Sophie Turner Gives the Mob Wife Aesthetic a ‘Quieter’ English Makeover in ‘Joan’
LONDON — Costume designer Richard Cooke spent a week flicking through fashion magazines from the ‘80s in preparation for dressing Sophie Turner as the infamous British jewelry thief Joan Hannington in the ITV series “Joan,” which made its TV debut this week.
The series and costumes simultaneously trace Joan’s life from a penniless single mother to a high-class thief that earns her the nickname of The Godmother in London’s criminal underworld.
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Joan’s speciality was swallowing diamonds and breaking into country houses — all while dressed to the nines.
“It’s really important to remember that in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a fur coat was the epitome of glamour. If you had a really expensive fur coat, you had sort of made it [in life] — I remember my mom saved and saved to get an amazing fur coat [in the ‘80s],” says Cooke, who concluded that he wasn’t making a documentary about Joan’s life.
All the furs he uses in the show are faux with many of the coats being from the brand Astraka, a popular fake fur brand from the ‘70s that he sourced on eBay.
Cooke gave each fur coat that Joan wears a backstory.
The first fur coat is a gift from her husband, Boisie Hannington, who is much older than her. “We discussed with the director Richard Laxton that her husband probably got it from a robbery and it still smells of somebody else’s perfume, but she wears it because it’s glamorous,” says the costume designer.
As Joan climbs the ranks and becomes notorious for her acts of robbery, her fur coats become more excessive.
Her long brown fur coat was inspired by an ‘80s mink coat that Cooke saw at The Dressing Room in Alfriston. He replicated the fur coat with faux materials and worked with an old-school furrier in London’s East End to put it all together — it’s the tudor cuff and gradient shades of brown that makes it so believable.
It’s an added bonus that Turner’s costumes under the furs match up to the glamour. Cooke read Joan’s 2002 memoir “I Am What I Am: The True Story of Britain’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief” for styling tidbits.
The costume designer’s rails had original and replicated pieces from the names that defined ’80s power dressing — a matching red skirt suit from Orsini; a blue duchesse satin suit inspired by Thierry Mugler with a cinched waist; a liquid gold dress reminiscent of Gianni Versace’s fall 1994 collection made from the same fabric that was purchased for Beyoncé at Misan Midlands, a textiles supplier; and a cream three-piece suit with high waisted trousers for her wedding to Boisie that took its cues from Bianca Jagger’s Yves Saint Laurent skirt suit from 1971.
“It was like doing a show within a show,” Cooke recalls of the juggernaut process of assembling the costumes.
He changed Turner’s character into almost 100 costumes; meanwhile the secondary characters had around 70 wardrobe changes in total and he dressed more than 2,000 extras for scenes that took place outside.
For a show based on a jewelry thief, Cooke was scrupulous about Joan’s accessories and used them as a means of transforming her from a young girl into a sophisticated lady.
At the start of the show, a teenage Joan is wearing a gold name necklace and hoop earrings that reminded Cooke of his sister’s accessories in the ‘80s, but as she transforms into a mobster, she leans more into a “Dynasty” character with her signature blonde hair and color-blocked outfits.
The costume designer teamed up with his longtime collaborator Victoria Bedwell, a jeweler who has worked with Burberry and Garrard, on imitating the diamonds and golds that Joan steals, swallows and wears.
Even though Turner is the embodiment of the mob wife aesthetic in “Joan,” Cooke took a deliberate decision not to exaggerate her to the likes of Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone) in “Casino” or Virginia Hill (Annette Bening) in “Virginia Hill.”
“The English [mob wife] aesthetic is slightly quieter [in comparison to the] American mob wife, which is quite brash and in your face,” he says.
Diamonds and divas are in Cooke’s forte, whose work over the years has spanned period and contemporary productions, including “Harlots” based on an 18th-century brothel in London starring Lesley Manville and Liv Tyler; “The Krays’ Mad Axeman,” a film about the British gangsters known as the Kray twins, and “I, Jack Wright,” an upcoming mystery thriller about a mother and son who find themselves cut off from a large fortune.
“I’m looking at brands such as Balmain, Chanel and Chloé to get the aesthetic right — even though very little happens in Paris, it’s important that there’s a Parisian influence in the clothes because that’s where the character lives,” he says.
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