Demure bonnets, stately jackets, and swanning skirts: the costumes in the latest adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility—starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and George MacKay—may look antique, but the references are not. Costume designer Grace Snell blended the earthy realness of the late Georgian/Regency period setting (1795–1799) with a touch of dramatic high fashion from some of her personal favorite designers. Think Romeo Gigli’s 1987 designs for Callahan (big skirts, snatched jackets) and Comme des Garçons 1994 collections (shrunken boiled wool jackets, big skirts). Snell intentionally focused on the design language of Ann Demeulemeester and Rei Kawakubo.
“They’re actually quite important to this idea of big skirts and tailored jackets,” says Snell. “I was thinking of this kind of juxtaposition of fighting those two things and I was looking back through all the portraits of the time and just trying to find my own version of this.” The film comes with its own fandom and fashion expectations. The book was previously made into the Oscar-winning 1995 film starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet and is based on Austen’s 1811 novel, which follows the Dashwood sisters and their widowed mother in 18th-century England, as they leave their estate and the two eldest sisters, Elinor and Marianne, begin their own dynamic journeys of love, loss, and growth.
The Austen classic has been remade for the screen this time with a new approach to color when it comes to the fashion, which is key to the storytelling. There’s a ballroom scene where it best comes to light: all the women in white or very light dresses and all the men in dark suits, like an old painting. “I was keen that we had quite a distinctive color palette to the film,” says Snell. “Because we’d decided to make this palette our own, we did a lot of our dye work with natural materials and natural dyes.” The meticulous process involved getting the faded, worn colors just right for the multiple copies of each outfit needed, like when Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) wears an elderflower yellow dress that gets wet.
“My influences were really varied, and I tried to view the period piece from an emotional angle, rather than being shackled to the historical accuracy of the film.” Snell put extensive research into the fabrics of the period, sourcing antique textiles, as well as hunting down fabrics that were very similar and are still made today. Take, for example, Margaret’s (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) waistcoat made from an existing 17th-century garment that the team purchased. They lined it with sheep’s wool, adapting it to be inspired by the environment. Elsewhere, Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) wears a waistcoat, adapted from a men’s waistcoat with an extreme, beautiful high collar. Snell and her team sourced antique-inspired jewelry from Camden Market in London and scoured antique shops for real antique textile scraps to curate a box full of ribbons and lace that Marianne could use to style herself throughout the film, “to get that kind of more realistic kind of outfit,” says Snell.
But vital to the fashion storytelling in the new Sense and Sensibility are the dress shapes of the sisters. “There’s a period in fashion history in the late 1790s where the empire line is coming into fashion,” says Snell. “But the fullness of the skirts is not quite slimmed down to that column shape that we associate with regency fashions. So a lot of these women are wearing an empire line, but with a lot more fullness in the front of the skirt. This was something that I really wanted our sisters to have.” Snell shares that she wanted to highlight the silhouette given it was not extremely well documented in history, since it only lasted for about five years through transitioning styles.
Throughout the film, the sisters grow into their own styles in an intentional way. By the time they’re both in London, they start presenting themselves from their own points of view. “I wanted our audience to feel like they were in the room with this family, and sometimes with period costume, it can be so put together so we can be observers reviewing it from high above,” says Snell. “I wanted to find a way to reimagine period costume so that we could see ourselves in these sisters, and we could see ourselves within the styling, and it might be something that we could wear today.”
Sense and Sensibility is in theaters now.
