“The very last outfit she wears is the brightest blue you’ve ever seen her in,” the costume designer said. “After she loses everything, she makes this decision to fight for what she wants, and through that I took her shapes from that depressed, flowy fabric to an armoured, structured look, tight to the body. Sort of a Jackie Kennedy, Grace Kelly look for her.”
She further went on to talk about her favorite outfit for Serena, “I love the power suit she shows up in to the Putnams’ benediction celebration [in episode four].”
“The only part of the handmaids that was really exposed was the neckline, which can be quite sensual,” she says. “I wanted to muzzle the handmaids. [The veil] sits under the nose, because that allows for acting in the nose and eyes. On the back I put on these gigantic hooks that have a secondary clasp in case they should fall off—which they can’t. The dichotomy of this lightweight fabric and these heavy hooks is quite creepy.”
The Washington handmaids leave a lasting impression in the mind with their mouths literally clenched shut with ring piercings, and further gasped with a neckpiece, inspired by a nun’s wimple. This terrifying imagery along with the underlying theme of women oppression in the real world has made the handmaids’ uniforms to be used extensively in protests across the US and on marches.
“In a weird, twisted way, it makes sense,” says the show’s costume designer, Ane Crabtree. “Women are saying: this was used as a means of controlling women by the patriarchy. We are going to completely twist that around and re-use it.”
“It’s hard to ignore a sea of red,” Bronfman says of the protests. “It makes you stand up and notice. These women are inspiring and they’re fighting for women’s issues, not just in our own country, but in many countries where things are still not equal. I get emails from women in different parts of the world saying, ‘Thank you for giving us this thing we can wear and feel strong in.’ It’s an army of women. You don’t even need to read or write to understand that.”
