How dried scabs influenced the red tones of ‘Hamnet’s’ costumes

“The first image I had in my head was a giant heart muscle, pulsing with blood,” says Malgosia Trzanska, costume designer for “Hamnet.”

Jessie Buckley’s Agnes’ main color palette will be red.

Hamnet, based on the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell and currently in theaters, tells the story of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jesse Buckley), who grieve the loss of their 11-year-old son Hamnet. The film follows a couple trying to reconcile the loss of their child and how William Shakespeare began writing his play Hamlet. Directed by Chloé Zhao, this film is a story of love and loss.

Trzanska says there was no script when she first met Chao. The two were working according to the book. “We talked about blood, menstrual blood, blood pumping, blood drying. She definitely has different colors of blood in her.”

When the audience first meets Agnes, she is young, wearing a red bark cloth in the woods. Red becomes more subdued once she settles down with William Shakespeare and has a child. “She thinks more about her children than she does about herself,” she explains.

The turning point comes when Hamnet dies of the plague. Agnes’ clothes become darker, and when her husband returns, the couple grieves their loss. However, he soon has to return to London and breaks up with her. When he told her he was returning to London, Trzanska wanted to show how far apart the two were in terms of dress. She wears a brown smock with a gray bodice. In contrast, he wears layers and leather.

When Agnes gets up from the table, it appears that the character is not wearing a skirt. “The idea was that the character started wearing clothes. She still has a purpose in life. She has other children, so she started dressing up and forgot to wear a skirt.”

“It’s a heartbreaking moment,” said Trzanska, who used different colors of blood to reflect Agnes’ journey. Because at that point she is grieving the loss of her son, and her silhouette no longer has any volume.

At one point, she wears a prune-colored skirt, which Ms. Trzanska describes as a dry scab.

At the end of the film, the character comes to life somewhat when she travels to London and sees her husband’s play at the Globe Theatre. “She’s actually wearing the same dress that we saw in the scene where she’s pregnant. It’s the same dress, but in close-up.” Trzanska added, “She’s coming back to herself and trying to reconnect. So the result is red, but not so youthful anymore.”

For Shakespeare, Trzanska broke away from the world’s traditional image of the bard. “The images in our heads were created years after his death, so knowing that freed me from trying to stay true to any of them,” she says. His clothes have Tudor-inspired details. The pink color and slashes of textiles were used as emotional tools to express his mental state.

But his layers were simple. The first doublet he wears when meeting Agnes is quilted. The slashes are small in this costume, but after Hamnet’s death, the slashes became larger.

To costume the ghost, Trzanska looked at how other artists had interpreted “Hamlet” over the centuries and found a sculpture made of cracked clay. When she showed Ms. Zhao other costumes, the director was drawn to the photo. “That’s how we arrived at clay. But I was also looking for the origin of the ghost as a sheet and where it comes from. And of course, that’s because the body was wrapped in a sheet at the time of burial. So it’s not a bed sheet.”

Eventually, Shakespeare becomes covered in dry clay, which cracks and disintegrates. Trzanska says, “It reveals that he’s raw and open.”