Back to my occasional quest to give fuller posts to movies we’ve only covered in a podcast, what could be better suited for October than 2015’s Crimson Peak?
Director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro wanted to create a gothic romance crossed with a ghost story, and he enlisted costume designer Kate Hawley to help bring his vision to life. Focusing around three characters and two distinctive locations, the costumes and sets are rich with symbolism to emphasize the storytelling.
On MotionPictures.org, Kate Hawley said:
“Guillermo already had a strong idea of what the ghosts were, and the color coding he wanted for the settings and costumes. Buffalo, NY, with its cornucopia of wealth and overt lusciousness had warm and gold hues, while Allerdale Hall in England is a world of winter and starvation, cold blue hues. I responded immediately. I read the script and then we got to work and built layers into these ideas.”
Hawley did historical research and gathered inspiration from art, continuing:
“Del Toro and I looked through lots of paintings for references, I would do mood boards and sketches of costume ideas. My costume department would cut small, theatrical installations of sets, adding fabrics and props for each character. So it’s like magpie-ing. I magpie from everywhere. And then we distilled things based on Del Toro’s response.”
In Jezebel, she also talked about her research and methods:
“I went into looking at themes, like symbolist painters. There’s an early draft of the film where they go to see some of the works of Rodin, the early symbolist painter, and that’s my world too. Guillermo and I have very similar books on our shelves. Sometimes I’ll go down little rabbit holes and borrow from very contemporary things, like in terms of color or, I found a photograph of a dead canary because I’d gone down into coal mines and all of it felt like it was answering many things at once.”
In our podcast, we talked about the story and the costumes overall, and now I want to go though the main character’s costumes in detail. First off, when does the movie take place? There’s a scene before the main story begins, showing Edith Cushing as a child, then the narrative picks up 14 years later, and this is supposed to be in 1901 (the date is shown briefly on a paper). However, the fashions worn by Edith and the folks around her would be at least 5 years outdated. Supposedly the Sharpe brother and sister are meant to look very old-fashioned, wearing 1880s styles. But Edith Cushing is a young heiress in 1901 and could afford the latest fashions. The giant-sleeved looks she usually wears were most popular from 1894 to 1896. Take a look at the evolution here:
The costume designer made a point of saying she referenced historical fashion in Jezebel:
“The silhouette is absolutely Victorian. None of what I’ve done is not real. Once you have the silhouette and hold true to them, then it’s in the other details that we can play around with things and fit them into the whole Guillermo world that he’s trying to create.
We made conscious decisions between the worlds of Allerdale and Buffalo, where with the clothes in Buffalo we used sewing machines on the men’s clothes and hand finishing, but all the clothes are hand-stitched, especially with Jessica’s [Lucille Sharpe’s] clothes, because it really sits against the body in a completely different way. No one will notice it but it really makes a difference in the construction. And things like the types of corsets we chose, the underpinnings which would define the outer structure, they’re all true to the period.”
You can definitely see the historical shapes in the costumes, and it’s fine for a movie to pick a certain historical fashions because that better fits their idea of what the characters should look like. But I’m going to point out that it doesn’t sync up with the movie’s stated dates, that’s why I’m here!
Now let’s look through the costumes worn by the main characters, chronologically during the film.
Edith Cushing’s Costumes in Crimson Peak
Mia Wasikowska plays Edith (as an adult; Sofia Wells plays her as a young girl briefly) and usually wears yellow and orange colors with white, grey, and even green tones. As Kate Hawley told NZ Life & Leisure Magazine, “Edith is all about smiling, blooming fertility, with a gold colour palette.”
The first costume we see her in is this double-breasted suit with big 1890s sleeves:
The collar and those double-breasted buttons remind me of this bicycling outfit, although the sleeves in the extant garment aren’t quite as big:
Edith’s jacket has sleeves more like this size:
The skirt from that suit is worn many times in the film. She wears it with this very full blouse at her father’s office, accessorized with a tie.
The costume designer was inspired by Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson girl” drawings:
Also compare with tailor-made blouses of the period:
That same orange skirt from the suit is worn with another blouse (which she also wears in an earlier scene), and the “hands” belt can be seen better during this picnic with the Sharpes.
The silhouette of this outfit is typical of the period, as shown in fashion plates like this:
But the details make the costume fit this gothic horror movie. Kate Hawley described this unique belt in Elle magazine:
“There’s a mourning belt that Edith wears, you’d describe it as slightly creepy, but I have a tendency towards the creepy. Mourning was such a constant presence in Victorian society so on that sort of detail I was looking at mourning jewellery. People plaited the hair and braids of their loved ones that had passed away and there were little ivory earrings and things. I took these little earrings, these ivory hands, and we scaled them up so it was almost like a mother’s hands clasped around her waist. We kept the original detail of weaving the braid — which was a Victorian thing — but again, it was scaled up.”
That design is reminiscent of extant mourning jewelry like:
Continuing in the same color scheme is Edith’s gold (with a green tinge) velvet robe she wears at home. It’s decked with bunches of ivory flowers and green leaves, continuing the blooming growth theme of this character.
The shape of this gown is similar to styles seen in period advertisements:
The most dramatic ensemble Edith wears in Buffalo is this white satin evening gown with matching cape. She glows!
This style is faintly reminiscent of grand ensembles like in this portrait:
But the sweeping gown looks a bit more 1900s to me — the only costume in the movie that’s really close to the supposed year the movie is set!
I’m not hair-obsessed like Kendra, but I’ll note that the overall hairstyling in this movie has a decent historical look. Edith’s hair with this evening gown is particularly lovely:
And it does look right from the period:
For a dinner and the scenes that follow, Edith wears this more subdued white gown that has a pleated, ruched effect.
The style of this gown comes just later after the big puffed sleeve. It’s edging towards the pidgeon-breast “S-bend” fashions of the 1900s.
That sleeve shape with the stacked ruffles at the shoulder are distinct to this very end of the century.
Edith marries Thomas and travels to his home of Allerdale Hall in England. She’s first seen there wearing this long grey coat. The coat’s capelet has a rather Art Nouveau trim, and she wears a sort of stole or scarf and matching muff made of bright velvet flowers.
In Elle magazine, costume designer Kate Hawley described this outfit:
“With things like the flowers and fruits, we had violets [on her coat] when she arrives at Allerdale Hall to enhance the symbolism of this luscious living thing, in contrast to the barrenness of Allerdale. We did away with a lot of traditional things such as lace and formal embroidery, and instead did things based on the themes of our characters and the world we were trying to create. We always based ourselves in the period but I let go a little bit and trusted my instinct in terms of going with things that help tell the story.”
Later, when Edith briefly leaves Allerdale to go to the nearby post office, all these floral touches are removed from her coat, and even the coat’s ribbons look darker. She’s been affected by the darkness of Allerdale Hall, slowly being poisoned by Lucille.
Now that she’s living at a big English mansion out in the middle of nowhere, this gothic heroine needs a white nightgown to run around in! Though we actually see Edith’s iconic puff-sleeved nightgown in the very first scene of the movie, as a sort of premonition.
She’s up at night so it does make sense that her hair is hanging loose, and furthermore, costume designer Kate Hawley had a specific idea with this style as she told Elle magazine:
“I was looking at a lot of symbolist paintings at the time and I found that image of ‘The Bridesmaid,’ a painting by Sir John Everett Millais, with all her hair out … its quite pre-Raphaelite. From all the research we did on hair and mourning, there are all these amazing mourning photographs of women wearing their hair out. So that image of Edith you’re talking about came from Millais’ painting. It was about creating the atmosphere of the house as a living, breathing thing. We chose the lightest fabrics for the nightdresses so that everything responded to movement and accentuated that mood.”
The costume designer also said in Jezebel:
“I’ve never done so many nighties and nightgowns! It’s all about running around in night dresses through long corridors. That also blended to the fabric. When Guillermo said to me, “It’s about a house that breathes,” that’s why we chose the lightest fabric, just a little thing to try and help the storytelling with the idea of the house.”
The movie’s nightgown is an exaggerated version of what would have been worn in the period. Compare with these historical advertisements:
Edit also wears the nightgown with this green robe accented in yellow gold (her colors again).
The massive scale of this robe is less like the velvet wrapper Edith worn in Buffalo at her father’s home. This new one is more like the tea gowns of the era that were worn for daytime at-home events, such as:
This next vivid yellow dress harkens back to that orange suit Edith wore at the beginning of the movie, at home, before she met Thomas Sharpe. But now it’s bigger, more exaggerated, more elaborate.
While it’s exaggerated, the shape is still right out of period fashion plates like this:
Costume designer Kate Hawley discussed the sleeve size inspiration for these costumes in Elle magazine:
“We actually had a very beautiful piece given to us. We worked with a company which does a lot with period pieces and costumes in England, and they did all of Tim Hiddleston’s costumes by hand. But they had an original 1890s/late 1890’s gown with a bodice, and we actually analysed the sleeve action going on — it was 3.5m of fabric per sleeve! So the dresses we did for Mia were the same, just on the sleeves alone. They’re quite structural and complex; that original gown came from an old couture house in Paris.”
Check out this period pattern to see how all that fabric can fit into a sleeve:
Edith has one other costume — she wears this green velvet bodice with what has to be the skirt from her orange suit from earlier. Just the lighting changes the skirt color from scene to scene.
Again with those giant sleeves! Right out of that 1894 to 1896 period, like this photo
Lucille Sharpe’s Costumes in Crimson Peak
In contrast to Edith Cushing is as Lucille Sharpe, played by Jessica Chastain. The first time Lucille is introduced, she’s wearing this amazing red bustle gown, which is probably the most memorable costume in the whole film. And yet, it was a last-minute addition! Kate Hawley told Jezebel:
“That was a pretty full-on dress, one of the last that we did. Guillermo and Jessica decided that we needed another dress and we had like, two weeks. The blue dress was like six weeks to build after prototyping! It was trying to get the right reds and the detail, the lacing, was about trying to feel like her spine; I was looking at pictures of starvation in the world of Allerdale. And Jessica’s a beautifully curvy woman if you see her in person, she’s actually quite voluptuous in a petite way, but I wanted to get that sense of bones so we did that with colors. We wanted to bring in the Jacobian, tragedy world of the house to the costumes.”
That ruff (and even the hair decorations) was inspired by 16th-century portraits like this:
As you can see from this display, Lucille’s red bustle gown doesn’t just stand out because of the color, but because of the silhouette. She wears styles from the 1880s while Edith wears 1890s fashions. In the film, Edith remarks that Thomas’ clothes are very well made but a decade or more out of date, indicating his family has lost their fortune. So this could explain why Lucille wears old-fashioned clothes. I think it also just sets Lucille apart from the “modern” world of Edith and Buffalo, New York, making her an oddity.
I’m also reminded of such iconic red bustle gowns as the one Mina wore in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Ellen wore in The Age of Innocence (1993). The red gown can sometimes symbolize the slut or whore, but in a gothic romance, red takes on everything from rebellion to death, and all of these work as part of Lucille’s character.
But it was also a popular color in the period! There are plenty of extant red bustle gowns like this:
I love this fashion plate because it feels like a “normal” version of Lucille’s two elaborate gowns, the red and blue:
The next costume Lucille is seen in is a luscious black velvet bustle dress, where she seems very matchy and twinning with her brother Thomas. This picnic scene further highlights the differences between Lucille and Edith, which costume designer Kate Hawley describes in Variety as: “You have the world of the moon, and black, and Lucille being the moth, and Edith being the butterfly.”
This is such a typical 1880s look. There are absolute tons of extant dresses, photos, and artwork showing black gowns like this. I was particularly amused to find these paintings all showing women in black gowns with white accents and often with a flower corsage, just like Lucille.
At home in Allerdale Hall, Lucille wears a deep blue velvet gown that almost blends into the house. She’s at one with her surroundings again. Costume designer Kate Hawley describes how the character reflects her environment in NZ Life & Leisure Magazine, saying:
“Lucille is a withered vine where nothing grows. Guillermo wanted to exaggerate Jessica Chastain’s height and slimness, so we had to find a language to make this amazingly beautiful woman look skinny. I looked at lots of photos of the English moors with sheep skeletons in the snow. We decided to paint into the fabric of her dress to suggest a hint of her bones coming through, did lacing on the back so it became like a spine, and fitted everything tight. Jessica then had the idea to wear nine-inch stripper heels. She could run in those heels. Amazing.”
Lucille’s final outfit is this white smock with super-full sleeves and a deep green cloak. It has a Pre-Raphaelite feel, although I couldn’t peg it to a specific artwork.
Thomas Sharpe’s Costumes in Crimson Peak
Tom Hiddleston plays Thomas Sharpe, which is quite enjoyable! But his clothes aren’t as interesting as the one scene where takes ’em off, heh. Otherwise, it’s worth noting that he wears black in Buffalo and then blue-green in Allerdale Hall. Like Lucille, he blends into his familial home when given the chance.
Is Crimson Peak part of your Halloween viewing?
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