The three-time Oscar winner (for Chicago, 2002, Memoirs of a Geisha, 2006, and Alice in Wonderland last year) used the Gothic spectacle of director Rupert Sander's vision to enhance the unnerving ambiguity of her own. Both plumbed history's bleakest depths for inspiration. ''We began with mediaeval research; the 10th to 14th centuries,'' Atwood says. ''Then we decided the architecture of the world we were inhabiting, then we moved forward and around in time.''

Against Gothic palace backdrops and an oozing black forest into which the fatally fair young princess Snow White ''escapes'', Atwood's designs animate Ravenna's relentless pursuit of beauty. In fairytales, as in life, female beauty, ''fair blood'', is revered as divine, pursued to the death and blamed for all manner of ills, including its own. Theron's angelically pale version is the perfect medium for Atwood's psycho-loaded couture.

In an early scene, before Ravenna's derangement is fully revealed, Atwood hints at her complex, dangerously fragile psyche with a wedding gown as unnerving as it is gorgeous. Its vice-like bodice is a jigsaw of slashed and cross-laced gold brocade and cream silk-satin panels. The skirts are lush, heavy and exquisitely detailed with gold metal beads, delicate toggles and tiny hooks to take the weight of spliced and bound pleats. Theron's breasts are corsetted hard into the bodice and swell unnaturally over the low top. Her decollete is framed by a spiny cage of what appear to be small, sharp, bleached bird bones fashioned into a mantle and set of puffed ''sleeves''.

Later on the wedding night, the new queen beds her king in soft, honey-gold light. She wears a thickly pleated shibori nightgown. It is the last of what Atwood describes as the ''hopeful'' scenes: it is the last involving Ravenna that warrants those ''reflective golden tones''.

Atwood then cranks up the beautiful-evil dichotomy by several sartorial notches and the results are nothing short of thrilling. Ravenna's gowns are dark and snakey, rock-hard and leathery-shapely, their silhouettes exaggerated by extravagant, gothic volumes and their surfaces crusted with regimented flotsam of death: quills, claws, scales, tiny bones and skulls. Atwood even elongates Ravenna's fingers with claw-like talons, strings an elegant garland of blind, beaked bird skulls around the decollete of one gown and decorates another with a mesmerising bodice panel of gizzardy worms.

Atwood's ability to balance ostentation and restraint in her aesthetic language has evolved in more than 50 films since the late 1970s. She stumbled into the art after graduating from New York University and spending what she dismisses as ''some years doing all kinds of other things''. Seven of Atwood's 50-odd films involved collaboration with offbeat director Tim Burton, including Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Sleepy Hollow (1999). The films' evocative mix of fantasy and reality, and Burton's penchant and intuitive ability for atmospheric effect, were right up Atwood's creative alley. In Rupert Sanders' Snow White and the Huntsman, she manages a similarly intense evocation of character by costume. She transforms the strangely cast Kristen Stewart from grubby heroine in stripped sleeves faintly reminiscent of Disney's archetypal Snow White costume, to a Joan of Arc-esque rallier of troops in a simple, white cotton shroud.

Atwood's leading men (Chris Hemsworth as the grieving, drunkard Huntsman and a stellar cast of digitally minimised acting legends including Bob Hoskins and Ian McShane as the dwarfs) convey a complex mess of masculinity, fallen grace, cynicism, humour, vanity and defeatism through some of the most evocative leatherwork yet seen on film. Atwood enlisted craftsmen from as far as Ireland and New Zealand to interpret the dozens of complicated costume briefs involving woven, plaited, slit, laced, riveted and jewelled leatherwork.

Her piece de resistance costume, however, required a more gentile kind of craft: millinery. ''To cut feathers so they laid smoothly and had very little weight and movement,'' Atwood explains. Thousands of pearlised green/black ''raven'' feathers were stitched in a swirling pattern to Queen Ravenna's most memorable costume and possibly, a pinnacle achievement for any costumier: the Raven Cloak. Its heavy folds drag on the floor, its collar rises like black wings around Ravenna's lovely face. In a crucial scene, both cloak and queen splinter as one into a tornado of flapping ravens. It's a heart-stopper, but its creator is both humble and circumspect on the subject of pinnacle achievements: ''We just gave it to [special effects] and they did their thing.''

■Snow White and the Huntsman is screening.

From: Life& Style (The Age)