Handmaid's Tale Womens Fancy Dress Costume

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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. 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. It’s like two kids making a plan for something crazy, seriously we get that excited, even after thousands of months.” The Wives are the only place where there’s a bit of freedom, visually,” Crabtree said. “The commanders’ wives were a place where I could expand my mind visually and create. We wanted to come from a place of reality.” And while the Wives of the elite wouldn’t be able to dress provocatively, she still wanted to create details — fine stitching, pleats — to create class differentiations. “There’s no grand design, there’s no flowery, there’s no excess,” she said. “What’s beautiful is how simple and plain [it is.]” 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.”

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.” 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.” When thinking about how the show’s wardrobe might translate into the real world, Kavanagh likens June’s style to a “reporter in a war zone,” in which each garment has a purpose—and sometimes even more than one. “She is always in good footwear that she can run in,” says Kavanagh, “she’s layered up a lot.” 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. 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...

If you can't quite shake the world the Margaret Atwood brought into existence then you might as well lean in. Step into the sensible shoes of the Handmaids and you'll feel closer than ever to characters like the tough and rebellious June. In fact, you can really shake things up and get a group of ladies together for one of the eeriest group costumes that people have seen in a while. 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.) 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.” Crabtree mostly works with her team of designers, but when schedules permit, she and the show’s Emmy winning Director of Photography Colin Watkinson merge their talents. The Handmaid’s tale was being really lived out in Missouri, with those legislatures trying to take the agency of those Medicaid patients away,” Mead said.

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... For a very long time, before people were literate, there were rules about who could wear what,” Atwood said. “By looking at a person you could see whether they were an aristocrat or what function in society they fulfilled.” Helen Lewis, the associate editor of the New Statesman, who is currently working on a book on the history of feminism, argues that the handmaid’s outfit is effective in part because of the aesthetic impact of the scarlet cloaks in the locations where they have been employed.

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Red was also the color of “medieval, early renaissance painting,” Atwood said, and the color worn by Mary Magdalene — who is often remembered, many would say mistakenly, as a fallen woman.

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. 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. 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.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. Credit: Old Dutch Cleanser company. Atwood says this image inspired the bonnets the Handmaids wear.