With frequent discourse over historical accuracy, ‘iPhone faces’, and workplace safety, costume design and styling in film and tv has become something of a minefield, particularly in period pieces. Just this past month, Bridgerton has come under fire after Simone Ashley commented on the frequent physical discomfort she experienced wearing stays (a corset, if you haven’t brushed up on your historical fashion terminology) on-set. Meanwhile, Daisy Jones and the Six, a new TV show set in the 1970s, has faced backlash for the characters’ overly “modern” looks. This might seem like a lose-lose situation created by an audience determined to complain about everything (and, well, I can’t deny that I am a hater), but I truly believe that character styling has by and large lost its way.
First thing’s first: safety in the workplace must come first, and if that means ditching stays and corsets, then I’m fine with that, no matter how beautiful they are or how important to the period aesthetic. The problem is that there is an alternative solution that many productions are more than capable of, and simply choose not to do: fit corsets properly. Historically, stays and corsets were custom-made for their wearers and, unless they were tight-laced, did not cause bruising or severe discomfort. Not that they were perfect or “just like a bra”, as some have argued, but they shouldn’t be causing the harm reported. A production like Bridgerton, which custom-made every single one of its costumes including the undergarments, has absolutely no excuse for not putting more care into these undergarments and properly fitting them to the actresses. The state of costuming is not a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation precisely because dangerous corsetry does not come from an adherence to historical accuracy, but rather from laziness and a disdain for historical aesthetics. Funnily enough, the exact same problem plagues Daisy Jones and the Six all the way at the perceived other end of the spectrum.
Every period piece will inevitably show some signs of the time they were made, so I don’t really hold it against Daisy Jones and the Six that the costume design heavily favours those elements of 1970s fashion which are currently experiencing a revival. In fact, we can see the same thing in the costume design of Almost Famous, an obvious comparison. The problem comes when this is combined with the hair and makeup, and even the actors’ faces. In promo pics, female characters are shown with contouring, Instagram brows, meticulously tamed blow-outs, perfect teeth, and (potentially?) lip fillers. People have mocked the idea of ‘faces that have seen an iPhone’, and it’s true that anyone can be born at any time with any face, but fillers and botox are certainly a thing of the present and are noticeably out of place in other time periods. Even taking cosmetic enhancements aside, certain faces go in and out of fashion, and when every single face in your period piece is a ‘trendy face’ it simply stretches the bounds of belief.
The popular response to criticisms of overly modern aesthetics by costume designers and hair and makeup designers in recent years has been that beauty standards of the past need to be made “understandable” to the modern viewer. This is a fine goal – I don’t think there’s a single person alive who could find the beauty in 17th century Spanish court dress (don’t believe me? Google it) – but this is not a new idea, nor are historical and modern beauty standards mutually exclusive. Designers have been doing this forever while still managing to capture the flavour of the period. Look back to the 2000s, the 1990s, even the ‘80s, and you will find any number of period pieces that manage to look both of their time and evocative of the period in which they are set. In Titanic, every close up of Rose reveals classic ‘90s lipstick shades and eye makeup, but her sumptuous gowns scream 1910s in their silhouette, materials, and colours. There is no contradiction here – the late ‘90s viewer sees her at once as a beautiful young 1910s woman and simply as a beautiful woman. Marie Antoinette famously showed the title-character owning a pair of converses alongside her 18th century silk mules. As viewers this helped us understand that she was just a normal teenager thrust into the formal world of Versailles.
Costume design and hair and makeup design are not easy – designers need to evoke the period, be understandable to modern viewers, and reveal information about both the characters and the story through aesthetics, all at the same time. I sympathise, but where modern designers go wrong is in throwing out the past altogether with their lack of attention towards crucial aesthetic markers. Bridgerton’s costume designer, Ellen Mirojnick, has made comments about the ugliness of bonnets and muslin, vocally prioritising modern beauty standards over historical aesthetics for the benefit of viewers. She claimed to create the Regency aesthetic through the classic empire waistline and modernise from there, but did she succeed? The waistlines in Bridgerton cut the bust in half, while the materials used cause the skirts to hang stiffly from these awkwardly placed waistlines. The fashion plates on which she based her costumes are a far cry from this. Here, the waistlines are placed just beneath the bust, and light muslins and silks are layered over petticoats and shifts, giving a voluptuous silhouette (something a show marketing itself as the first sexy period drama should surely jump at).
This attitude to historical beauty and fashion is not only dismissive, but condescending. It feels like audiences are being told that we’re too stupid to understand anything beyond what we see on Instagram, that we couldn’t possibly tune ourselves into a visual language outside the one we are bombarded with. Designers couldn’t be more wrong about this, and those rare films that do manage to strike the right balance between historicity and beauty are proof – audiences loved Autumn de Wilde’s Emma for its manicured, colourful Regency wardrobe, while Dolemite Is My Name’s 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes suggests that a dagger collar or two is not the box office poison that designers seem to think. Historical aesthetics are part of what makes period pieces so enjoyable, and we ought to be having fun with them, not discarding them.
“pride and prejudice” by Apostolos Letov is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.“Regency Era Couple” by Linnaea Mallette is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal