Just like its sometimes-inscrutable story line, the visuals of Twin Peaks juxtapose the mundane with the creepy in a way that makes it impossible to look away. The subversive small-town aesthetic that defined the original series—and set the tone for this year’s continuation, which wrapped on Showtime with a fittingly bizarre finale Sunday—inspired decades of Halloween costumes and high-end fashion photo tributes, as well as an homage in the form of at least one hipster-cool restaurant bathroom. Its visual language was established in part by costume designer Patricia Norris, who took home the Outstanding Costume Design for a Series award at the 1990 Primetime Emmys for her work on the original series’s pilot.

Unfortunately, Norris died in February 2015, months before the production of Twin Peaks: The Return was scheduled to begin. So the challenge of bringing the characters of Twin Peaks 25 years into the future was handed to costume designer Nancy Steiner, whose work you know from countless visually driven films, including The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Little Miss Sunshine. She had worked previously with Twin Peaks: The Return producer Sabrina Sutherland on the Wim Wenders-directed film The Million Dollar Hotel, released in 2000. “[Sabrina] remembered how I dealt with Wim and the actors and she thought I’d be a good fit for David [Lynch],” Steiner explains. “So she called me up and said that she’d talked about me with David, and that if I wanted the job, it was mine.”

Courtesy of SHOWTIME (still); By Lois DeArmond (sketch).

Clearly, Norris left pretty big saddle shoes for Steiner to fill—and zero notes. “There was no bible to reference,” says Steiner, alluding to the filmmaking custom of recording every outfit worn in every scene by every actor. “All we had was, like, one Cooper suit.”

Steiner was faced with the creative challenge of imaging Twin Peaks, a precious time capsule of the early-‘90s zeitgeist, in the hodgepodge of 2017 aesthetics—all angular Kardashian eyebrows and doughy athleisure. She also faced the enormous pressure of grappling with both a rabid, detail-obsessed audience and the eagle eyes of expectant television critics. “I didn’t realize how big the fanbase was until I started researching this project,” Steiner admits. “I went online and saw all of these fan sites, all of this merchandise. It was intimidating. It was scary.” But she couldn’t pass up an opportunity to work with the legendary director.