Handmaid's Tale Womens Fancy Dress Costume

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On the other hand, red is the cross and red is blood,” Atwood said. The cross, because the Handmaids’ lives are circumscribed by a Puritan-esque theocracy, and blood, for the childbirth the women are forced to endure for the male ruling class. Crabtree wanted to toe the line between realism and surrealism in the clothes by mixing familiar religious dress with influences from the fashion and art worlds. “I’m throwing in a very tiny surreal mist to the clothing so it feels like a dream,” Crabtree said. “You can’t quite tell if you’re awake or dreaming or having a nightmare, and part of that is just the reaction to all that was happening in the states with politics.” Crabtree spoke to us about the inspiration behind each uniform she created, from the teal dresses of the Wives to the olive-brown clothes of the Aunts. The Handmaid’s Tale has becomea cultural touchstone in costume design, at once depicting the way fashion has historically been used to control bodies, strip away agencyand reify outdated notions of gender. In the recently concluded fifth season, viewers were treated to an alternate reality—one where main character June Osborne (played by Elisabeth Moss) is empowered to not only escape the dystopian Gilead, but indeed tip the first domino of a long-awaited revolution. And in the real world, as we come to the end of a year that saw great political upheaval and unrest, The Handmaid’s Tale’s themes are more salient than ever. The most visually arresting part of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel, are the uniforms the Handmaids wear: bright-red dresses capped with stark white bonnets. The Handmaid’s Tale does much of the world-building of this near-future dystopia through its costume design. In this new totalitarian theocracy known as Gilead, women are divided into different castes according to their usefulness to the state; the uniforms follow suit. The Handmaids wear long red dresses because they are, quite literally, the reproductive organs of the new country. The costume designer Ane Crabtree calls the color “lifeblood.” It’s used as a lightbox because there’s, well not zero, but very little makeup. It’s natural,” she said. “And it’s a way to actually create light in the face.”

Ann Taylor also offers the Tie Waist Knit Dress for a more figure-hugging look, available in women’s regular and petite sizes 00 to 14 in two colors. Crabtree also designed the iconic bonnets the handmaids wear, their “wings,” which fit snugly on the head, held in place with magnets against the wind gusts in Toronto, where the show is filmed. Blood red is the shade Atwood originally envisioned, as her narrator, Offred, describes in the book early on: “Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us.”As for the other iconic looks of her designs, “I call them tribal uniforms because each tribe does exactly what they are deemed to do,” she said. “So they are in that way like Star Trek. But I always say that the simplicity makes the real estate really difficult and really important. More pertinent than any other show because you can’t over design this.” The handmaid’s costume has been adopted by women in many countries as a symbol of protest about various issues having to do with the requisitioning of women’s bodies by the state,” she told the Guardian. She made the bonnets out of a material close to a linen so that they could play with shadow and light. “It has a beautiful slight opacity when you need it to and slight luminosity for natural light and lit moments,” said Crabtree. “We didn’t want it to be this sort of concrete slab thing on the head. We wanted to do shadows on the faces.”

First introduced in her novel in the form of “some fairytale figure in a red cloak”, it is a uniform – as Atwood’s heroine Offred explains – designed to be understood in terms of violent oppression and the fertility of the handmaids in a largely infertile world. Most post-1980s high school students—those whose libraries didn’t ban the book, anyway—will recognize Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale, a 1985 work of speculative fiction by famed writer and environmental activist Margaret Atwood. If the dystopian tale was required reading then, its new small-screen adaptation—coming to Hulu April 26th—feels like required viewing now, and not just for teens. Costume designer Ane Crabtree, tasked with bringing Gilead’s dystopian dress to life, agrees, admitting that her creative process was particularly emotional and charged because the show’s filming schedule aligned with the results of the 2016 presidential election. With each season, the regimented world of The Handmaid’s Tale expands, drawing viewers deeper into Margaret Atwood’s dystopia. In season three, airing now, the narrative stakes are even higher as June ( Elisabeth Moss) works to disrupt the repressive system of Gilead from within. The costumes are similarly amped up. 500 shoes, 100 handmade cloaks and bonnets and 900 meters of wool...No one can accuse them of being immodest: they are well covered up. But everyone seeing these groups of women know what they mean in the context of the individual protest, whether it be Ireland, Argentina, or Arizona.” The Canadian author believes the use of the handmaid’s uniform is both flexible and powerful, allowing women to protest in locations where they do not have a right of audience. What the costume is really asking viewers is: do we want to live in a slave state? Margaret Atwood The so-called “Wives” would be in blue. The “Aunts” in brown. The “Marthas” in green. And the “Handmaids” at the center of her story, whose job is to bear children for the Wives, in a deep red-colored dress, like a nun’s habit, and white bonnets, called “wings,” around their heads. In episode two, when the women assemble for the birth day, Crabtree put them in different shades of blue. “I started playing with different tones of teal in the Wives and also in the Handmaids because if you have cardboard cutouts of people in the same silhouettes, in the same color, it starts to look like a play,” she said. The more powerful women were outfitted in darker teals. “The color has such a poignancy and shadow. And it has such pathos,” she said. “It’s like aged, beautiful, bird’s-eye blue. It’s darkened and withered and spoiled.”

Keishia Taylor is among those who first started wearing the handmaid’s uniform about a year ago during the campaign to overturn Northern Ireland’s abortion law. A human-centered missionand finding the best products that suit your world without hurting others is indeed something that is important to Kavanagh personally. “It’s sad that so much of what’s happening in our show is reflecting current times,” she says of the show’s parallels with the political climate in the U.S. and beyond. “With everything that’s happening, it’s a little more about mindfulness: less indulgence, and more purposeful pieces that bring you joy.” In London, protesters put on the cloak and bonnet to protest against Donald Trump’s visit to the UK and the policies of his administration.

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Now, those costumes and the speculative fiction novel are being brought to life through a TV adaptation premiering this week on Hulu — which many have said bears striking parallels to the present. Last week, Atwood and the actress Elisabeth Moss, who plays the novel’s main character, the Handmaid Offred, sat down with NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown and shared more about the meaning behind the costumes. By contrast, the costumes worn by the women of Gilead are nothing if not indulgent. Kavanagh’s costumesbuild upon the frameworkof the other designers who worked on the series before her. For the fifth season, Kavanagh looked toward styles from the great depression and inter-war periods to inform her design process. “I went for a late thirties/early forties undertone for the lines and silhouettes,” she says. She points out how, during World War 2,resources were limitedfor all people—except for those at the top. As wealthy women continued supporting top designers during the horrors of war in real life, sodo the wives of Gilead on screen—under a strict blue-only rule.

There’s a tiny percentage of women who can have babies in Gilead, and those are the Handmaids,” says Crabtree. “That’s their menstrual flow; that’s their lifeblood. You can see them coming a mile away, flowing down the street, like a river of blood.” It’s like two kids making a plan for something crazy, seriously we get that excited, even after thousands of months.” The deep red color, Atwood said, came from various places. For one, “German prisoners of war held in Canada [in WWII] were given red outfits because they show up so well against the snow,” she said. (In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” some Handmaids try — and fail — to escape Gilead, the hierarchical regime under which they live.) In designing these costumes, Kavanagh thought of the powder blues and delicate pinks worn by young boys and girls, combining them to create a soft lilac and by extension, a subtle blurring of the in-place ideas of how gender was allowed to be expressed in Gilead. “I wanted a bit more of a saturated purple,” says Kavanagh. “Purple is known as a royal color, and that’s how these girls are being treated: like royalty. I really wanted to emphasize that. I did a play on a 1950s swing coat for the young girls. I didn’t want them in a cloak because I wanted to give a visual difference. They’re not wives yet, but they’re not little girls anymore.” Inspired by the style? Shop the similarly styled City Chic Blushing Belle Faux Fur Collar Coat from Nordstrom, available in women’s sizes 14W to 24W.

500 shoes, 100 handmade cloaks and bonnets and 900 meters of wool...

Also, red is so impossible usually on film. It can be really ugly," she continued. "It can take all the color and pull it towards itself and you’re not going to look at anything else. Of course you still do that a little bit in our show, but I tried to find what I call an intellectual red. That wasn’t blaring.”