9 thoughts on “Costume Designer Lucinda Wright: The Frock Flicks Guide

  1. AAARGH! Emily Blunt’s Catherine Howard gown – AAARGH! It isn’t even so much that its inaccurate: more that it’s so flimsy, tacky, ill-fitting and cheap-looking that I can’t believe that they didn’t hire it from a fancy-dress shop, and not a particularly high-end one either.

  2. Rowan Atkinson is really good as Maigret. No traces of Bean or Blackadder, once again proving that comedic actors can do drama very well. As for the costumes, I admit I wasn’t paying much attention to them which must mean they were really well suited to the time period.

  3. The costumes in ‘The Suspicions of Mr Whicher’ (both) are pretty good. I do Victorian and I wasn’t particularly offended by much except that they kept having actors in Victorian suits leave ties off/ collars open. I believe there is a time jump in Mr Whicher 2, with them having met when Olivia Coleman’s character was young and it starts out when she is older, with flashbacks.

    I think I saw a couple of dodgy bits in Vanity Fair (like TIE YOUR BONNET RIBBONS ALL OF YOU) but it was mostly okay. The red dress is intrinsic to the plot in Vanity Fair, because Becky just straight up steals the fabric from her sister-in-law and it’s the start of everyone realising what she’s really like. Anyway, the bonnets were a shape you almost never see as it can be very unflattering and I got really excited that they used it. Even if you can just buy the pattern from Lynn McMaster, it’s still a tricky one to make and trim.

    Miss Marie Llloyd was my unabashed favourite, they even did the ‘She sits among the cabbages and leeks’ story. The costumes were pretty good, the odd theatrical one where I hmmmmmed. I enjoyed it, even if it could have stood to be a bit longer – rather rushed over a lot of her life.

    I mostly study late Regency, Victorian and Edwardian fashion so I can’t comment on the Tudor stuff unless it’s really egregiously bad!

    1. “The red dress is intrinsic to the plot in Vanity Fair, because Becky just straight up steals the fabric from her sister-in-law and it’s the start of everyone realising what she’s really like.”

      The stolen fabric was for the court dress to be presented to the Regent; Becky snatches it when she’s helping her brother-in-law sort out his newly deceased father’s estate. Thackeray lets the reader in on it (the novel has constant asides to the reader, and is hilarious), but the other characters remain clueless even though they do raise eyebrows at how Becky is able to dress so lavishly.

      The red dress appears to be from the ball just before the attack on Waterloo; there’s no color description in the novel, but it’s a killer dress.

      One thing that has always struck me about “Vanity Fair” costuming: William Makepeace Thackeray also copiously illustrated his own novel; he actually writes in the novel that he refuses to give his characters period-appropriate clothing, which he maintains would make them look ridiculous (and provides an example of how they’d really look). Instead, his illustrations all show 1840s clothing.

      1. Which is another reason I adore the novel and don’t yet believe anyone has dramatized it right.

  4. LOVED Maigret until the episode with a Burlesque club scene when all the underwear costuming was modern. ERK, It was so noticeable, I had this weird – are we in a time war? moment.

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