Dress to repress
Wives, Aunts, Marthas, Handmaids and Unwomen – there’s a look for each of you in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Dystopian drama The Handmaid’s Tale (2017- current, season 1 can be streamed from Showmax) is like a terrible warning from the future, but it’s a future where they understand that there is nothing we love more than a great show! We witness through flashbacks how the United States became Gilead, a place where women are treated as men’s property and assigned demeaning social roles dictated by appearance and fertility. Head of wardrobe Ane Crabtree (who worked on sci-fi series Westworld, 2016- current) has dressed The Handmaid’s Tale characters in visually striking uniforms to demonstrate how Gilead denies women’s individuality and enforces its rules by stripping away women’s compassion for one another by eroding any common ground between them.
WIFE
Identified by: teal blue uniforms, a colour linked to the Virgin Mary. Character: Serena (Yvonne Strahovski). Who: Serena Joy is married to Commander Fred (Joseph Fiennes) and as such, she holds a “pure” (but mostly infertile) woman’s most privileged position. Before Gilead, she was a TV evangelist who preached women’s “natural” social position as subservient to all men.
AUNT
Identified by: a khaki-brown uniform based on women’s World War II uniforms, playing up their unquestioning obedience to authority. Character: Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd). Who: Lydia uses victim-blaming to disempower the women sent to her for re-education as Handmaids. Aunts are older women, past the age of fertility, who provide Commanders (the male ruling class) with Handmaids – fertile women they have tortured into submitting to the monthly “breeding ceremony”. Before Gilead, someone like Lydia would have been screaming abuse outside an abortion clinic.
HANDMAID
Identified by: red, tent-like dresses, set in opposition to Wives’ fitted teal gowns. The white wings of their headpieces are meant to prevent them from communicating without being obvious. Character: June/Offred (Elisabeth Moss). Who: the Handmaids are fertile women assigned to be Gilead’s breeding herd, regardless of their sexual orientation. Their names are all prefixed by the letters “OF” – as in “one of his” – and the second part of the name is the name of their owner. So June has now become Fred’s sex-slave “Offred”.
MARTHA
Identified by: drab, moss- green uniforms with pinafores, based on an old cleaning mop that Ane saw. Character: Rita (Amanda Brugel). Who: Marthas (named after the Martha in the New Testament) are unmarried, infertile women assigned to be drudges – house slaves who clean, act as nannies and boss the Handmaids a bit.
UNWOMAN
Identified by: skimpy, sexualised clothes. Character: Moira (Samira Wiley). Who: an Unwoman has proven to be infertile after being “tried” by three Commanders (any mention of men’s possible sterility is a capital offence). It also includes the rebellious – from nuns to lesbians. They are either sent to secret brothels or to The Colonies to clean up toxic waste for years.
As Commander Fred tells Offred in episode 5, “We only wanted to make the world better. Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some.”