Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale first introduced the Plum family to its dystopian world in season five. When Luke (OT Fagbenle) and June (Elisabeth Moss) are looking for their daughter Hannah, they first learn about a premarital training school.
Hannah, now older and named Agnes (Chase Infinity), attends Aunt Lydia’s (Ann Dowd) elite prep school, where she and other young girls are trained to become future wives. The young girls are divided into groups and distinguished by the color of their clothing. “Plum” is trying to become a woman, while “Pearl” is an outsider who has entered the academy.
Leslie Kavanagh, costume designer for The Handmaid’s Tale, was excited to move from red visuals to plum and tell a new visual story through the costumes.
Here, she details Gilead’s look and how she found the right plum hue and used military-style wool for Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd).
plum
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Plum is the daughter of Gilead. “They are the biological children of many of the Handmaids,” Kavanagh explains.
To find the right shade, Kavanagh started from scratch, mixing the red of the handmaiden’s robe with the teal of the commander’s wife. First, she did a lot of camera testing with different textures and fabrics to make sure everything worked. Lighting was important to Kavanagh during the testing process to see how the light would hit the fabrics and shades.
“I custom-dyed it many times, buying existing fabric and layering it to create a special shade just for the show,” she says. Kavanagh used various shades of purple. Each girl wore a blouse in her own signature color, dyed to compliment the actor’s skin tone.
The Pearls
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In this book, Pearl and her friends are described as wearing grey, sparkly clothes. Kavanaugh liked the idea of brilliance and passed it on to showrunner Bruce Miller. He hesitated and told her that “it might be going too far,” but Kavanagh assured him that was not the case.
She found an oyster-colored fabric with pearl-like properties and couldn’t wait to make clothes from it. But when it came time to present the costume to Miller, she realized it just wasn’t working.
She had 36 hours to rebuild Pearls’ appearance. This time, Kavanagh leans toward warm white tones like off-white, winter white, and even warm vanilla tones to offset the cooler environment of “Testament.”
“Having a little bit of that range helped with balance. Pearls are supposed to grab your attention. Pearls are like the Biblical handmaiden,” she says.
As for Daisy (Lucy Halliday), on the surface this character seems interested in adapting to Gilead’s mores, but by June it is revealed that she has been recruited as a Mayday spy, hired to destroy the regime from within. Daisy’s story is revealed through flashbacks.
Kavanagh used vibrant colors and layers for Toronto’s characters. When inside Gilead, Kavanagh says, “Everything has been stripped away from her because they’re trying to reform girls and make them into whatever they want them to be. So she’s a blank canvas, so to speak. And that’s how I got there, trying to look on camera.”
Aunt Lydia
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The original concept of the ladies was brown and had a warlike atmosphere. Kavanagh found the woolen fabric he ordered from England. “This is a wool that can be used in the military, and it has a militant feel to it, because they have more power than wives, guardians, and handmaidens.”
Kavanagh loved reading the script for Episode 6, where the origins of the Aunts’ costumes were revealed.
This episode explores Aunt Lydia’s (Ann Dowd) backstory and the ultimate choice she makes to protect herself over others. Kavanagh explains, “She chose it as penance and punishment, because it wasn’t the nicest thing. There are other fabrics that are used in the scene where we see her choosing, but she chose what she judged in that moment to be the worst, most unpleasant fabric, as repentance and punishment for what she was doing.”
ball
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In episode 5, the girls of Gilead throw a prom-like ball. However, it is not an ordinary ball, but a show for commanders who are looking for their future wives.
Kavanagh knew the girls would be spinning, so she took great care when creating the dresses and skirts for the dance sequences.
Similar to the plum costume, Kavanagh had each girl have a unique shade of green and added a capulet to each dress.
As for the commanders, “we made them almost GQ-like,” Kavanagh says. “They’re surrounded by a lot of 14- to 16-year-old girls, and it’s normal for them to have crushes on boys, even if it’s not allowed.”
