The Descendants is a series of three movies following the lives of four teenagers, the children of classic Disney villains, who have been picked from the magicless Isle of the Lost to attend school in Auradon. Specifically, the movies follow Mal, the daughter of Maleficent (from Sleeping Beauty), Evie, the daughter of the Evil Queen (from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), Jay, the son of Jafar (from Aladdin), and Carlos, the son of Cruella De Vill (from 101 Dalmations). Their boarding school is filled with the children of heroes and heroic characters from other Disney stories.

The movies themselves are about the level of the High School Musical franchise, including lots of songs and dancing, and a decidedly junior high level of maturity. However, although the plots are thin and not fully developed, I find them interesting, and the costuming and theming of each character includes loads of callbacks to the original story from which they’re derived. For a big Disney fan like me, it can be super fun to find all the different references. A lot of the characters in the movie have costumes, accessories, hair, and styling very similar to their parents' looks in their original movies (or in some cases, their parents' famous nemeses).

Kara Saun is the costume designer for The Descendants and she is BRILLIANT. I've combed through her instagram and through a lot of Tumblr posts, youtube videos, and various disney social media accounts to find a lot of this information.

I've read that the aesthetic of "The Isle of the Lost" was intended to evoke "dirty candy," like bright colors that have been run down and messed up by life. In addition, since they've been trapped on this island for the past twenty years and don't have wifi (which is explicitly stated in the intro to the first movie), the idea is that the island's fashion is a bit dated. Their parents' clothes are hard to date, because they're based so much off their looks in their original movies, with their various different locations, cultures, and time periods; most of these settings and times are not explicitly stated, but over the years, viewers have made educated guesses based on the costumes, language, and items present in the movies. Sleeping Beauty dates to medieval France, probably around the 1300s. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is set in Germany in around the early 1500s (although the Evil Queen's look is actually based off of a medieval statue dating more to ~1040). Disney's Aladdin is set in the fictional Agrabah in the 800s or 900s, but before the Persian Gulf War occurred, Disney planned to set it in Baghdad, in modern day Iraq (although fun fact, in the original 1001 Arabian Nights containing the story, Aladdin is said to take place in China). 101 Dalmations is set in England in the late 1950s-early 1960s.

The kids on the Isle of the Lost though, have solidly 70s punk style. They wear lots of leather and denim with many rips, shreds, and holes, spike and stud accents, fingerless gloves, asymmetrical zippers, and biker type clothes. They also sport big, bright, bold hair and outfit colors. The Villain Kids' clothing silhouettes tend to be pretty fitted, which was a characteristic of 70s punk clothes that specifically retaliated against the loose, drapey, hippie styles big in popular culture at the time (and the peace and love ethos that went along with them, naturally).

The kids at Auradon Prep, in contrast, tend to be dressed in mostly preppy styles, lots of feminine and flowy blouses, cardigans, bows, pencil skirts, and delicate floral patterns for the girls and sports coats, sweaters, and letter jackets for the boys. Their outfit colors tend to overall be more muted than the Island kids, like pastel versions of their parents' chosen colors. The big exception to this is seen in blue and yellow, the high school colors which are seen on every athletic, cheerleading, and band uniform. These are based off of the Beast's blue and yellow coat look and Belle's own yellow dresses; Prince Ben (the son of Beauty and the Beast) dresses in blue and yellow almost exclusively.