Ryan Murphy's "Monster" anthology has always used costume as a storytelling device, and its fourth season, "Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story," is no exception. The eight-episode Netflix series, which began streaming globally on September 17, opens with Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden wearing a delicate white Victorian chemise as she wields a hatchet in a blood-spattered scene, a stark first image that sets the visual language for the rest of the season. Beatty stars opposite Vicky Krieps, Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall in the retelling of the 1892 ax murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, and creator Ian Brennan has said the season is built around the misogyny, gender roles and societal restrictions placed on women in the Victorian era, themes that play out as much in the costuming as in the script.
VICKY KRIEPS pic.twitter.com/skpx0C78eC
— Netflix (@netflix) September 19, 2026
That white chemise, an undergarment rather than a finished dress, is a deliberate inversion of the corseted, layered silhouettes typically associated with the period, and it frames Lizzie as stripped of the era's usual armor before the story pulls her back into it. Early on-set photography from production, which began in Los Angeles in September 2025, showed Beatty in a pink Victorian dress with a flower crown in what appeared to be a dream or fantasy sequence, alongside extras in full period dress and a horse-drawn carriage, while Hunnam's Andrew Borden was seen in a graying beard and a Gilded Age-style robe and slippers befitting the household's domestic tension. The costuming leans into the show's central contrast between the rigid, high-necked propriety expected of an 1890s New England household and the repression simmering underneath it, a tension the series reportedly explores through Borden's relationship with the family's maid, Bridget Sullivan, played by Krieps.
That Victorian restraint made for a pointed contrast at the show's New York premiere on Wednesday night at Pulitzer Fountain, where the cast abandoned bustles and high collars entirely. Beatty wore a custom Harbison Studio gown with a bustier bodice, a cinched waist and a short train, described by WWD as having "subtle lingerie-inspired elements," while Krieps chose a sleek black Bottega Veneta dress. Billie Lourd, who plays Lizzie's sister Emma, wore a lace De La Vali dress with a plunging neckline and cap sleeves, paired with Amina Muaddi heels. WWD characterized the collective look as "dark glamour," with the cast dressed head-to-toe in black alongside designs from Erdem.
The pairing of an 1890s-set story with a distinctly modern, minimal red carpet is not unusual for a Murphy production, but it is a notable one here given how much of the season's marketing has leaned on its Victorian imagery. Variety's review of the series called it "a window into the Victorian era," noting that the show depicts a young woman "tormented by her family, misogyny and her own body," a description that applies as much to Beatty's on-screen wardrobe as to her character's circumstances. As the first "Monster" installment centered on a woman, the season uses its Victorian dress code as shorthand for constraint in a way its predecessors, built around modern-dress subjects like Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers, did not have available to them.
