One of the sharpest shifts in Euphoria season 3 is not just in the writing, the time jump, or the darker adult world surrounding the characters. It is in the clothes. According to GQ’s interview with new costume designer Natasha Newman-Thomas, the fashion this season is no longer about a heightened high-school fantasy. It is about building separate, lived-in worlds for characters who now exist in drug houses, luxury spaces, construction deals, and Hollywood backlots rather than the sealed bubble of East Highland High.

Newman-Thomas joined the series for season 3 after previously working with Sam Levinson on The Idol. She admitted she initially hesitated to step into a show with such a famous established look, especially after Heidi Bivens’ work on the first two seasons. What changed her mind was the script. Once she read it, she realized season 3 was not simply repeating the old visual language with older actors. The five-year time jump had opened the story outward, giving each character a distinct environment and social reality. Instead of one insular world, the show now moves across wildly different settings, and the costumes had to reflect that expansion.

That broader canvas seems to matter most in the way the show now presents Nate Jacobs. In the earlier seasons, Nate was often dressed in basic, stripped-down clothing that underscored his cold physicality and emotional control. In season 3, he is suddenly wrapped in Bottega Veneta. That change is deliberate. Newman-Thomas said she built Nate’s wardrobe around the idea that he is trying to project two things at once: a man who can perform as a hard-working contractor and a man who can impress wealthy investors and signal status. In her reading, Bottega was the perfect label for that contradiction. It looks expensive, polished, and aspirational, but still capable of being styled as rugged “workwear.” She called it “performative workwear,” which fits Nate because, in her view, his whole career and identity are built on performance.

That idea makes Nate’s fashion more revealing than any line of dialogue. He is not dressing like a man who already owns power. He is dressing like someone rehearsing power, hoping the costume becomes reality. Newman-Thomas explained that Nate would not be spending on Bottega or a Harry Winston ring unless he truly believed he could make the money back. In other words, he is living inside a self-created illusion of success, gambling that image will outrun truth. The wardrobe tells the story of a man faking stability, wealth, and control even with the people closest to him.

Jacob Elordi was apparently fully on board with that approach. Newman-Thomas said she pitched the Bottega-heavy idea to him, framing it around Nate’s performative identity, and Elordi immediately responded to it. She described them as being on the same page from the start. One of the standout examples is Nate’s custom Bottega wedding tux. The designer said Bottega created it specially for the show, and Elordi loved it so much that when she went to fit him for another scene during lunch, she found him still wearing it. He told her he had been walking around the backlot in the tux because it made him feel like Cary Grant. It is an amusing image, but it also reinforces how carefully season 3 is using clothing to shape male fantasy, charisma, and self-invention.

The article also makes clear that Euphoria season 3 is no longer dressing one cast so much as curating several rival ecosystems. Newman-Thomas described building the world around Alamo, played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, with a very different sensibility from Nate’s. Alamo’s wardrobe includes custom suits by Ernest W. Baker and green custom cowboy boots with scorpion-tipped details designed specifically for the character. The goal was to create someone glamorous, dangerous, and larger than life, a man whose look carries theatrical menace. Around him, the rest of the crew receives equally specific styling: one character gets a 1990s-inspired hip-hop aesthetic, another wears coordinated sets tied to California identity, while Bishop is dressed with trench coats, suspenders, and bolo ties to evoke suspicion, concealment, and a quasi-detective aura.

What makes these details so interesting is how sharply they contrast with Laurie’s side of the criminal world. Newman-Thomas describes Alamo’s operation as the glamorous side of selling sex and drugs, while Laurie’s is deliberately disheveled and grimy. Even that split is not random. It suggests season 3 is visually dividing criminal power into two fantasies: one seductive and polished, the other corroded and raw. The clothes do not just decorate these worlds. They define the emotional temperature of each one.

The Hollywood material gets its own fashion logic too. The character Dylan Reid is styled one way when he is himself and another when he appears on the fictional soap LA Nights. Off-screen, he is meant to feel like a genuine star, dressed in brands that make him seem cool and contemporary. On-screen, he becomes deliberately cheesier, leaning into the manufactured gloss of soap performance. That split mirrors the larger obsession running through the season: the gap between who people are and who they stage themselves to be.

Even Rue is pulled into that reorientation. Newman-Thomas notes that Rue wears a lot of menswear this season, including substantial Levi’s and other masculine pieces. That detail aligns with the season’s harder, more adult tone. It also suggests that Euphoria is no longer content with its old beauty mythology. In season 3, clothes are not just about iconography. They are about deception, class aspiration, territorial power, and the identities people stitch together when their inner lives begin to crack. By that measure, Nate Jacobs is not merely wearing Bottega Veneta. He is wearing a lie so expensive it almost looks like destiny.