On 'The Penguin,' Sofia Falcone Does Ugly Things in Beautiful Outfits

A feisty new bombshell has entered The Batman extended universe, and her name is Sofia Falcone: the crazy-sexy accused serial murderer who becomes an unlikely protagonist in HBO's The Penguin. Skillfully played by breakout star Cristin Milioti, Sofia's story reads like a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of a good girl gone bad. Born into an affluent but deeply troubled household as the daughter of Carmine Falcone—the city's reigning crime boss—Sofia spends her life chasing the passive feminine ideal her father wants her to be: a beautiful, charity luncheon-attending distraction from her family's darker dealings.

All that do-gooding ends up going to waste, though, when Sofia finds herself framed for strangling several women. The killings were actually committed by her father, by the way. And when Sofia gets wise to the truth, Carmine decides to make her his patsy instead of his heir. After a traumatizing ten-year stint at Arkham psychiatric hospital, Sofia remerges scarred (literally) and thirsty for revenge.

It would have been easy for costume designer Helen Huang to lean on all the mob wife aesthetic tropes we've come to expect from canonical works like Scarface, Pulp Fiction, The Godfather, Casino, Goodfellas, American Hustle, and The Sopranos. But Huang tells me she wanted Sofia's styling to feel "more fashion and curated than that." Instead, she looked to society pictures from the 1960s and photos from Truman Capote's White Ball for inspiration.

"I didn't really want her to look like the traditional mob princess," Huang says. "With the Falcones, we thought of them as sort of an older European kind of institutionalized money. So we looked at Edie Sedgwick, which I thought was a good reference because obviously she had gorgeous clothes, but there was a way of styling it that was rebellious."

Another key reference was a September 1994 Peter Lindbergh editorial shot for Harper's Bazaar that reinterpreted '60s clothing for the modern It girls of the '90s on a young Kate Moss.

"It was very kind of proper and elegant clothes, but on a younger woman, it has a totally different feel," she adds.

Sofia's style takes a symbolic turn when she decides to embrace her psycho killer reputation, topple her father's regime, and reinstate herself as the city's baddest mob boss. Her color palette expands. The shapes get bigger. The textures get wilder. And the heels get much, much higher. In other words, she starts taking up visual space. Men have called her crazy, and perhaps they're right. But you'd have to be nuts not to agree Sofia Falcone looks phenomenal.

The Ladylike Grand Entrance Outfit

Like a wolf in sheep's clothing, Sofia makes a quiet but powerful entrance in the series wearing a white skirt suit accessorized with Toteme slingback kitten heels, sheer dotted tights, and a silk scarf tied around her neck. It's a unnervingly ladylike look that instantly subverts our expectations of how a rumored serial killer fresh out the psychiatric hospital might dress. Sofia's best accessory, though, has to be her cold and unflinching gaze.

"I think to be scared of someone in kitten heels is quite hard to pull off," Huang says. "Cristin really embodied the clothes and turned them into something more eerie."

The Blood-Red Skirt Suit

Episode two sees Sofia in another custom suit, this time a red Prada-inspired number that's worn with a zebra print vintage Celine coat sourced from TheRealReal. The coat, Huang explains, felt like an heirloom piece Sofia would have inherited from her late mother. Strategic pops of color and print were also used to make Sofia stand out from the gloom of her family home, and the darkly dressed men who surround her there.

"We tried to make it so her femininity is the disarming thing about her in contrast to the men," Huang says. "It makes her a threat just by being around."

Then, for a covert drug business meeting at a nightclub, Sofia pours herself into a sultry Dion Lee black lace contour corset dress with an '80s feel that pairs perfectly with her tousled shag haircut.

The Knockout Mob Boss Gown

Clad in a gas mask and a morbidly beautiful Christopher John Rogers chartreuse dress, episode four ends with Sofia ghosting through the Falcone Mansion, having wiped out her entire blood line with an orchestrated gas leak.

"We tried on a lot of Rodarte and the writers were like, 'No, no, no, this isn't right,'" Huang recalls. "It needs to feel like a coming out party. She needs to feel like she's walking a carpet."

The knockout dress marks the first time Sofia wears anything low-cut in the series.

"All the way up until episode four, she was pretty covered up," Huang continues. "The necklines were high because there's this uncertainty and insecurity about the scars that she obtained in Arkham. But after the citrine dress, she shows a lot more of herself. It's a very subtle shift, but it really shows much more confidence on her part."

The gown's long georgette train also gave the camera something to follow.

"It's really special in a way because it's really impractical," Huang says. "It's her doing all these really awful things in a really, really beautiful gown and how that juxtaposition creates this tension. What an entrance, how beautiful it looks sweeping on the floor over all the dead bodies with the gas mask. It's tense, but it's also funny in a way. Kind of like a wink to the audience that says, 'Here I am.'"

The morning after massacring her family, Sofia greets the police in a pair of leather Sandro pants and pointy Acne Studios ankle boots.

The New Regime Slip Dress and Fur Coat

Having annihilated the Falcones, Sofia decides to co-opt what remains of her father's flunkies and start a new crime family under her mother's maiden name. She announces the news in a black lace slip dress from Fleur Du Mal topped with one of her mother's vintage fur coats. Huang commissioned the custom faux fur piece based on a reference photo of a coat that mixed several types, tones, and patterns of animal fur in one piece.

"We chose it because of the different types of long-haired fur, so it doesn't feel flat," Huang says. "It has this huge structure and it sort of mirrors her sort of inner chaos in that it's not just a cohesive mink or vintage mink. It's kind of wild looking and less demure than short-haired vintage fur."

Huang always knew she wanted to pair the coat with a slip that would cohere with Sofia's quiet elegance, even if the fur feels like a sartorial departure.

"I always like to feel that women know who they are, and when they go through emotional shifts, they just access different parts of their closet to become who they need to be at the moment," she elaborates. "But it's not like we're sad, then we go out and buy a different wardrobe."

The Taste of the Leopard Trend

Leopard print is used sparingly in Sofia's costuming to avoid any obvious mob wife style clichés. One place where it does pop up, however, is the seductive Rodarte lace and leopard slip she wears after becoming the boss of the newly formed Gigante crime family, underscoring her transformation from prey to predator.

The "Girly, Sexy, and Intimidating" Outfit

One of Huang's proudest moments in the series was putting together the vintage Marni coat and 1960s lamé dress Sofia wears with a sky-high pair of Christian Louboutin Mary Janes while she's hunting down her enemies.

"They're really, really high," Huang says of the heels. "They're like five inches. It's a girly shoe, but the height gives it that womanly power. I think that's where the idea of this outfit came from. It's both girly and intimidating and sexy at the same time."

The vintage dress was sourced from Ending Soon. The jacket, like most of the vintage coats that make up Sofia's wardrobe, came from TheRealReal.

"You can't really see her buying from a store," Huang quips. "We had to make her feel quite timeless because we didn't want a DC character to feel like you could shop her at a Bloomingdale's or Neiman Marcus or something."

The David Koma Dress to Kill

After making an attempt on a rival gangster's life, Sofia dons a black David Koma mini dress with a long red sash that looks like a trail of blood. She accessorizes the sheath dress with the same pair of Christian Louboutin platform Mary Janes she wears in a previous episode and sheer black tights with a decorative seam running down the midline.

The Surprisingly Colorful Vivienne Westwood Outfit

As the action in Sofia's arc ramps up, so does the palette of her wardrobe. Case in point: The Vivienne Westwood blue tartan corset and mini skirt she wears with a sheer cobalt blue pair of Wolford x Mugler tights to talk business with her mafia underlings.

The Red Grand Finale

As Sofia's storyline races to a perilous conclusion, she's nearly shot and left for dead. Instead, she's spared, but quickly taken in police custody: a fate almost worse than death for her. Huang wanted to create a look with texture, but it was important to Milioti that any new and custom garments be created with cruelty-free materials. Instead of fur, Huang had the voluminous garment constructed using feathers as a substitute.

"That came together really, really quick," Huang says. "And when you get one stab at something, you never know if it's going to work out. But when she put it on, I was like, 'You look amazing. You look really snatched for what you're doing.'"