Fashion Designer Maya Hansen Talks Her Dishonored 2 Designs

Last year, while writing about the first Dishonored, Gita Jackson was fascinated “that Arkane Studios thought so much about the world they were creating that they even thought about the fashion.” Dishonored 2 is now out, and if anything Arkane spent even more attention on how their characters dress. They even brought in professional help for their two female leads, Emily Kaldwin and the diabolical Delilah, hiring renowned Spanish fashion designer Maya Hansen to create their outfits.

Born and raised in Madrid, Hansen’s designs have been worn by Lady Gaga, Kylie Jenner, Italian pop singer Laura Pausini, and RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Violet Chachki, among other celebrities. She uses a variety of fabrics and materials to create forward-looking fashions that echo corsetry from various historical eras, and that makes her a perfect choice to design clothes for Dishonored 2’s pseudo-Victorian setting.

Although Hansen has worked with musicians, painters and other artists before, Dishonored 2 is her first videogame work. It’s a collaboration that she found creatively fulfilling. “I found it very interesting working on a character from the designs and ideas that have been created for the videogame since we, as fashion designers, can contribute our own point of view to support the development of the videogame story,” she says.

“It’s really fascinating to discover how extensively the designers of the videogame developed [both Delilah and Emily],” Hansen says. “It was impressive to receive so much information in advance. Once we started defining their style, it was relatively easy to offer different possibilities. It’s very interesting to have that much information about the characters for which you are going to design something, because they are the ones that will tell you what kind of fabric, what colors, or what shapes they would like to wear.”

In order to give us a better look at that collaboration, Hansen, Arkane Studios and Bethesda Softworks have shared a number of images from the design process. Over the next few pages you can follow Emily and Delilah’s outfits from Hansen’s original sketches, to their refinement through a gallery of concept art, to their final appearance both in the game and in the real world. You can click on any image to open up a larger image to inspect any details more closely. Along the way Hansen will share insights from her first videogame work. If you’re at all interested in fashion, be it in life or in games, this should be an illuminating look at the process.

All quotes by Maya Hansen.

The Original Sketches

DELILAH

“Delilah is a woman with a strong inner life, a very tormented person. That might be the reason why her clothing is so theatrical and dramatic. She has this need to express that she’s been through a lot and that her life matters.”

EMILY KALDWIN