SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for “New York,” the fifth episode of “The Vampire Lestat,” now streaming on AMC+.

When costume designer Lex Wood began planning the costumes for “The Vampire Lestat” (or the third season of “Interview with the Vampire”) she had one word in mind: color. And a lot, to reflect the mania that is season 3’s narrator and the newly formed rock star version of Lestat de Lioncourt, played by Sam Reid.

Moving away from the red and black typically associated with vampires, Wood, who joined the Anne Rice adaptation’s costume department at the end of Season 2, saw the change in narrator as an opportunity to expand the AMC+ show’s aesthetic.

“Lestat is a musician,” says Wood Variety. “Everything happens through the lens of music, so I spent a lot of time researching and listening to music from artists that I felt fit our vibe, some that Daniel Hart directly referenced when he was writing.”

While Wood and Reid were clear that they did not want to model Lestat after any rock star, to give him the space to be “as individual as possible”, Iggy Pop, David Bowie due to his “shifty, chameleon-like effort”, and Freddie Mercury were all inspirations when Wood began designing pieces for Lestat and the members of his rebel band.

“A lot of the actual design we were doing on the fly,” Wood explains. “We had some pieces that I designed before we started, but a lot of them we’re doing on the fly, because we’re responding to the script.”

Wood, who says about 75% of the show’s costumes were handmade, was also deliberate in his choice of fabrics. Take Lestat and his mother Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle); “They’re both made in the 18th century, and I wanted to incorporate as much silk as possible to still give those little tugs of physical thread that tie them to their past. There are also a couple of Easter eggs in terms of the use of those fabrics,” Wood hints, hoping that eagle-eyed fans of the show will notice as the season progresses.

Much of the rest of the clothing pulled were archival pieces, selected to look a little unique. When it came time to dress the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), Lestat’s other half and the show’s previous narrator, sourcing became a little difficult.

“Jacob and I had talked a lot about Louis’ transition after Armand (Assad Zaman) when we were finishing season 2, and we wanted his costume to fit with that,” Wood explains, adding that “Armand no longer restricts him, and a physical manifestation of that is his use of color and pattern.”

“He is a very difficult character to achieve because, in theory, he is incredibly rich,” he adds. “He’s a multimillionaire and unfortunately we do everything within the TV budget, so we couldn’t always find the most expensive version of everything, but that was really the goal: to have a multimillionaire look and feel.”

With season 3 taking place after Louis discovered that his lover Armand, and not Lestat as he had originally thought, was responsible for the death of his adopted daughter Claudia (Delainey Hayles), Louis is “fooling himself into thinking it’s fixed,” according to Wood.

“We wanted to layer it to show that part of her hiding place,” says Wood, whose team bought and made fabrics for her outfits, including her pants and cardigans. “How do you try to show that you are integrated into society? You are no longer hiding in an apartment in Dubai; you walk around and you are successful. How do you try to fit into this world?”

Louis’ wardrobe choices are also partly due to his “trying to look normal in front of Regina.”

Regina, the spitting image of Claudia and also played by Hayles, poses as the deceased vampire for a fee, but first encounters Louis while working as a waitress at a restaurant in New York.

Regina’s waitress uniform is a nod to the yellow dress Claudia died in; the similar tone is a deliberate emotional choice that also helps her stand out when she is first introduced through the glass of the restaurant window.

“Regina is a little enigmatic, so we wanted her to feel like every girl you meet; you wouldn’t look twice at her when you walked down the street, and that’s the point,” says Wood. When Regina begins impersonating Claudia correctly, her wardrobe reflects that decision.

“Regina is pretending to be someone she’s read about in a book, but she hasn’t seen Claudia’s vision like we’ve seen it, so we wanted to have some very clear nods to some pieces that would have been described by Louis or in the book,” says Wood. “When they go to dinner, she wears yellow on purpose, but she doesn’t exactly get the style of the dress right. I wouldn’t have read that in the description.”

Not much is known about who Regina really is, and Wood decided to play it safe with her jewelry. Louis’ jewelry also remains consistent, with some additions for the new season.

“We wanted Louis to have a little silver, a little sparkle, because we thought that was a choice he would make. He wears a particular bracelet that has notches on it, like he’s counting the kills he’s been doing for Talamasca while he was employed by them,” Wood says.

Lestat, on the other hand, wears his jewelry to “try to play with people”: “Maybe that ring means something, and he’s trying to annoy Louis by wearing it. ‘I’m wearing someone else’s wedding ring, not yours,’ that kind of vibe.”

“We have stones of various colors, which have different meanings, depending on what is happening with Lestat,” adds Wood. “It’s the exploration of trying to figure out who he is at that particular moment, so we wanted that element of variability in everything, while everyone else is a little more constant around him.”

Various silhouettes throughout the season depended on Lestat’s many moods, some mimicking his 18th-century origins, others with built-in corsets to add an element of playfulness.

“We wanted to accentuate features at different points, like a softer shoulder when we lean into the emotion of him feeling something, or give him a stronger shoulder so he can see more other points,” Wood says.

Part of Lestat’s character arc this season is the incestuous journey he goes on with his mother. Appearing on screen for the first time in the show, Gabriella is described as appearing more androgynous in Anne Rice’s novels.

“Our writers will exclude or include some things within our script, so we wanted to use androgyny in her style and used quite a few 18th-century tailoring techniques in making her coats,” says Wood, adding that the audience is “seeing Gabriella through Lestat’s eyes.” “Exploring the masculine and the feminine led to important decisions being made about the type of fabrics we used or how soft some of their pieces were.”

“Everyone cheats on someone in one way or another,” Wood says, but when it comes to lies and secrets on the show, Armand tends to be the clear precursor.

“When we first see him he looks like a gremlin, so his style develops a little bit over the course of the series,” says Wood, who promised Zaman that they would get Armand’s famous black coat at the end of the season. Armand shifts toward “softer layers, earthy tones, sharper shapes, and more tailoring,” as he undoes decades of lying to Louis and begins to approach his first rookie, journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), responsible for writing and publishing the novel that has turned Louis and Lestat’s lives upside down.

Molloy, despite having recently transformed into a vampire, appears to be the most emotionally balanced on the show.

“We didn’t want to stray too far from where we left off at the end of season two,” Wood says. “He’s a little more daring and a little more laissez-faire. He also hasn’t made money in the same way as everyone else. It wasn’t long after his book came out that he decided to grab a bag and go with Lestat on his tour bus. We wanted to give him the appearance of a limited wardrobe, because he doesn’t really care, but he didn’t have a lot of room to pack things anyway.”

Don’t think that the traveling nature of the season limits all the characters: “We imagine that behind the tour bus there is an extra bus that brings Lestat’s entire wardrobe.”