Accuracy has got the cold shoulder: why the costumes in War and Peace are off-colour
It’s a given that in order to make a period piece “relevant” , you have to put some top spin on it. Hence the sexual frisson between Hélène and her brother Anatole has become a fairly explicit, incestuous bed scene in the BBC’s adaptation of
War and Peace. Andrew Davies, the adapter, says the incest is in Tolstoy’s original, but so subtly alluded to, that most readers (him and myself included) miss it first time round.
Most of us can live with a gifted screenwriter highlighting, truncating and sexing up a 150-yearold 1,000-page novel in order to make it fit six hours of prime time.
But one-shouldered, mauve satin dresses in 1805? Lily James, who plays the heroine Natasha, has praised the veracity of the costumes. I think not. The colour mauve didn’t exist in clothes before the 1890s, when a chemist called William Perkin accidentally produced the world’s first aniline dye while trying to make artificial quinine.
Granted, that’s a fairly dry point, compared with the pleasure of watching the series romp through endless battle scenes on its way to the main action: ie, the costumes. But let’s not pretend they’re accurate.
It’s true that fashions became pretty racy in the early 18th century. Les Merveilleuses (female members of an aristocratic subculture) scandalised Paris with their semitransparent, gauzy dresses, which were rooted in ancient Grecian draping and Rousseau’s endless lectures about “back to nature”. But even Les Mervs drew the line at Gillian Anderson’s Elie Saabstyle, Bafta-esque, one-shouldered frock. I doubt if Tolstoy’s lot would have worn anything like it either, especially during a Moscow winter,
That doesn’t necessarily matter, if the transgressions are intelligently thought through. The Oscar-winning costume designer James Acherson ( Dangerous Liaisons) once told me that if he were wholly accurate, he would alienate modern audiences: “If you slavishly reproduced the chalky make-up, pocked skin and grey wigs of the 1780s, the public would be so grossed out that they couldn’t concentrate.”
For Veronica Isaac, assistant curator at the V&A, who’s working on a PhD in theatre costume, the Beeb venture is a missed opportunity in subtlety. “I understand that they’re aiming for a mass audience and they’ve only got six episodes. They’re trying to differentiate dozens of characters from one another and using costume to do it. Inevitably, that takes precedence over historicism.”
By way of character exposition, Isaac means that the slutty one looks like something out of an Agent Provocateur ad and the men appear to be permanently en route to a ball, even when they’re on the battlefield. (Point of information: although balls were often held on the eve of battle, wools rather than velvets were worn in the field.) Don’t get Isaac started on the sloppiness of the medals or the tailoring.
And the characterisation sometimes goes wrong: Natasha is meant to embody a high mark of maidenly virtue. Yet in the poster her body language looks more like a publicity shot for the Kardashians.
Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to see some genuine 1805 interpretations of foxiness? Rather than mauve and a very 2015 eye-shadow palette of bronzes, suggests Isaac, they could have used red and black and some outré feather head-dresses. “They could have made it sexy while keeping it authentic simply by using the right fabrics,” she says. “Good quality muslin, which was popular in the early 1800s, is sheer and clingy. It leaves nothing to the imagination. Instead, they’ve gone for synthetics in colours that strike a very fake note. The peignoirs that Tuppence Middleton [the naughty incest-ee] wears are straight out of the 1930s.”
You can see what the BBC has done here, with those shimmering pastels and modern body language: imported a red carpet meets reality TV aesthetic. And, as Isaac notes, “not one of them in period underwear”. If you enjoy geeky costume-watching, by the way, have a look at frockflicks.com, which goes into all of this in far more detail.
Ultimately, though, does accuracy matter? Sometimes you have to contextualise the past to uncover truths that might otherwise get lost. It’s not entirely unhelpful to think of the Russian court in 1805 as the red carpet of their day.
Besides, every costume drama can be dated not by the period it’s set in but by when it was made (check out the backcombed hair in the Sixties BBC version of The Forsyte Saga on YouTube). But too many modern liberties mean a sophisticated, nuanced understanding goes out the window. Besides which, do we really want to be judged as an era that worshipped shiny lilac?