
On Disney villains, the wicked woman, bodycon, and glamour: a quick dive into Marc Webb’s (2025) Snow White live-action remake. While all is fair in love and war, fairness and beauty themselves wage a war for power. The site of their battlefield? The heavily contoured human flesh.
Gal Gadot (Evil Queen) on the set of Disney’s Snow White (2025). Tight silhouette, intense makeup, colourful rectangular jewels, and matching manicure chisel her character into the female villain archetype. Available via Instagram, @sarahbrockmua. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
There seems to be a continuous persistence across various Disney productions to encase the main female antagonist in a tight suit. More often than not, the outfit is marked by an angular silhouette and dominantly dark undertones. Whether the villain possesses the frame of a praying mantis, or whether she exemplifies the voluptuous Rubens ideal, her body is squeezed into a cocoon of mischievous suggestibility and nocturnal vibrance. Think of Angelina Jolie as Maleficent (Maleficent, 2014), Mellissa McCarthy as Ursula (The Little Mermaid, 2023), and, most recently – Gal Gadot as Evil Queen (Snow White, 2025). The latter is probably the most extreme illustration yet, with nearly every inch of the sovereign’s limbs and torso hugged by bodycon dress, long sleeves, collars, and headdress.
In Marc Webb’s live-action remake of the Grimms classic, the sleek LBD aesthetic is a signature of power, confidence, and opulence. Sandy Powell – the acclaimed British costume designer whose works we know from The Young Victoria (2009) and Cinderella (2015) – reconstructed the Evil Queen’s wardrobe from the zeitgeist of Disney’s classical era. “[The original animation] was based on the fashions of the time”, she tells HelloMagazine, “and the reference for that was the 1930s Golden Age of Hollywood, with figure-hugging, bias-cut dresses with sequins. It’s a simple, strong look and not a million miles from a medieval shape”. The intended effect, adds Powell in an interview with People, is that of glamour, sophistication, and intimidation.
Sandy Powell designed the costumes for Webb’s (2025) Snow White. To dress the Queen, Powell relied on references to medieval and 1930s Hollywood shapes and fabrics: long sleeves, flared capes, shimmering textiles, and sequins. Available via HelloMagazine. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
The Evil Queen’s outfit, having something art-nouveau about the stained-glass crown and something serpentine about the scaly shimmer dress, calls forth the ghosts of silver screen goddesses of the 1930s, but also insinuates some kind of devilish, primeval Eve-like fallenness. A rottenness of the luscious apple, plump and dewy on the outside, but poisoned –corrupt, somehow – just underneath the peel. This corruption shines forth most brightly (forgive the oxymoron) when the Queen insists on a causal relationship between beauty, power, and perfection. “All is fair when you’re the fairest of all”, she spits in the hunter’s face during a musical interlude. Sexualised contours of the dancing, performing female body, the corseted exposure of curve and fissure – the fairness – are tantamount to the justification of authoritarian, plutocratic rule. The Queen asserts her beauty, her sexuality, and her majesty by positing that what people want is not something transient and perishable like kindness, but something adamant, refined, and rigid like… well, like herself.
And we learn who she is sooner than we know it. Even before the Queen’s character can be fully appraised by the viewer, she is first and foremost an impression. She is a skilfully architectured, styled, made up, laced, collared, starched, bejewelled, bodyconned, balaclava-ed, manicured worm of extremism and ambition (maybe careerism?). Eaten up by an idée fixe, perhaps even driven by a gendered competition with ‘a man’s world’, the Queen’s physical margins grow tighter and tighter around her, eventually sucking all humanity into mere silhouette, mere shadow of existence.
This gives one pause and makes one wonder about the links of association between tight-fitting black clothes and the ‘naughty women’ of cinematic fairy tales. It makes one wonder whether hyperbolically accentuated femininity is necessarily indicative of a perversion of some kind. Whether this kind of style is translated into a viral stereotype of the uptight, bitchy perfectionist. Whether confidence comes at the cost of compassion, and whether glamour comes at the cost of genuineness. If popularised formulaic dress codes of this kind remain constant, the cocooned matriarch might very well solidify into a symbol of feminine venom.
