designer Janie Bryant Check out Pennywise's (Bill Skarsgård) full costume in the It movie adaptation - plus insight from costume designer Janie Bryant (Mad Men).

What to wear: The key to Pennywise's outfit is keeping things relatively monochromatic (in this case, either silver or white). Pair silver or white leggings with a ruffled, long-sleeved shirt or dress (you can always spray paint it silver), and glue three red pom-poms down the front.

Wear white, black, or red boots, and glue a red pom-pom to the toe of each. Finish it off with a pair of white or silver gloves, white face paint, a red wig, and red lipstick that you draw in two lines all the way up through your eyebrows.

Pennywise wears a light grey Victorian-esque blouse with puff sleeves and more ruffles than an '80s prom dress. Honestly, the more ruffles the better. Technically, it's described as silver in the book, but to keep things simple, we can just go with white or a similarly light color.

In the Pennywise the clown origin story, Pennywise arrived on Earth in a cataclysmic event millions of years ago. He landed in the section of what would become North America, specifically where the town of Derry, Maine, eventually comes to be built.

Now, King doesn't offer an explanation as to why Pennywise is named like that, and the name doesn't seem to have any cultural significance except for the old English saying “Penny Wise, Pound Foolish”, which refers to being stingy about less expensive things but not so much on big things.

Literature. In the novel, It is a shapeshifting monster who usually takes the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, originating in a void containing and surrounding the Universe - a place referred to in the novel as the "Macroverse".

Steps:

1. Create Pennywise's Hair. Cut out the rubber skin on the orange hair wig and glue it to the white clown wig-skin.
2. Make your Pennywise Clown Collar With Coffee Filters.
3. Dye your peasant top and leggings with your RIT fabric dye.
4. Add ruffles to the bottom of your leggings and shirt.
5. Applying the final details.

Throughout the book, It is generally referred to as male, usually appearing as Pennywise. The Losers come to believe It may be female after seeing it in the form of a monstrous giant spider that lays eggs.

King stated in a 2013 interview that he came up with the idea for Pennywise after asking himself what children feared "more than anything else in the world", and feeling that the answer was clowns.

No, Stephen King's It is not based on a true story. King had the idea for It when looking at an old wooden walking bridge in 1978 near his home in Boulder, Colorado.

And, fitting right into that mythology is Pennywise the Dancing Clown. In the first It and It Chapter Two, the origins of Pennywise were only briefly touched upon. The two-parter made clear he was ancient and not of Earth, but it largely steered clear of the deeper mythology.

Throughout Stephen King's It, Pennywise is referred to as a male, but author Stephen King pulled a fast one on readers in the It book ending by revealing the creature's true form was a pregnant spider, implying that it is, in fact, biologically female.

The features that we often define individuals by - their skin, their hair, their smile - with Pennywise and the Joker, these features are abnormal and disturbing. There's something twisted about them. They don't feel human.

The story follows the experiences of seven children as they are terrorized by an evil entity that exploits the fears of its victims to disguise itself while hunting its prey. "It" primarily appears in the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown to attract its preferred prey of young children.

Why is Pennywise in It called Pennywise? Because IT took the form of (or possessed, the history is unclear) an actual clown who visited Derry named “Pennywise” - likely as part of a traveling circus. This is the form that IT prefers to take, as clowns are both enticing and frightening to children.