Support Frock Flicks with a small donation! During Snark Week and beyond, we’re grateful for your monthly pledges for exclusive content via Patreon or your one-time contributions via Ko-fi or PayPal to offset the costs of running this site. You can even buy our T-shirts and merch. Think of this like supporting public media, but with swearing and no tax deductions!
Several Snark Weeks ago, I ranted about my five least favorite Snark Week tropes, and among them was We Only Have Mud for Dye. You’d think that would cover it, but MAN are they making it hard for me to move on! I think what got me irritated again was all the muddy colors in Outlander: Blood of My Blood, but then Trystan posted about how Hamnet costume designer Malgosia Turzanska was inspired by the colors of MENSTRUAL BLOOD AND SCABS for Jessie Buckley’s wardrobe, and I just about keeled over. Hence, my asterisk in the title, which refers to:
*And, apparently, occasionally menstrual blood.
Oh yes. According to a Variety interview:
“Red becomes the main color palette for Jessie Buckley’s Agnes… ‘We talked about blood, menstrual blood, pumping blood, drying blood and so the different colors of blood are definitely in her’… At one point, she’s in a prune-colored skirt, which Turzanska describes as a dried scab.”
Now, of course costume designers are trying to evoke an era, and there’s two parts to that: researching what was worn in the actual period, including dyes available and popular colors; but also thinking about what modern audiences will FEEL is historically accurate/inspired.
Case in point: I KNOW I read about a medieval property in the UK that had painted a room in a historically accurate color that visitors thought was too modern and bright and they repainted it something subtler. I can’t refind the story, but a good example is the repainting of Stirling Castle, which many felt was too strongly yellow despite that being an appropriately period color. So, I understand why designers and directors choose muddy color palettes for the costumes in historical films and TV series. I just don’t like it.
Why? Because even natural dyes (which are the only dyes available pre-mid-19th century) came in a range of bright colors! Here’s a set of naturally died yarn posted to Facebook by Sally Pointer – Heritage Education:
The Tudor Tailor folks have done extensive research on what colors were available AND POPULAR in England in the 16th century, and they show similar ranges of bright (and, sure, dull) colors in their books. I can’t find a preview of that, but I can show you some ensembles they have made using colors informed by their research that are MUCH brighter than we usually see on screen:
Cases in point, in addition to what I ranted about in my top five post:
Firebrand (2023)
This film featured STUNNING recreations of Tudor clothing designed by Michael O’Connor. The upper classes were bright and glamorous and strong, when appropriate:
But when it came to the lower classes, everyone looked like their clothes were dyed about 300 years ago and ran through a gazillion washes:
The Afore-Mentioned Outlander: Blood of My Blood:
As I discussed in my lengthy review, designer Trisha Biggar told Town & Country magazine,
“They tended to use similar colors because they were dyeing fabrics with plants that were indigenous to their areas. So somebody who had yellow would have yellow in their kilt, and somebody else might have green or red.”
Okay sure, but then why does everyone look like they’ve been overdyed with brown?
Hamnet (2025)
Based on the press, the awards, and the quality of lead actress Jessie Buckley‘s previous work, Hamnet looks like it’s going to be an EXCELLENT film, one I’ll definitely be watching. But the fact that the Anne/Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare’s costumes’ color is INSPIRED BY MENSTRUAL BLOOD AND SCABS IS JUST SO GROSS.
The only other color I can see (granted, so far) is so dark I can’t even tell what color it is:
Especially because if we look BEYOND Anne/Agnes, everyone else is in SUPER washed-out browns and blues:
Which historical films and TV shows have underwhelmed you with muddy colored costumes?
No cap on the leading lady in Hamnet’s final scene drove me crazy! (I am a milliner) especially as EVERYONE ELSE wore one except her brother! I was delighting in the variety of headgear portrayed on the common people. Would it have killed her to put on an unfortunate biggins with her hair hanging down?
I read it as them leaning into Anne/Agnes’ ‘wild spiritual woman of the woods’ characterization. Like of course all the proper women wear their hair up but our leading lady who dresses in the colour of blood and has spiritual kinship with animals must let her hair flow free! (Mild snark, I liked Hamnet a lot as a movie and Jessie Buckley was phenomenal but there was a touch of ‘not like other girls’ to how they presented Anne/Agnes).
OK, “Anne/Agnes’ ‘wild spiritual woman of the woods’ characterization” makes me even less interested in Hamnet bec. that’s such a massive cliche right there UGH.
I immediately thought of Elfine Starkadder in “Cold Comfort Farm”!
OMG, you’re so right! Agnes is what Elfine would’ve been without the makeover
“But when it came to the lower classes, everyone looked like their clothes were dyed about 300 years ago and ran through a gazillion washes”. I read gazillion as Godzilla! Maybe that’s what we need, to liven things up a bit. :)
What always gets me is early 20th century people being dressed in browns as if sepia tintypes were full-color photos.
PREACH
Then preach a second time!
Preach again!
Odyssey by Nolan. The costumes are not only bad, they are also in drab, dull colours. Odysseus was a goddamn king, make him look like one!
He was a king who had just survived a ten-year siege and was frequently shipwrecked on his way home: a certain absence of sartorial splendour is perhaps natural.
He was the one besieging, not the besieged and went in his way home with a nice chunk of Troy’s treasures, expensive fabrics included. He should not be dressing in rags at the beginning of his journey. And certainly not in something that seems to have been a nubby, mud colored fabric even in its heyday (the rag cospkaying his cape).
Not to mention how plastic looking the armour looks. There weren’t 3D printers in Ancient Greece, Mr. Nolan.
Having seen HAMNET just today, I can confirm that it is a good film and can also say that one liked it a good deal, but did not quite love it.
Also, yes, the costuming of the leads is immensely regrettable (Though that theatre scene is a sartorial treasure trove and there are a number of good costumes on the secondary characters).
Extra also, HECK YES to the call for more and brighter colours in Period features: beshrew all productions who just can’t handle the sheer looney MUCHNESS of historical looks, they are Cowards!
Didn’t get to it this Snark Week, but the flip side to ‘we only have mud for dye’ is ‘we’re using aniline dyes way before the 19th century’ ;) That doesn’t happen as much these days, but in the 1950s-60s, everything was much more colorful, whether it would have been historically or not.
In the past 20ish years, the idea that muddy = authentic has taken over.
If we’re going to err I’d sooner err towards whole eras looking like something out of a child’s
Bedtime picture book than suggest whole periods of history were populated by the walking dead.
Not even the Living dead (with cool marble tombs and worryingly-enthusiastic groupies), but like corpses freshly torn out from their graves – their muddy, muddy graves.
Can I say how much I hate Tricia Biggar’s work since she became the principal costume designer for Outlander? The quality of the costuming has really suffered, and whether it was her decision, or making Caitriona Balfe a producer that allowed it, the women on the show no longer had corsets on, making the natural form obvious under their bodices, a big “don’t” in those days if you didn’t want to be considered a loose women. I hate that there’s obvious pleather on the men. Or late 20th century patch pockets on frock coats. Ugh. Sure, her Star Wars trilogy costumes were great, but that’s a fantasy world. If there is life outside our galaxy, we don’t know what any of those beings would wear. Biggar’s done an equally crappy job on Blood of my Blood. I only watched the first two or three episodes and thought, “they’re trying to replicated the original series beat for beat.” Nope. Adding to Trystan’s thought train above, there’s the obvious polyester, ever so springy, when a natural fiber wouldn’t do that on various accessories. Also, when you watch the first series of Poldark, the miners returning from Wheal Leisure are far too clean to be believable. Not so much that they were only “using mud for dye,” or aniline dye, but bandbox fresh unbleached muslin in a variety of weights. IMO, the costuming was just crap on that series. Full stop.
I’m involved in a project transcribing some of the records of the Revels Office in the 1540s-50s. The descriptions of the costumes are astonishing – crimson taffeta, “garded” with purple or yellow, nether sleeves of blue cloth of silver. They did not in any way have our concept of “good taste”, and any bit of colour was not so much worn with pride as flaunted!
What an amazing project!
Prince Hamlet in faded denim is [serious teeth-grinding sound]. Richard Burbage, the leading man in Shakespeare’s company, is shown as a snazzy dresser in his portrait – he’d have put on his absolute best plus any piece of fake jewelry he could find in the costume box to play an actual prince, because the groundlings come to see princes looking and talking like princes, not like slobs in tatty faded clothes.