Handmaid's Tale Womens Fancy Dress Costume

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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. 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. Why the handmaid’s uniform has come to represent a constellation of issues affecting women is as telling as the phenomenon itself, with Atwood among those reflecting on why the costume she imagined as the most visible articulation of the subjugation of women by the imaginary state of Gilead has become such a potent medium for dissent. Speaking of group costumes, we here at Halloweencostumes.com have some serious dreams for these Handmaids Tale costumes. We'd love to see a group of Handmaids walking around the streets of New England. You could even delegate your most intimidating friend to be an aunt. She could dress up in a brown dress, military style boots, and an extremely stern expression. If you don't get an award for the best group costume for this amazing look, we don't know what would work!

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.]”The image used in The Handmaid’s Tale cuts right to heart of the toxic relationship between church and state. 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 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.”

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.” It may feel odd to think of fashionand the hit Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale in the same thought. After all, the show’s violent and oftentimes graphic portrayal of a dystopian future isn’t necessarily intended to inspire a fashionable silhouette. Yet still, costumes from the series have transcended the screen in interesting ways. It’s not unusual to see women don the iconic crimson handmaid’s robes to attend protests in the U.S. and abroad. And in 2017, New York-based avant-garde fashion label Vaquera even famously collaborated with Hulu to design a collection of dresses inspired by the series. 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.” 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.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.” 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.” 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. 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.”

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.

Dressing for uncertain times in the real world

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.” 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. Crabtree was returning to the US, when she first saw pictures of demonstrators in Handmaid’s Tale costumes on social media, she said.

Credit: Old Dutch Cleanser company. Atwood says this image inspired the bonnets the Handmaids wear. Costume designer Ane Crabtree kept working and working at the color, Moss said, until they came up with the perfect blood red. In general, the costumes and colors were intended to reflect the hierarchy the women live in — symbolism of dress that is not without historical precedent.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.