Michele Clapton
‘Game of Thrones’
Queen Cersei’s (Lena Headey) stunning red velvet and gold-embossed “power” dress, exquisitely structured and embroidered, is Clapton’s favorite series outfit. “I love the structure of Cersei’s costumes and the way we use them to tell her emotional state, her attitude,” Clapton says. “I love that sense of carelessness in the way she wears things.”
Fit onto a corset base, the fabric was funneled up and out over the neckline, and taken around the top of the queen regent’s arms. “I love the way it hovers around her shoulders,” says Clapton, whose costume budget is among the larger ones for television. “It’s like an armor, a shell. It implies how cold and isolated she is as a character; don’t touch her. It’s also an incredibly flattering line.”
The embroidery is done in-house (as are most of the costumes) and had to be loud and “extremely emblematic, to underline Cersei’s belief in the Lannister family strength,” notes Clapton, so she prominently featured the Lannister crest of a lion and the color red with masculine metal beads and rings “as a representation of the frustration Cersei feels at the [isolated] position she’s forced into.” “The challenges were the very reason I was initially so interested in wanting to design this series,” says Clapton about the complexities of “Throne’s” fantasy realm. “It was important to all of us that it didn’t just become another fantasy show, which so often heavily rely on medievalstyle costumes or costumes that make no sense, have no depth.”