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Go behind the scenes of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ with costume designer Grace Snell as she reveals how she and her team brought the film’s Regency-era fashion to life. From creating natural dyes using everything from onion skins to elderflowers and carrot tops, to sourcing authentic antique fabrics, discover the painstaking craftsmanship behind the film’s richly textured, historically accurate costumes. See how Daisy Edgar-Jones’ Elinor Dashwood incorporates period-accurate menswear, while George MacKay’s Edward Ferrars balances the elegance of an upper-class gentleman with the rugged charm of country life.
Transcript
00:00You can see these blackberry stains that we made with actual blackberries that we picked ourselves
00:04and we needed a few of these. We needed three so I cast it upon myself to be the one
00:10to match
00:10the blackberries on all three dresses so that they didn't have any continuity mistakes
00:15just because I knew that it was it was a scary job for someone to do.
00:20Sense and Sensibility, the 90s film, is one of my favorite films. The costume design for that film
00:27is one of the reasons I do what I do and reading Diana's script I instantly knew there would be
00:34a
00:34different kind of energy and I thought I will step up to the challenge. So we chose to set our
00:41film
00:41in 1795 to 1799 loosely speaking which is the end of the Georgian period coming into the Regency so
00:50there's this awkward phase of transition and we could borrow some Georgian fashions which you see
00:55the sisters in in the mourning phase because these are their older clothes that they have dyed
01:00and then we move through right to the ball where we get to see the start of where Regency fashion
01:05is
01:05going. That was really exciting to have both ends of the spectrum in our film. This house will always
01:11be home. We will find somewhere else just as nice with the money father left us. What money?
01:18I play Mrs Dashwood who is recently widowed and she has three beautiful daughters Eleanor, Marianne and
01:26Margaret and where we meet her she is finding out for the first time that everything has been left to
01:33her stepson and really they've been left penniless. So this is her main mourning robe and it is this beautiful
01:43like a silk taffeta I think and then we have the beautiful little mourning cap as well. It's all
01:49hand stitched and there's some beautiful detailing on the back. It's an amazing princess back with this
01:54beautiful diamond shape and really really small pin tucks. It was so fiddly and what I loved about this
02:01fabric was it's got a slight green hue to it so it's in some lights it looks very dark green.
02:06I was really keen
02:07to get a very specific palette which was the shades of black palette. They weren't quite black they had
02:15maybe dark greens or dark purples. Sort of some of the darker blacks and things like that we would
02:22lighten them up with a more faded gray or like a slightly purplish hue or something and it was such
02:28a
02:28beautiful texture throughout the whole film. My approach to colour was really important for our film and the
02:36control of colour I find a very powerful way to design. So one of the first things we did is
02:43we set up a
02:43dye room which was headed by Carla our amazing dyer and she started sampling for me madder, logwood, onion skins,
02:51carrot tops, all these incredible things. So I bought some of our tests that we did on Bombazine which
02:58is a fabric we found was worn a lot in the mourning process. We have a lovely one with a
03:03sprig here,
03:04a lovely damask and these were all the incredible dark dark shades that Carla could achieve with natural
03:10dyes. It's unpredictable, you can't get the same colour twice. All those elements actually added to the
03:16texture of the palette itself. Things are just they feel more earthy and it feels more dirty and you
03:25get the sense of that they're actually out working in the land and they don't have a huge staff they
03:30have one maid. You know that one maid is not getting up every morning and doing six hours of hair
03:36and
03:36makeup you know it's like. So when we enter Barton we introduced other colours this is when onion skins
03:46came in bob and carrot tops and other really fun colours. With Marianne's elderflower dress which
03:52was dyed with dried elderflowers we had our our trainee go out and collect all this elderflower which
03:58produced this incredible pale yellow colour on cotton and we dyed metres and metres and metres of this
04:04in the elderflower so we could make four of this costume. The trouble is if there was a tweak to
04:09the
04:10script or if suddenly someone was riding a horse and they needed a stunt double and we'd already
04:16dyed we then had to try and replicate that colour to make a stunt double. So those that's when it
04:22gets
04:22tricky but with enough planning it is manageable. So here we have Marianne's elderflower costume. This
04:28is a dress that she wears regularly throughout our film. She has paired it here with a bombazine
04:34morning jacket and this lovely boat neck with ties at the front because having discussed with Esme we
04:39wanted Marianne to feel very much open and less done up and with Eleanor this is her logwood dress which
04:48is just the most incredible lilac colour and looks different in in most lights with her bombazine jacket
04:54which is actually the same pattern that we made Esme's from but this one is slightly longer over the hip.
05:01I think when designing for these two sisters we begin with Marianne being all about the sensibility and
05:08Eleanor being all about the scents. He's not handsome, is he?
05:12He's not handsome, he's not handsome, he's not handsome, he's not handsome, he's not handsome.
05:14In some ways Eleanor is more like the parent. It was really interesting to play with that dynamic and
05:22the fact that Mrs Dashwood and Marianne are really cut from the same cloth. And by the end of the
05:28film
05:28they have shared their traits and become more well-rounded women but Eleanor is much more practical so I think
05:36the practical element of Eleanor was clothing needs to be functional, it needs to be structured, it needs to
05:41be neat and then with Marianne and her sensibility I wanted her to feel more free and loose and undone
05:48and I think in total our two sisters had about 80 costume changes. The lighting of the film was very
05:54important to how I designed the costumes. I knew there would be candle light and I knew that there would
05:59be
05:59lots of natural light so this leads me back to why the lightest of cotton fabrics were to be used
06:05so
06:05that there was movement and we could catch the light through the costumes and when I was designing
06:10Marianne's ball gown I knew we'd be seeing it in candlelight. So this one is the finest gold silk that
06:18shimmers and is very very very loose. It moves like water and drapes beautifully and that was designed
06:24specifically to be seen in candlelight. Fabrics are a hard one because I really want to be accurate
06:32with my fabrics. From our historical research in the late Georgian period we see less and less silk,
06:39there's lots of trade bans happening in the world so I did ask my team when they were pulling to
06:44look
06:45for very natural fabrics. A lot of our girls dresses are this cotton mousse which is very light and accurate
06:51to the time. For this particular cotton mousse we bought 126 meters. Our poor Dairam had to get that
06:59through quite quickly. The antique fabrics that we collected were in amazing antique markets and I
07:04got in touch with a couple of dealers who were sourcing you know curtains or big lengths because that's
07:10often what would have survived. So this is a wool fabric and it's extremely old. I found this at an
07:19antique market in in London. It's just got this most incredible fleck and you can see we've got
07:25our hand done buttonholes in brown. I'm a big fan of navy and brown together so there's quite a lot
07:30of
07:30that in Eleanor's palette. I love waistcoats and they kind of signify you're doing a job and I think
07:35she starts you know running the household in Barton. She's in charge so I just like the idea that she's
07:42dressing for the job really. It's based on a man's waistcoat actually that we tried on her and it had
07:48this
07:48incredible high collar and Daisy's got the most beautiful neck so this really suited her form
07:52and we paired this with one of her beautiful lilac cotton mousse dresses which is dyed with logwood.
08:00So this is Marianne's dress that she wears to the hop. You can see it's still got its
08:06stitching from where it's been hitched for her dancing which she wears with the most beautiful
08:10pink sash and I love the idea that it represents young love and innocence and once her heart is broken
08:17she then loses the sash and it doesn't belong to her anymore. This is something that I was very
08:23passionate about having a go at trying which is we have very old fabric period correct. We got it
08:30turned into this lovely bodice lined with sheepskin for her to have a little warm cozy waistcoat and you
08:36can see these blackberry stains that we we made with actual blackberries that we picked ourselves and we
08:41needed a few of these we needed three so I cast it upon myself to be the one to match
08:47the blackberries
08:48on all three dresses so that they didn't have any continuity mistakes just because I knew that it was
08:53it was a scary job for someone to do. You know people don't stop being people people don't stop dropping
08:58food on themselves or one of my worst days on set was when somebody brought a crepe van in and
09:06I sprinkled the
09:07tiniest bit of lemon juice on my fabric and you realize that natural dye and acid don't go together.
09:14We got to a stage that we said to a lot of the women you need to be wearing a
09:18certain kind
09:18of deodorant because the aluminium it interferes as well with with the natural dyeing process so
09:25practically it is challenging.
09:33Forgive me, Edward Ferris.
09:41Were you not expecting me?
09:45No. Yes.
09:46Okay so this is George who plays Edward Ferris. This is the look that we see him when we meet
09:51him for the
09:52first time. I saw again with my more modern references I was trying to work out of an upper
09:58class gentleman in the countryside and immediately thought of barber jackets so I was quite adamant
10:03that this jacket be waxed which I think is practical too. You know he rides himself and he's very hands
10:10-on
10:10man so this coat had to be warm and weatherproof. What's amazing about George's costumes is they were
10:16actually made by Cosprop with a lot of support from John Bright who designed with Jenny Bevan the original
10:21sense of sensibility so it was really lovely to have John be so supportive of George's costumes and
10:27they really really got on together. John was very very generous with his advice and support for me to
10:32take on this enormous challenge. This is Willoughby's costume for the ball that he wears and this is his
10:38waistcoat which we had embroidered and embellished with these cellulose sequins which are much better
10:44than plastic sequins but hard to source the tiny little sequins and cellulose is a natural fibre so
10:50when Marianne meets Willoughby at the ball he's shimmering away like a shiny star which makes it even
10:56more tragic I guess. We have such a warped view I think of what life was like in ye olden
11:04times you know
11:05because our perception is very much based on these very static images that also were of a particular
11:14time and generally reflected a particular socio-economic group and so having done a lot
11:21of period dramas and living you know working in environments with these clothes like you understand
11:26how impractical a lot of them are and how battered they get and what I loved with the approach of
11:31grace in Georgia was let's not fight against this let's work with it let's incorporate it I just
11:38love that I and I love that approach and maybe some people feel that that's the wrong approach but I
11:43feel
11:43in my heart 100% that that actually reflects the reality an awful lot more to me it just yeah
11:50it's so
11:51evocative and it's so beautiful