Get your eyes ready for a serious feast.
Outlander's headed to the king's court of Paris, meaning cast will be decked out in the finest fashions that 18th century France had to offer. E! News talked to costume designer Terry Dresbach to find out exactly what went into those gorgeous, intricate gowns and just how historically accurate those corsets actually are. (Spoiler: They're extremely accurate!)
Dresbach was already a fan of the books and of 18th century Paris, so the design was no problem for her. "It was really a question of how the hell we were going to pull it off, because we knew we needed 10,000 garments. We weren't going to be able to rent them, we weren't going to be able to buy them, so you know, the French Court's huge, and we were going to have thousands of extras and hundreds of principle costumes so the dilemma really became, how we were going to create all of this in the amount of time we had."
Dresbach and her team started planning season two about halfway through season one, and enlisted local manufacturers to start making basic costumes for the extras in February 2015. A team of about 25 people started construction on the principle costumes in June. "There was nothing about this season that was easy in any way, shape, or form," Dresbach says.
They had to buy "many thousands" of yards of fabric in a variety of colors and styles, but unfortunately there are no stores that sell 18th century fabric for the "very, very elaborate" principle costumes, meaning the fabric had to be custom-made, along with all buttons, shoes, hats, purses, and nearly every costume or accessory you see on screen. "The only thing we didn't make were the police uniforms in the 20th century," Dresbach says.
Any outfits specifically described in the book will appear on screen. "I was getting deluged with fans going, are you doing the red dress? We can't wait for the red dress! We can't wait for the nipple rings!" Those were two things that it was very very clear and I had said to [executive producer Ron Moore], these are two things you cannot skip. You have no choice, you have to do these or they will burn us to the ground." If you don't know what Dresbach is referring to by the nipple rings, you'll just have to wait and see.
Dresbach says the red dress was a challenge, at first. "I got a lot of inspiration from the dresses of the 1940s, which is the period that Claire is from where the dresses are quite simple and the color becomes the decoration rather than taking a brilliant, fire-red dress and putting crap all over it. As hard as it is to overwhelm Caitriona Balfe, you could do that, and you want her to be the jewel, so you don't need to go crazy on that dress. Once I figured all that out and we had the right color, it was a quick sketch."
"If you look at the other costumes on the other woman characters, they're very very very heavily embellished, because that's what would have happened in the period," Dresbach says. "Claire is not from that period. She's from the 1940s, and she's standing at a dressmaker's deciding how she wants her clothes made. Caitriona and I talked about it a lot, and we never want to lose Claire. In the first season, we managed to maintain the way she walks, the way she moves, so she's a modern woman. In France, we wanted to do the same thing—to retain the Claire of it all. Her clothes are much simpler than everyone else's."
"You just loosened your corset," Dresbach says of dealing with pregnant bellies at the time. "In theory, you'd just wear that same thing when you weren't pregnant anymore and you'd just lace it tighter. You could be pregnant and not show until the seventh or eighth month, but part of our story is that she's supposed to look pregnant and the audience needs to know she's pregnant, so it was a very very difficult task to make her look pregnant, because the clothes just swallow everything up."
Solving that problem took a little bit of creativity and a whole lot of baby bump tests. "It really was just a question of taking what would be normal clothes and finding ways to structure them a little bit different so it would show. But we had many many, many baby bump tests. It looks like she's seven or eight months pregnant and in the story she's only four months pregnant, because otherwise, no one would know she was pregnant in her clothing, so we had to go a little bit bigger than we might have normally done so people could actually see it."
Jamie (Sam Heughan) wouldn't look right in the more effeminate, decorative garb of men in the French court, but he couldn't still dress like a highlander. "Sam was really worried that I was going to suddenly drape him in turquoise embroidery and was very relieved to see the direction I was going. We were gonna hold on to who he was as a character and hold onto his Scottishness, but at the same time, he couldn't have walked in there looking the way he was in season one. They wouldn't have allowed him next to the king. So we had to have him be refined and aristocratic enough that he would be acceptable in the court."
Jamie's new look is like old Jamie, but fancier. "He wears beautiful silks, but we didn't cover them in tons of embroidery. We kept his colors very traditionally the hero—the black and the white, very masculine, the dark grays and the fabulous boots, and he wears his kilt on occasion. It works well." Dresbach says this white leather coat with embroidered stags is Heughan's favorite costume. There are five of them, and we can probably expect the coat to appear even when Jamie is no longer in France.
While Dresbach can't name her own favorite look, she says that this olive 1940s-inspired gown is Balfe's favorite.
"Your job as a costume designer isn't just to make beautiful clothes or ugly clothes or just to make clothes, it's to tell a story," Dresbach says. "So Louise's (Claire Sermonne) character is very coquetteish, very flirtatious, she's sexually daring, she's a provocateur, so her clothes need to tell that story and help the audience understand who she is, because you don't have five years to get to know her. You have five minutes. So we need those clothes to clue us into who she is."
The same is true of all the characters, from the experienced Louise to the virginal Mary Hawkins. "She's young, she's an ingénue, she's inexperienced, she's never been married, she's a virgin, she's insecure, and those clothes need to show that. So we pick the colors, we pick the decoration, we pick everything to support that character, with everybody. So each costume should tell you who that person is or give you a good indication of who they are."
"Certainly in the context of modern clothing, you're not going to see a guy walking down the street in an embroidered pink suit—not generally. But that was one of our biggest dilemmas was men's clothing. Men's clothing was highly embroidered, but only in certain areas. The embroidered fabric that's available to purchase is embroidered all over, and that wouldn't have been accurate."
"We had to set up a team of embroiderers. We had about six people doing embroidery who had never done it before, a lot of them. Only one of our embroiderers was an experienced person. Everyone else were art school graduates who learned to do it on the spot. It's really extraordinary what they pulled off. Every bit of embroidery you see on the show was done by them."
"We dress them historically from the skin up, so they are absolutely accurate," Dresbach says. "They are architectured, so corsets support your back, they make you stand up straight, if done properly, they don't hurt. The dresses are built in ways that are kind of like making buildings, so if they're done right, they shouldn't be painful. And our actors are in them for a really long time, so we do everything we can to make sure they're not painful. Each one of the gowns is about 12 to 15 yards of fabric. A dress today, a cute little minidress, is a yard and a half of fabric. These gowns are 15 yards. It's a lot of fabric. If they're properly made, the weight is balanced to some degree."
When the show occasionally moves back to the 1900s, things got a lot easier, costume-wise. "We were like, oh thank god. I don't think I can figure out one more decorative way to put a ribbon on a costume. I think I'm kinda done with the 18th century for a while. We all ran into the 1900s like, hallelujah! But then we'll return and we'll go back again to the 18th century. The beauty of this show is that you get, you know, how many periods of fashion? It's really remarkable. But there is release after you've made 1500 18th century costumes."
"The actors just loved what we did [in Paris], and then we were all really glad to get back to Scotland. It was really fun but it was great to get back to our roots. In season one it didn't seem very easy and comfortable, and then after doing Paris, it seems really easy and comfortable."
We can't wait to get back to Scotland either, but in the meantime, we are completely in love with this fancy French costume porn and can't wait to see more of it!
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