Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale imagined a dystopian future where women are stripped of autonomy and sorted into color-coded castes. When Hulu adapted the story in 2017, costume designer Ane Crabtree had to bring to life uniforms that already existed in readers' minds.In the novel, Offred talks about the clothing like this: I get up out of the chair, advance my feet into the sunlight, in their red shoes, flat-heeled to save the spine and not for dancing. The red gloves are lying on the bed. I pick them up, pull them onto my hands, finger by finger. Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us. Where did this come from, for Atwood?It turns out that a childhood memory of a cleaning product terrified her as a child.In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Atwood revealed the origin of the handmaids' distinctive red cloaks and white bonnets. She brought up the Old Dutch Cleanser packaging, which featured a woman whose face was obscured by a bonnet, holding a stick and chasing something. Old Dutch CleanserThe image disturbed young Atwood, and decades later, it became the template for one of fiction's most recognizable costumes.Atwood also explained that the wives would wear blue, referencing the Virgin Mary, while the handmaids would wear red, invoking both Mary Magdalene and Hester Prynne's scarlet letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel. Building the Uniform When Crabtree got the assignment, she approached the project as both a longtime...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Monday, 10 November