One of the first things you might have noticed about Bella Baxter, Emma Stone’s delightful and seductive character in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Frankensteinian film Poor Things, is not her big blue eyes, her sudden bodily convulsions, or even her infantile speech, but, rather, the billowing confections that seemed to protrude from her shoulders. “It’s about the sleeve,” Lanthimos reportedly told the film’s costume designer, Holly Waddington, whose previous projects include Lady Macbeth and The Great. And that’s exactly what he got: really, really big sleeves.
The costumes in Poor Things were just the tip of the iceberg, however, in what had already been a big year for sleeves. An oft neglected part of one’s wardrobe, they’ve lately taken center stage on runways, on red carpets, in movies—and now on the streets.…