CLOTHES ENCOUNTERS
It's a golden age for costume drama. Lisa Armstrong wonders, does it matter that the details are so wrong?
Thanks to all the money sloshing around those streaming networks, there have never been so many lavish costume dramas to gorge on.
In the comet-tail afterglow of Netflix's megabucks Bridgerton comes Hulu's The Great, an account of Catherine the Great and her husband Peter, the considerably less great. It stars Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult, and shares a co-producer with The Favourite.
That last detail tells you a lot. Like The Favourite, The Great makes virtue of its playfulness and skilful flouting of the “rules” of historical accuracy. It opens in 1745 when 16-year-old Catherine, née Sophie, arrives in Russia from Prussia, costumes and hair sliding all over the historical time zones. She's a pastel-clad, blond ingenue reminiscent of that other 18th-century pastel-clad ingenue, the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette, who haunts almost every frame of Sofia Coppola's eponymous 2006 film.
As with The Favourite, The Great gives the impression its breaches of accuracy aren't the results of ignorance or sloppiness but a studied attempt to breathe new life into what has often been dismissed as a faded genre.
Every decade has its own way of interpreting the past on film. The 1990s took pride in strict accuracy. In Ang Lee's 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet were given detailed lessons on early 19th-century deportment so they moved correctly.
These days, interpretations are more lateral. Soundtracks and fabrics are deliberately anachronistic (Bridgerton features a stringed arrangement of an Ariana Grande song). Provided there are enough knowing references and correct period details to make the audience feel they're being talked up rather than down to, and assuming the esthetic “feels” right, many viewers, including historical experts, are happy to approve of these shows.
“The silhouettes are good in The Great,” says Bernadette Banner, a fashion historian whose hugely popular assessments of recent costume productions on YouTube testify to the interest in the subject. “They were wearing proper undergarments so everyone was positioned properly.”
She's less impressed by the hair and makeup in the first episode but, as the multi-Oscar winning costume designer Anthony Powell once said, “if you showed audiences how people really looked in the 18th century they would be repulsed — or so distracted they couldn't concentrate on anything else.”
Besides, what is absolute accuracy? Portrait painters often heavily varnished the truth so we'll never know for sure what Anne Boleyn or Catherine the Great looked like. The important thing is that we gain insight into their characters and context.
That's why for many, the daring costumes in 2018's Mary Queen of Scots were the best thing about what was an otherwise ploddy retelling of a familiar story.
There's no evidence that Mary, played by Saoirse Ronan, had multiple ear piercings, as she does here, but they indicate a punkish spirit. And I've never seen a portrait of Mary with a hairdo like the one she and her ladiesin-waiting wear when they arrive in Scotland from the French court — featuring a kind of French hood made from their own hair.
“There are very few portraits of Mary,” explained Jenny Shircore, who designed the hair and makeup for the film. “So I researched the entire period and then made up my own story around that. It's my interpretation of what Mary Queen of Scots would've done.” The effect is arresting.
Arguably it was Coppola's fastand-loose Marie Antoinette that set the standard for today's “posttruth” historical bodice-rippers, which are less interested in slavish accuracy than forging a deeper emotional connection with contemporary audiences.
Coppola always said she was trying to get to the heart of how it must have felt to be a teen queen suffocating in an alien court and simultaneously seduced by its deadly extravagance.
Halfway through Bridgerton's first episode, the Featheringtons' neon pinks and yellows, and the Bridgertons' obsessively colour
coordinated blue interiors and outfits began to make me slightly queasy.
Then I got over myself. Bridgerton, set in 1813, has its faults, but the costumes aren't necessarily among them. People are clearly engaged with the esthetic.
Not everyone is a fan. Queen Charlotte's anachronistic panniers and tall wigs have incensed some viewers far more than the series' fantastical reimagination of Black history. But Queen Charlotte represents the older generation so her clothes could plausibly have been stuck in a previous era.
Others were so outraged by the corsets when “everyone knows corsets weren't worn under Empire line dresses,” they switched off.
Yet corsets were worn under Empire lines. Those “simple” shifts of the French Revolution still required cantilevering. Corsets were shortened and rebranded as stays. Their function wasn't so much to shrink the waist as to push up breasts and improve posture. By 1820, dandies wore them, too. So did some children. Metal was introduced into their construction and their manufacture was considered so physically demanding they could only be made by men until the latter half of the 19th century.
In the end, the clue's in the name — costumes are critical to a costume drama's success, not just as sugar coating but for what they reveal about character and the social mores of the time. No one wants to see zips in a Jane Austen or Uggs in a Nancy Mitford, but while purists may never be satisfied, the rest of us will settle for illuminating diversion.