20 Things You Somehow Missed In The Prestige
12. Colours As A Red Herring
Using the colour of a character's clothes to convey their motives is not a new thing; however, Nolan uses it to deceive the audience in The Prestige.
When Scarlett Johansson's Olivia Wenscombe first starts out with Robert Angier, both as his assistant and as his lover, she wears white and softer, pale colours to signify how her respect for him is pure and unsullied. However, when he asks her to spy on Alfred Borden, her costumes quite noticeably adopt darker and heavier tones, seemingly because she double crosses Angier and becomes Borden's assistant and mistress.
The dramatic change in the colours used in her costumes may signify that she is a femme fatale at first, but it soon becomes clear that she is as much a pawn in the rapidly escalating game between Borden and Angier as Borden's wife, Sarah is, suggesting that she was in just as much danger when she was with Angier (in her pale clothes).
However, even though Olivia believes that she is in love with Alfred Borden, she is in fact unknowingly in a relationship with his identical twin brother, which proves that their love could have been as pure as that shared between Olivia and Angier. Therefore, the use of dark colours to portray her as an adulteress is complete misdirection from Nolan's side of the camera.