Costume Direction

This is the costume direction deck for Infection, created by costume designer Adam Fishbein. The film is Severance meets American Psycho, a short following Jane as she gives in to the corporate machine and becomes a mirror of the man she fears. Adam's deck is the visual argument for how that transformation reads on camera.

The thesis lands in the first page. The sartorial language should feel disorienting, not of a specific time or place. Infection is not set in 1985 or 2025. It lives in the timeless gray of cubicle farms and fluorescent light, where capitalism has stripped people of their individuality. Adam draws from the iconography of corporate dress across decades to deliver that without anchoring to a single era.

Each character gets a dedicated page. Jane begins in the shapeless uniform of entry-level corporate dress and evolves toward her boss's tailored, masculine 1980s power silhouette as the infection takes hold. The boss draws on Madison Avenue suiting and 1980s excess, the iconography of greed deployed almost to satire. Ma Dukes is in a hospital gown and head wrap, monochromatic to fit the world. Maggie is pointedly framed as a mirror of Jane's past.

What someone reading this should pay attention to is the breakdown table on page seven. That is where the deck stops being mood and becomes production tool, logging every scene with change numbers and operational notes including Jane scratching her neck so no high necklines, the boss handing Jane gloves so they must match his, and the bathroom splashing scene requiring multiples of Maggie's costume.

For students of production design, this is what a complete costume document looks like, thesis through scene-by-scene execution in one place.