Costume designer Colleen Atwood undertook this re-imaging and updating of the classic “Snow White” costume for the 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, where Kristen Stewart wore it as Snow White.

When designing, Atwood wanted to keep the classic puffy fairy tale sleeves but knew that the other elements of the dress could not be frilly or beautiful. In an interview in  Collider, Atwood said of the costume:

At the beginning of the story, it’s a long dress over leggings with the two layers and the same kind of boots…. When she leaves the castle, she leaves through a duct. She goes down through water, so the costume is totally wet…So, you have this costume but with a long dress and a long leather cloak over it coming out of the water. It dries off, and then the Huntsman finds her. At that point in the story, after they start running through the forest, he realizes this thing is crazy, so he takes his knife and cuts the bottom, and we lose that. You end up with a shorter tunic, the leggings, and the boots.

Because the costume was worn for most of the film, and because there were scenes with the gown wet, dirty, and torn, duplicates had to be made. Atwood stated:

I made the costume out of materials that blended with the environment and that would hold up under the situations that I had to put the costume through. I made about 20 of those. When you’re doing that, you source the materials that you can find and that you can duplicate times twenty. 

The gown – or at least one copy – went on to be worn in the ABC series Once Upon a Time, in the 2015 episode Dreamcatcher, where Olivia Steele Falconer wore it as Violet. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to know which version this is or if other copies of the costume will also show up elsewhere in the future.

Have you seen this costume anywhere else? Let us know!