Bridgerton's Costume Designer on Creating Clothes Meant to Be Taken Off
Bridgerton, the steamy new Netflix series based on Julia Quinn’s beloved romance novels may be set in Regency-era England, but a period accurate Jane Austen mini-series it is not.
Instead, showrunner Chris Van Dusen crafted a heightened version of history, one in which the characters are diverse at every class level, and, given that it's a romance, all the less-than-savory elements of 19th-century life, chamber pots and the like, are carefully stored out of view. The overall look of the series is loosely rooted in historical fact—the production filmed in Britain's stately country homes and women wear dresses with that classic empire-waist silhouette. But everything is slightly modernized and often comes in a candy-colored palette. Costumes in particular were key to Bridgerton's aesthetic world building.
"We had to create a city," costume designer Ellen Mirojnick says calmly over Zoom, explaining how 7,500 bespoke costume pieces were created for the series.
"When we first started, even though it was five, five-and-a-half months prior to shooting, we didn't know how many extras there were going to be, but we knew that they were going to have to fill a city; they were going to have to fill balls; they were going to have a promenade; they were going to have to be part of the environment," she tells T&C. "We thought: how are we going to make these extras absolutely as magnificent as the principles?"
So she started sketching even before the show's lead actors were cast, and then they set up a warehouse and hired a 230-plus people, including a whole team specifically focused on embellishments.
"It's the largest show I've ever done in my entire career, and the most fabulous show I've ever done in my entire career," she says, calling it the "challenge of a lifetime."
A veteran of Shondaland (she previously worked Rhimes's How to Get Away With Murder and Still Star-Crossed), Mirojnick shares that her process involved looking "at what was real, what was high fashion, and then, [thinking] 'What would Shonda do?'"
"We're not talking about 1813 and Jane Austen and beige, cream bonnets," she says. They wanted to create something "fresh and young and aspirational," and "the first way in which you create something new is shift the palette."
For the old-money Bridgertons, that meant "soft, romantic" blues, whites, and pinks. And for their neighbors, the nouveau riche Featheringtons? "Spicy, vibrant, I-want-to-be-seen" shades, like orange, green, and purple.
But it was the character of Queen Charlotte (image up top), who Mirojnick thinks represents the "pinnacle" of the Bridgerton aesthetic. "Queen Charlotte never changed her silhouette from 18th century," she explains—so they took that shape and played with the hue. "We made beautiful combinations of different fabrics, different colors," Mirojnick says. But what really took the Queen's look to the next level was her hair design. “Change her hair color, change the height, change the shape. Everything was embellished. It was sublime.”
But Mirojnick's work went beyond just re-imagining 18th-century attire. She and her team had a few Bridgerton-specific challenges to deal with, too. Notably: how to get people out of their clothes as fast as possible.
"How easy can you get in the pants?" was a key question she had to address. "How easy can you lift up the skirt?" she says. "How easy does the top come off? How easy does the shoulder fall? And will it look sexy and alluring and rapturous?"
A bodice ripper, indeed.
All eight episodes of Bridgerton are currently available to stream on Netflix.
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