Handmaid's Tale Womens Fancy Dress Costume

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One of the most disturbing scenes in the early episodes is also one of the quietest: Ofglen and Offred are standing in front of a store, both garbed in their regulation red, staring at a window of children’s robes, miniature replicas of the handmaid’s own ensembles but paler in hue. “This used to be an ice cream shop,” Ofglen whispers. Reflecting on the task of creating these nightmare silhouettes for tiny girls, Crabtree says, “It had to feel like it could really happen. It has to feel like now.” We really wanted to jolt some attention to it and the handmaids were really effective in generating attention and press coverage.” Referencing the handmaids’ standard uniform, Crabtree shared, “This is a kind of very modern, sporty, Gortex that we now secretly use to put the inside the capes.” Okay, okay. Maybe we're getting away from ourselves. You don't have to stage a coup over your book club even if that would be best for everyone involved. All you need to do is have macabre fun wearing this ensemble. Put on your most pious (or your most secretly subversive) expression. The Handmaid's Tale costume is a great option for a maternitycostume as well as a look for literature majors and people who want to stir up some serious discussions about basic rights and freedoms.

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.The image used in The Handmaid’s Tale cuts right to heart of the toxic relationship between church and state. 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 has been donned by pro-choice protesters during Ireland’s successful referendum to revoke the eighth amendment of its constitution and by abortion rights campaigners in Buenos Aires. 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.)

The change in the setting of the series allowed Kavanagh a great deal of creative freedom to develop an updated aesthetic for the show’s central characters. “I was really able to push a few boundaries of what’s been in place there,” she says, referring to the iconic season-one costumes that were originally designed by costume designer Ane Crabtree. To learn more about the role of fashion, power and revolution—and how this conversation impacts every single one of us—we sat down to chat with Leslie Kavanagh, the costume designer behind season five of The Handmaid’s Tale. Kavanagh’s careful guidance of the series as it forges new pathways and possibilities inspired us to think about the role clothing plays in our own lives—and even the style lessons to be learned through this important show. Conveying gender and power through costuming The Handmaid’s Tale While the costumes worn by characters in Toronto were dominated by multi-functional, utilitarian styles in muted color palettes, Kavanagh’s most distinctive costumes this season might be those worn by The Plums. Debuted in the second episode of the season, the Plums are the daughters of prominent commanders and their wives in Gilead—young women who, it is revealed later on in the season, were in training to become wives themselves. Outside of the color spectrum, Crabtree applied her design expertise to small subtleties that may go unnoticed by most viewers. “I gave the Handmaids lace-up boots that were modeled after a pair I have, but then I took away their laces so that they can’t even consider killing themselves,” she says; that move is also a reference to Atwood’s original novel, in which many Handmaids attempted self-harm to escape their warped reality. “We sewed the grommets down, and then on top of that we did a boot cover, so they can’t even be reminded that they used to have laces. It’s just a sleek cover. That was a way of oppressing them mentally.” 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.

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

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. 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. If you’re inspired by Kavanagh’s thoughtful costumes, the on-screen styles can be easily replicated from a handful of retailers whose designs are similarly inspired by wartime fashions. The Midi Flare Dress in Double Knit from Ann Taylor offers a modest style that is still elegant and fashion forward. The style is available in Pure Sapphire shade in women’s sizes 00 to 16. The version adopted by protesters is the one made concrete by designer Ane Crabtree for the television series of the book. 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.

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. In Ireland, it was used in context of the ban on abortion, because women had a sense that the state thinks of us like vessels and incubators,” said Taylor. 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.” She added: “In countries that prohibit birth control and reproductive health information, the state claims ownership of women’s bodies through enforced childbearing. What the costume is really asking viewers is: do we want to live in a slave state?”

You would have no idea the different interpretations of the color red that one can come up with,” she said. “Not only the color that it should be for the show but the color that it would photograph as.” When you're a Handmaid's Tale fan, it can be difficult to stop thinking about the world of Gilead. You might want to stop thinking about it. It's a cold, dark, quiet, and unbelievably frighteningworld. So yeah, it would be good to leave Gilead behind when the last episode of Handmaid's Tale season three airs. But the red robes and white bonnets still haunt Handmaid's Tale fans when we think about the small freedoms of our daily lives. The hidden stuff is we have to redesign for the weather in Canada because it’s freezing, right?” she told Nightline. “I didn’t want a show where everyone is walking around in sleeping bags, it wouldn’t be good for the story. I’m learning on this show a way to make things hidden, they're kind of like inventions on warmth.”