Kevin Costner picked up the mantle of Western screen icons more than 30 years ago with the colossal success of Dances with Wolves, and entrenched himself as the heir apparent to John Ford and Clint Eastwood with myriad similar projects. So when he announced Horizon, a quartet of period Westerns set against the backdrop of the Civil War—and put $38 million of his own money into the budget—it created a high level of excitement and stakes.

It also meant that Costner, who stars, directs, and cowrites, had to fill out the posse with accomplished creatives who could rise to the occasion. Enter Lisa Lovaas, a costume designer whose 40-year-long career includes credits on the Transformers franchise, Jack Reacher with Tom Cruise, and Renfield. After being introduced to Costner, it quickly became apparent that her experience on blockbusters, as well as her singular attention to detail, made her the right person to join the cinematic series. “I’ve had many years of working on the Michael Bay shows,” Lovaas says, “and once you work with Michael, you come out able to do anything.”

Immediately after reading the script and being introduced to the Horizon universe, which focuses on both Western homesteaders and the White Mountain Apache tribe whose land they encroach upon, Lovaas began work.
She started with a book of costume ideas for each of the movie’s 120-plus speaking roles, one that included concepts for not only Horizon, but the subsequent entries in the series. She even pulled from her own family history. Lovaas’ grandfather was a doctor on a Navajo reservation in the 1920s, and when she showed Costner a photo of him dressed in crisp white contrasting with the Indigenous people, it was instantly evocative. The combination of immersive research and personal kismet put Lovaas in the position to succeed in this incredibly challenging project. “If I didn’t have that deep research, I wouldn’t have been able to follow all of these characters through the 15 years that we are going to see them,” she explains.

One of the most confounding challenges in designing for a period film is accounting for how people have physically changed over the last 150-plus years. That included key things like height and fitness, as well as the fact that many of the Native actors in the movie are heavily tattooed. Lovaas had to stray from her initial conception of the characters, covering their body art because the rigorous shoot and massive cast didn’t allow for hours in the makeup chair.

Though production wasn’t quite the 100-day marathon of Dances with Wolves, two multi-month shoots meant ensuring that every costume on both films had duplicates. In a nod to the Western homesteaders and the nomadic ancestors of the White Mountain Apaches, Lovaas and her team needed to bring to location in Moab, Utah, every material, accessory, and tool for production with them from Los Angeles in anticipation of new ideas, alterations, or damage. “There was one quilting shop,” she explains of the 5,200-person town. “When we got to Moab, it was fun because we had stacks and stacks of vintage ribbon and lace and lots of fabric. I had the fabric and the lace dyed to take the white off, and then we would be able to make key pieces like the chemises and the corsets.”

Moab’s desert presented its own challenges, particularly with the major battle sequence in the first film. Both Horizon and Horizon Chapter 2 are intensely physical films where actors go through the wringer. “We shot in September when it was 100 degrees. It was so warm, and everyone was in as little fabric as possible. Then in November, we shot the battle and it was ice on the ground in the mornings,” Lovaas says. “We had to make those costumes comfortable enough to be able to work in the freezing cold for three nights.”

Those extreme conditions posed similar problems for dressing Horizon’s homesteader women. Lovaas says that the harsh temperatures “would’ve disintegrated” true vintage pieces over the course of the shoot. From her meticulous research, she pulled popular 1860s patterns and had them printed onto fabrics she sourced from India via England and Thailand. Lovaas and her team largely handled the Apache garments themselves through block printing, but she also used a trusted printer in Los Angeles for certain jobs. “I love fabric. I love trim. I love vintage trims. So even at the expense of using the real vintage trims and having them deteriorate, I love the quality of
the way they looked on camera,” she says. “It might have been a little bit of extra work and having to mend things at night, but there’s just a difference in having that vintage quality, and that’s something that I’m partial to, and it’s seen in a lot of the women’s outfits that we made.”

All of this dedication amplifies the lived-in tangibility that became Horizon’s most consistent source of critical praise, and helped set it apart in the 2020s film universe. Horizon is instantly in the conversation with the great Westerns of the last century because it looks like one of them.
The genre’s saddlebag is full of iconic garments, from Clint Eastwood’s poncho in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to Warren Beatty’s fur coat in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Hayes Ellison’s (Kevin Costner) bluish gray cowboy hat fits the character’s stoic, reluctant-hero archetype, while Juliette Chesney (Ella Hunt) wears a dress colored like a wheat field at sunrise, which perfectly embodies the duality of rustic homesteader life and traditional femininity.

When asked about the key pieces, Lovaas mentions the earrings worn by Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) as she soldiers through the unimaginable grief of losing her husband and son in the first film’s climactic raid. They’re not just striking for their brilliance against the dust-caked backdrop, but were partially inspired by the adversity Lovaas and thousands of others faced losing precious belongings, homes, and even loved ones in California’s deadly 2025 wildfires. “People would look at me and not know what I’ve just gone through. You had to have a certain image to just get you through the day. I didn’t want to collapse,” Lovaas says. She wanted to convey that same resolve for Frances. “Those little things that you love or have lived with become symbols that help you continue on.”