Interview: Agent Carter costume designer Gigi Melton

Previously: A guide to the 1940s costume design of Agent Carter

Agent Carter combines so many of my favorite things: comicbook adventures, a complex female protagonist, 1940s spy hijinks and, of course, beautiful costumes and set design. The post-war setting is a fascinating period to explore from a fashion history perspective, and I was happy to see that all of the costumes have a strong characterization element as well.

Costume designer Giovanna "Gigi" Melton caught my attention on Twitter with her many behind-the-scenes posts about her work on Agent Carter, and she was kind enough to grant me an interview. Read on for more background on the amazing costumes in this show, plus a selection of Melton's original design sketches.

HelloTailor: How did you go about researching and designing the overall look for the show? Were you influenced by any of the comics, or was it more a matter of exploring the 1940s aesthetic?

Gigi Melton: A combination of much research.  For Peggy the influences were Lauren Bacall, Katherine Hepburn, Hedy Lamarr. The smart, strong, fashionable and beautiful women of the era.

For SSR [Strategic Scientific Reserve] agents Dooley, Thompson, Sousa, and Krzmenski I researched government and detective looks. For eccentric Stark it was Howard Hughes and for Jarvis it was a British nod to tweeds. Coupled with comic book research, I took all of my inspiration and tailored it to create the individual looks for the scripted characters.

HelloTailor: I saw that you managed to source at least one vintage dress for Hayley Atwell, which made me wonder how many other costumes are original pieces from the '40s. A lot of historical dramas try to use a mix of vintage costumes and new designs, occasionally with vintage-style underwear to add authenticity to the look. Is this how you worked with Agent Carter?

Gigi Melton: Most of Peggy was built for the show, however there are  a few amazing vintage pieces in her closet.  We have vintage style lingerie but we modify with other pieces as well because of all the action. For Dooley, Thompson, Sousa and Krzmenski , their sport jackets and suits are about half vintage and half custom, all of their ties are vintage. With the exception of vintage ties, Stark and Jarvis are custom.

HelloTailor: How do you deal with creating clothes for action scenes? That must be tricky, especially since Peggy spends so much time wearing skirts.

Gigi Melton: Lots of multiples. As an example: the gold dress in episode one has a built foundation made with cotton trigger [a sturdy type of cloth], all boned so she do the kicking as well as being slammed around. Otherwise the fabric would have ripped. We make blouses and jackets with specific slits to allow for harnesses. For kicks in skirts I have vintage style black silk tap shorts to wear under.

Carter's disguise from episode 1 was inspired by Veronica Lake.

HelloTailor: Could you tell me a little about Peggy's red hat? Did you realize at the time that it was going to become such an important part of her image?

Gigi Melton: The red hat was scripted as:  A red hat in a sea of gray fedoras. For my design I thought,  Peggy is competing in this man's world, and her hat needs to be powerful to match all the fedoras but still be feminine. I truly had no idea it would take off this way.

Note the red, white and blue color scheme!

HelloTailor: I'd love to know more about how you differentiated between the male SSR agents, since they have to wear relatively similar outfits to work each day. Were you aiming to give Sousa a softer look with his cardigans?

Gigi Melton: For our SSR guys Dooley, Thompson, Krzeminski, and Sousa, each have a distinctive look befitting their character. Chief Roger Dooley (Shea Whigham) wears  strong double breasted suits; Jack Thompson (Chad Michael Murray) wears  single breasted with a fashion edge  coupled with suspenders; Daniel Sousa (Enver Gjokaj) wears sweater vests under his sport coats and pleated pants, I chose the sweater vests as a more approachable look, but also one that he could be comfortable with a crutch ; and Ray Krzeminski (Kyle Bornheimer) is a bit of a slob with his sport jacket, and open collar shirts. 

HelloTailor: Finally, Jarvis really stands out from the other male characters. Were you going for a particularly British style with his tailored suits, as opposed to a more American look sported by characters like Jack Thompson?

Gigi Melton: Yes -- I wanted his look to reflect his British roots, and the Jarvis look is very distinctive to all the other characters . The script  described him as a man in a tweed suit. But I wanted him to have a European style and aesthetic as well. So I felt the direction of a suit and vest, balanced with the casual but beautiful tweeds (which Britain is famous for) created a perfect look for his character as butler and front man for Stark. 

Previously: A guide to the 1940s costume design of Agent Carter
Further reading: ABC's featurette on Agent Carter's costumes, and Tyranny of Style's preview interview.
See also: The Bletchley Circle

Tumblr: HelloTailor
Twitter: @Hello_Tailor

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The three main problems with NBC's 'Constantine.'

Previously: Constantine, "Non Est Asylum" and "The Darkness Beneath."

After six episodes, Constantine has graduated past "unwatchably bad" and settled into a network TV formula. It's better than it was at the start, but it's definitely not good.

Aside from obvious issues like clunky dialogue, Constantine has three serious ongoing problems:

1. It's virtually indistinguishable from other genre shows of the same type, ie Supernatural.
2. Both of the supporting characters, Chas and Zed, are completely pointless.
3. It's often racist.

There's no better example of problem #1 than last week's episode, "Rage of Caliban." The plot was an unimaginative spin on "young child possessed by demons" horror movie tropes, practically begging for some kind of genre-savvy humor. It even takes place on Halloween, and the guest characters are a suburban family so bland they'd probably be rejected from a cereal commercial for being too generic.

Out of six episodes, only two have really felt individual to this show: "The Devil's Vinyl" (a reasonably interesting riff on the urban legend of a blues musician selling his soul to the devil) and "A Feast of Friends", which was adapted from Hellblazer #1 and had a satisfyingly unpleasant ending.

Every other episode is either painfully predictable, or reliant on familiar genre cliches. No wonder Constantine's ratings are dropping: It's just retreading the same ground that Supernatural has been covering for the past decade, along with a handful others like Grimm, Sleepy Hollow, and Teen Wolf. Constantine has failed to carve out a niche of its own.

Problem #2 is a weird one. I've seen plenty of shows where one or two characters felt superfluous, but this is so much worse. Chas and Zed are so unnecessary that several episodes have to write one of them out of the story. And when they are onscreen, they often have nothing substantial to do.

6 episodes in and we still don't know what Chas is doing in this show, except cooking for Constantine and being impervious to mortal wounds.
— Hello Tailor (@Hello_Tailor) November 30, 2014

Even more pointless than Chas and Zed is the angel character, whose only role is to show up and tell Constantine about "a darkness coming."
— Hello Tailor (@Hello_Tailor) November 30, 2014

Supposedly, Zed is following Constantine because he can teach her how to control her powers. In reality, her purpose is to fulfill the show's female character quota and give Constantine someone to talk to. Instead of being a fully developed character, she's more like Constantine's personal assistant -- a role that's already filled by Chas.

Chas shares Zed's exposition sidekick duties, which sometimes falls flat because unlike Zed, he isn't new to the supernatural/exorcist lifestyle. If he's already experienced in dealing with ghosts and monsters, then why have him ask Constantine to explain a simple concept like ley lines? (That wasn't even the clumsiest exposition scene in last week's episode, by the way. The worst was when Constantine literally explained what demonic possession is, implying that the writers think we've never heard a ghost story before.)

So bizarre for Constantine to basically be explaining the concept of a ghost to the mum in this episode. PEOPLE KNOW WHAT GHOSTS ARE!!
— Hello Tailor (@Hello_Tailor) November 30, 2014

Instead of having two full-time sidekicks, they'd be better off with Constantine as a solo protagonist backed up by recurring guest stars. You know, like the comic.

Problem #3 is already unsalvageable. Constantine has two white male showrunners, and for some reason they decided to make the primary antagonist a black man who is both a crime boss and a vodou priest. It's difficult for this not to have racist undertones, particularly given Hollywood's history of portraying vodou as alien, dangerous, and evil. Which is a pity, because Papa Midnite is the best character in the show. The actor has real screen presence, and adds a sense of power and charisma to a role that could easily have been a total trainwreck.

Combine the problematic depictions of vodou with Constantine's other moments of racist subtext, and the end result is disastrous. From the hideous "black gypsy magic" scene in episode 2 to the introduction of casually exoticized characters like the African shaman in "A Feast of Friends," they've already gone way past the racism limit for a tone-deaf US network TV show.

Constantine isn't the worst show I've ever seen, but I certainly wouldn't be watching it if I wasn't a Hellblazer fan with a morbid fascination for where the show is going. There are a few rays of hope now and then -- the convincing physicality of Matt Ryan's performance, and Papa Midnite's role as a not-quite-bad-guy antagonist -- but in general, it's depressingly lacklustre.

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Constantine: "The Darkness Beneath"

Previously: Constantine, "Non Est Asylum"

If you're still on the fence about watching this week's Constantine, here's a line that tells you everything you need to know: "There's nothing blacker than gypsy magic."

Yes, this episode hinged on the kind of racist stereotype that I'm surprised is even allowed on TV in 2014. Friends, this was not a pleasant hour of television.

I think Constantine is going to save this mining town by blowing up the mine where everyone works.
— Hello Tailor (@Hello_Tailor) November 2, 2014

In order to introduce the new female lead Zed, episode 2 saw Constantine visit a Pennsylvania mining town without his regular (and so far pointless) sidekick Chas. This town had a problem with vengeful spirits killing off local miners, and because Constantine is indistinguishable from Supernatural, our hero traveled across America to solve their problem by interrogating a bunch of angry men and befriending a sexy yet mysterious lady. That's Zed, by the way. We still don't know much about her except that she was probably described as "tempestuous" in the casting call.

The victim in the pre-credits scene was a mean drunk husband who burned to death in the shower. After various unimaginative demonic shenanigans, we learn that his wife is the one who brought the mine monsters into town, and Constantine's solution is to... bring her (implicitly) abusive husband back to drag her down to Hell. Oh, and she's a "Romani girl," hence the godawful "gypsy magic" line I quoted above. To make matters worse, this tired old stereotype was completely unnecessary to the situation at hand, and could've been removed without making any difference to the plot.

The most frustrating thing with this episode was how easily they could've made it better. It was written by the creator of Farscape, a delightfully weird show with its fair share of interesting female characters. But this episode wasn't just poorly written, it was a paint-by-numbers example of generic supernatural/mystery TV. What makes this all the more baffling is that it's adapted from a comic that actually does have some personality, and both of the showrunners are supposedly Hellblazer fans. I'm yet to see much evidence that anyone in this show has gone beyond reading the Hellblazer Wikipedia page, though.


Last week I mentioned that one of Constantine's biggest problems will be differentiating itself from similar genre shows. Well, that issue is already making itself known. This episode was even more like Supernatural than last week: Constantine saves a small town from undead spirits, and the unimaginative monster-of-the-week storyline was marred by sexist and racist subtext. At least Supernatural is capable of genuine menace and horror, and its dud episodes are elevated by the compelling relationships between its lead characters. Unfortunately, it looks like Constantine is only emulating Supernatural's bad points.

The whole "Pennsylvania mining town" concept could have been used to transfer themes from Hellblazer to a contemporary American setting. But there the resemblance ends. What we got was a story where a woman is clearly intimidated by her husband (who is implied to be abusive), and uses her magic powers to warp some protective spirits into attacking miners as revenge. This is a totally solid fairytale idea, and could have ended on the very Hellblazer-ish note of Constantine having to "defeat" an enemy who isn't really a villain, but is just a normal person who has been pushed to the limit.

Instead we got an episode that fails to explore the emotional context of the setting, and culminates in the wife character being depicted as a one-note villain who is punished by being dragged to hell by the spirit of her husband. And let's not forget that Constantine just blew up the local coal mine, thus ruining the economy of the entire town. I feel like they should've made a bigger deal out of that??

There are two explanations here: Either the writers are simply misinterpreting the way the Hellblazer comics told this kind of morally ambiguous story, OR they're purposefully writing this kind of simple, cliched episode because they think it's the best way to stay on air.

I have no idea how many women are on the production staff at Constantine, but I'm guessing not many. So far Zed is slightly less cardboardy than Liv, the female lead who was written out of the pilot episode. That doesn't mean Zed behaves like an actual human woman, though. The relationship between her and Constantine is very muddled, lurching from unconvincing sexual tension to an intrinsically unpleasant dynamic where she is ~drawn to him~ while he orders her around and acts like a douche.

The thing is, the Hellblazer version of Constantine is by no means a feminist character, or even a nice guy. He tries to do the right thing, but he screws up a lot. But the comics tend to be critical of this, and we also benefit from seeing his internal monologue all the time. Ideally, Constantine would show his struggle to be a good man, but balance this with storylines where he fucks up or is forced to make bad choices. He also needs to be backed up by a well-written female character, which Zed is not. She's meant to be a foil to Constantine, but their relationship is unbalanced from Day 1. She needs his help with her powers, while he uses those powers for his own ends. On top of that, she has to persuade him to let her join him. We're also told that she's in her mid-20s -- an inexplicable decision because Angélica Celaya is 32, only one year younger than Matt Ryan.

With Zed now thrown into the mix, we're left with an entire cast of characters whose motivations are frustratingly unclear -- and not in a good way. Constantine appears to be motivated by sheer altruism to follow Liv's map and fight a bunch of monsters. Chas may or may not be some kind of traveling demon hunter as well. And Zed's reasons for teaming up with Constantine are partly because she needs his help, and partly because... she dreams about him? How convenient.

As it stands, Constantine can only go downhill if it continues on in this vein. The similarities with Supernatural are too pronounced, and so far Constantine's characterization is disappointingly weak.

I'm hoping that they do a character-focused episode soon, so we can learn more about Constantine's backstory and get a better idea of his motivation. Right now he feels like an extremely watered-down interpretation of the character we see in Hellblazer, to the point where he's only recognisable thanks to superficial traits like his accent and costume. A costume which, by the way, is already beginning to look a little awkward. He wears that brand-new trenchcoat and undone red tie all the time, and it's making him look like a poseur. Why not just take the tie off, or at least tie it properly for part of the episode? Most viewers have little or no knowledge of the comics, so callbacks like this are immaterial. They should lay off the meaningless details (Britishisms like "blighter," really?) and focus more on the actual substance of the show -- such as it is.
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NBC Constantine: "Non Est Asylum"

I'm a big Hellblazer fan, so I've been looking forward to NBC's Constantine with trepidation. Is it going to be any good? Well, no. Hellblazer is not well suited to the formulas and restrictions of US network television. But I'm a glutton for punishment, so I'm going to keep watching.

Predictably, I wasn't exactly blown away by the pilot episode's combination of stilted exposition and occult horror cliches. That being said, a pilot is a pilot is a pilot. It's entirely possible that this show will improve later on. In the meantime, I'm gonna do one of the worst things a TV critic can do: over-analyse a show based on its inevitably simplistic first episode.

We begin with an origin story that will be familiar to Hellblazer fans: John Constantine in a mental hospital. He allowed a young girl to be killed and dragged to Hell by a demon, so now he feels bad. And for whatever reason, that leads to electric shock treatment. Everything else in the episode will feel familiar even to new viewers, thanks to its solid basis in cliché. Daddy issues, a Dark Past, and a young woman (Liv) who needs the protagonist's help -- it's all there, and it all progresses more or less as expected.

"You do that a lot, you know," says Liv. "Deflect emotions with humour. Like the morally ambiguous male lead of a TV show." #Constantine
— Hell Tailor (@Hello_Tailor) October 25, 2014

Having saved the girl and confronted his literal/figurative demons, Constantine ends the episode with an embarrassing voiceover monologue while wandering the city at night. So noir. "I'm the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and arrogance," he says, like a 14-year-old boy trying to sound cool. Not exactly Shakespeare, but it adheres to my expectations for mainstream US drama pilots, which generally consist of characters explaining things to each other in very plain terms.

The biggest disappointment was that they hired the excellent Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, Doomsday) to direct an episode that could never be much above mediocre. I hope he comes back later in the series, to work on something a little more interesting. He's a perfect choice for this show, and honestly they need all the help they can get.

I've never subscribed to the idea that TV/movie adaptations need to be "accurate" in order to be good. Some things just can't be directly adapted for the screen -- for example Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which relies a lot on footnotes and a very precise literary style.

In the case of comicbook adaptations like Constantine, the original was written by multiple people over a period of decades. In this context the most important thing is to replicate the tone and characterization of the comics, and I'm not confident they're going to manage it. Most of John Constantine's most recognizable personality traits (kind of a screwup; bad at relationships; sometimes only does the right thing when pushed) are already stereotypical for morally ambiguous TV antiheroes. The problem is, Constantine is more than the sum of his parts.

There are a zillion other unshaven douchebag antiheroes on TV, most of them with their own selection of addictions, dead parents and dark pasts. At the moment, the only thing distinguishing this show from the shortlived Dresden Files adaptation is the protagonist's accent, and Constantine already shares way too many similarities with Supernatural.

The thing that should be setting Constantine apart is his status as a counterculture icon. But since this type of show is petrified of making any kind of political statement, I'm not holding out much hope.

When Constantine was first announced, the showrunners were careful to reassure fans that Constantine would be blond and that they'd try to dodge NBC's anti-smoking rules. This was to counteract the backlash against the Keanu Reeves Constantine movie, which basically took a dump on Hellblazer canon. Still, I wasn't reassured. Constantine's smoking is important to a storyline in the comics where he gets lung cancer, but making him a non-smoker would be a relatively superficial change compared to some.

More than anything else, the reason why Hellblazer has enjoyed such longevity is its social relevance. I'm all for picking apart Captain America for its political subtext, but Hellblazer is another matter entirely. This ain't subtext. Half of the classic 1980s comics read like hatemail to Margaret Thatcher, and Constantine is very much a product of his upbringing and experiences in late 20th century Britain.

In the NBC show, Constantine is presumably in his 30s, meaning he was born sometime around 1980. John Constantine, Hellblazer edition, was born in 1953 and aged in real time throughout the comics. Now, I do understand why NBC decided to set Constantine in the present day, because an occult-themed show set in 1980s Britain would be kind of a hard sell. But you've got to admit that being born in the '80s creates a very different origin story for this character.

Somewhere in the USA, a teen boy just decided to start using the word "squire" because he decided it sounded cool & British in #Constantine.
— Hell Tailor (@Hello_Tailor) October 25, 2014

One detail that rubbed me up the wrong way was a scene where Constantine argues with a bartender over who is the "most" influential band, the Sex Pistols or the Ramones. Huh? Why would someone born in 1980 have a stake in the Sex Pistols, a band that were only really relevant to the zeitgeist of 1977? Evidently this is meant as a callback to the canon backstory of him being in a punk band in the '70s, but NBC's version of Constantine was a teenager during the height of Britpop. If they wind up including flashbacks to him touring with Mucous Membrane in the late '90s, he's gonna seem like a pop-culture relic.

Realistically speaking, I know Constantine is never going to have the same political weight as the comics. That doesn't mean I can't hold out hope for improvement in other areas, though. First, they need to carve out a tone that sets the show apart from its many competitors, particularly Supernatural. Unfortunately one of the showrunners is David S. Goyer (the "S" stands for sexist), so it's unlikely to outstrip Supernatural in the feminism department.

Otherwise, I'm hoping they stop relying on demonic horror cliches and try to do something interesting with Hellblazer's occult background. That, and hopefully make it clear that this isn't a show about Constantine's heroic quest to defeat the forces of darkness. All the best Hellblazer storylines either begin with Constantine trying to avoid helping someone, or with him being blackmailed or cajoled into helping an old friend, only to fuck up horribly when the time comes.

In other words, the best way to replicate the personality of Hellblazer is to end most of this show's episodes on a downbeat, anticlimactic note. Good luck with that.

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Next: "The Darkness Beneath"

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Costuming and design in Hannibal: Bella Crawford, between life and death.

Previously: Costuming and design in Hannibal, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 (Hannibal's wrist watch.), Part 4 (Abigail Hobbs).

I already mentioned in my first Hannibal costuming post that the FBI team dress like characters in a crime procedural drama, while people like Hannibal and Bedelia du Maurier seem to come from another universe entirely. The main visual difference between the FBI lab team and your average CSI character is that they wear vanishingly few monochrome outfits.

Compared to a show like Person of Interest, where two or three main characters can be wearing all-black outfits in any one episode, Hannibal's crime-fighters look positively colourful. Beverley Katz has at least three different maroon jackets, Jack Crawford loves his dark blue and purple jewel tones, and even Price and Zeller mostly wear neutral colours like navy blue or beige. (Price is characterized by his slouchy dad outfits and cardigans, while Zeller's clothes are more youthful and flattering.)

The only character in the show who habitually wears black and white is Bella Crawford. In her first appearance in "Coquilles," she's wearing a pure white dress to a dinner party with Hannibal and her husband. In the darkness of Hannibal's dining room, she stands out immediately, and the draped style of the dress makes Gina Torres look like some kind of ancient Greek deity.

Another potential meaning of these white outfits is that she is already a "ghost," in among the more colourful, healthy characters in the show. (By this metric, Hannibal's vibrant colour palette is the "healthiest" of all, which makes sense. Mads Mikkelsen loves to talk about how rather than being a "dark" character, Hannibal is almost always the happiest person in the story.)  

Screencaps via Screencapped

Bella's next outfit highlights the white dress from earlier, for reasons that don't become apparent until we see her from another angle: white at the front, but black at the back. Black and white are both associated with death, although in this context I think the stark contrast uses white to represent the healthy "front" she shows to the world, with black representing the darkness of lung cancer that hides behind her facade. Either that, or it's the shadow that will soon catch up with her, and has already overtaken some parts of her body that we don't notice at first glance.

She is half in the world of the living and half in the world of the dead, although interestingly she is one of the very few characters who isn't put in the Hades/Persephone position of eating Hannibal's "pomegranate seeds."

For obvious reasons, this show is riddled with imagery to do with death and the afterlife. However, while most of the time it's something related to the viscerality of material death (i.e. the skulls and horns decorating Hannibal's dinner table, or the crime scenes we see in every episode), Bella is the one character whose appearance uses symbolism associated with the more spiritual side of death: light and shadow, black and white. As someone who is mostly unconnected to the day-to-day events of the FBI and the world of serial killers, she is "pure," and is also the only character who is poised for a natural death.

At home with her husband in "Coquilles," she's back to wearing paler shades: a leopard-print robe and nightdress which the eagle-eyed costumesofhannibal blog pointed out could potentially resemble a pattern of "free-floating cancer cells." Her final appearance in this episode is the scene when she comes clean to Jack about her lung cancer, at which point she has transitioned over to a severe black outfit: mourning clothes.

The next time we see her is in "Takiawase," by which point she's in chemotherapy and is far less put-together than before. We already knew that Bella is very much attached to her dignity, and all of her outfits in "Coquilles" showed her to be mature and poised. Her appearance in "Takiawese" is an obvious progression from that. Although she retains the same sense of style, she's wearing a soft cardigan that would look more appropriate on an older, frumpier woman. She's also wearing pale grey: fading from life to death, or from light to darkness. She is still the only character to wear truly monochrome outfits. Even Hannibal's "grey" suits are always shot through with threads of other colours, or accessorized with a patterned tie or pocket square.

Another detail to note in this scene is the lighting. In their first session in Hannibal's office, the curtains let in far more daylight, and everything was much clearer. This time round, Hannibal's inner blinds seem to be at half-mast, giving everything a slightly murkier feel. Lighting is always used to great effect in this show, particularly in scenes that take place in Hannibal's office or Bedelia du Maurier's house, both of which have huge windows and multiple artificial light sources that can cast the characters in and out of shadow.
This progression into "old lady" outfits continues with Bella's scene at home with her husband, where she wears a terrycloth robe and what looks suspiciously similar to hospital slippers. A floral scarf holds back her thinning hair, there are white roses by the bed ("purity," once again), and for the first time we notice the somewhat funereal decor of the Crawford household. Here are some set photos from showrunner Bryan Fuller's Twitter feed:

For her suicide scene in Hannibal's office, Bella wears a softer version of her cardigan outfit from earlier on, this time with a pale beige cardigan and a shroud-like blouse. The office is in complete daylight once again, rather than the half-dark of the earlier scene.

In Bella's hospital room scene, the set design is far more important than costuming. Bella is shot like the serene corpse of a medieval saint or queen, lying in state or depicted as a marble statue on top of her final resting place. Meanwhile, Hannibal lurks in the shadows at the foot of her bed. Although Jack said in an earlier episode that Bella was trying to avoid their house looking like a hospital room with too many flowers, the colour scheme and potted plants in Bella's real hospital room bear a startling resemblance to the Crawfords' home decor. Dressed in hospital scrubs, Bella edges ever closer to the loss of dignity she feared after her first diagnosis, while Hannibal is back in control once again. As Dr Chilton said last season, sometimes saving a life is as arousing as taking one.

Previously: Costuming and design in Hannibal, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 (Hannibal's wrist watch.), Part 4 (Abigail Hobbs).

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Costuming and design in NBC's Hannibal: Abigail Hobbs

Previously: Costuming and design in Hannibal, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 (Hannibal's wrist watch.)

While Hannibal Lecter's suits are undoubtedly the most eyecatching costumes on the show, I found myself really warming to Abigail's costuming when rewatching season 1. Her clothes in "Potage" are particularly interesting, because they were bought for her by Alana Bloom. This means that rather than wearing her own clothes, she's actually dressed in Alana's interpretation of Abigail-clothes.

Abigail may be an emotionally fragile 17/18-year-old girl, but I'm glad to say that she's neither dressed up like a TV teen (which wouldn't remotely fit in with the overall tone of Hannibal), or styled to look more childlike and therefore ~vulnerable. Like the adult characters, she has a very specific dress sense and colour palette, which in her case is very "outdoorsy". Either she's wearing sensible hunting clothes to spend time in the forest with her father, or she's dressed in green and brown, often surrounded by natural imagery of plants and flowers. While Hannibal is a Francis Bacon painting and Will is an Edward Hopper, I think Abigail is a botanical illustration.

Screencaps via screencapped.net

Abigail's hospital room is very serene, with her butterfly-patterned nightdress matching the pale blue-green bed linen, furniture and patterned wallpaper. This delicate floral motif is directly at odds with Freddie Lounds, who shows up wearing a leopard print dress, a red-lined cape and gloves. Freddie looks practically Disney villainesque in her predatory role as Abigail's unwelcome visitor, and is the one central character in the episode who isn't wearing an outfit that fits in with Abigail's colour palette.

Compared to indoor characters like Bella and Bedelia, Abigail's scenes often take place outdoors and surrounded by plants. Her outfit for her first trip outside her hospital room is a floral scarf (matching her hospital room wallpaper) and a teal coat that complements the blue/teal outfits worn by Hannibal and Alana when they visit Abigail's family home later in the episode.

As ever, Hannibal's costume is significant. Taken on its own, Hannibal's sweater/jacket combination is already relatively unusual for him because it isn't a true three-piece suit. Along with its complementary colour scheme to Abigail's outfit, it has a couple of other possible meanings. First, the high-collared look is somewhat reminiscent of the kind of vampiric 18th/19th-century European aristocrat that Hannibal is partly modelled upon as a character. Secondly, the sweater/plaid jacket combination is basically a hunting outfit, which fits perfectly with his current role of stalking Abigail as potential prey.

When they revisit the Hobbs house later in the episode, Hannibal has changed into a brown/red version of his earlier outfit, which immediately gives him that demonic undertone we know and love. After Abigail stabs Nicholas Boyle, we get this brilliant shot of Hannibal's blood-coloured sweater and brown hunting jacket perfectly complementing the brown interior of the Hobbs house -- and the drying blood on Abigail's hands. Meanwhile Abigail and her blue-green outfit stand out from the background for the first time in the episode.

Abigail's outfit when visiting Hannibal's office has far more in common with the clothes we see in flashbacks, as opposed to the Alana Bloom coat she wore in earlier scenes. In Hannibal's office, she's dressed in earth tones once again: a brown, outdoorsy jacket, her floral scarf, and grey jeans. (N.B. I'm fairly sure that Abigail is the only main character we see wearing denim in this show, a practically unheard-of feat on American television.)

One thing I found interesting when rewatching these early episodes is that while the show makes an effort to characterise Abigail as Will and Hannibal's "daughter," she actually looks way more like Will and Alana's child, both physically and in terms of costuming. With her fair skin, dark hair and scarf/coat outfits, Abigail looks a lot like Alana, while her more outdoorsy outfits firmly put her in Will's camp. Will (an angler) and Garrett Jacob Hobbs (a hunter) both dress pretty similarly when they're not at work, with both wearing warm sweaters and pocketed gilets -- a look we see on Abigail herself during flashback scenes, and in her brief appearance in Will's fishing dream in season 2.

"Potage" is really the only episode where Hannibal and Abigail look remotely similar, although Hannibal is approaching the hunter aesthetic from the English country gentleman end of the scale, while Abigail is the daughter of a typical American working-class hunting enthusiast. Still, it means that Hannibal actually changes his own style in a way that fits in with Will and Abigail's more casual dress sense, which we never really see again for the rest of the series.

To be continued...

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Costuming & design in NBC's Hannibal: Hannibal Lecter's wristwatch.

As part of my ongoing series on costume and design in Hannibal, I'm going to post my first guest blog with contributions from an outside writer. My brother is a watchmaker and an avid fan of Hannibal, and recently mentioned to me that he had some thoughts on Hannibal's watch in the show (a $176,300 white gold Patek Phillippe 5270G Chronograph, apparently). Here's what he had to say:

via weartherude

Patek Phillippe are generally seen by most watch people as the big brand leaders. They have an extremely prestigious rep, although reputation is very, very weird with watches. It doesn't just vary by brand but also by model. The Rolex worn by a particular James Bond in a particular Bond movie may be seen as some amazing piece of art, but a gold-cased Rolex of the same model but a different year could be trash. To give you an idea of Patek Phillippe's marketing brand, here's a recent advert:

Obviously this is schmaltzy as fuck. It's all about getting rich guys to buy into this notion of some noble patriarch father-son connection through this status symbol. Hannibal would think it was pathetic. That said, the aesthetics of the particular watch they have him wearing seem pretty spot-on: It's large, but not distasteful. It's also expensive, but not some horrendous diamond-encrusted monster.

However, I'm still on the fence about it thanks to Patek's image as a brand. If Hannibal is into his mad expensive watches enough to shell out that kind of cash,  I reckon he would either go for one of these:

Source: Lang und Heyne

Or this:

Source: A. Lange & Sohne

The first is a HANDMADE GERMAN MAMMOTH IVORY WRISTWATCH. WTF PERFECT. The second is a watch which occupies to same kind of price bracket and technical style as the Patek but is from a brand that Hannibal would probably like more, the gravitas-laden A. Lange & Sohne Datographe. This watch is generally seen as one of the best designs to come out of the industry in the last 10 years. There are also other options from that brand, including this brown/gold model, and the circular watch in this photo, which I think is the right kind of fussy for Hannibal. 

Hannibal's Patek Phillippe, via weartherude

So, in summary: The watch Hannibal wears is a good choice in terms of characterisation: luxurious yet reserved, with incredibly expensive material (platinum) and a billion complicated extra functions (moonphase, a calendar that doesn't need correcting, etc). BUT it's from a brand I personally think he would sneer at. Honestly, if it weren't for the advertising, the Patek Phillippe one would be nearly perfect. But if it were a choice between the Lange and the Patek I think he would get the Lange, as it's more "niche."

THAT BEING SAID, WHAT CANNIBAL WOULD PASS UP A WATCH MADE OUT OF BONES, AMIRITE?

HelloTailor: Perhaps this is just my own personal taste coming into play here, but I can't really imagine why Hannibal would bother to spend $176,300 on a wristwatch. Taking into account things like accuracy, raw materials and craftsmanship, there is still NO WAY that this price tag serves any purpose other than to indicate that the watch's owner is Very Rich. In fact, my opinion on almost all high-end watches of this type is that they all seem like obnoxious status symbols for men who want to wear something super expensive and sparkly, and see overpriced watches as the only socially acceptable outlet for this desire.

Considering Hannibal's dislike of classless displays of wealth and bad taste, my instinct is that he'd be pretty scornful of the super-rich culture of buying ostentatiously pricy designer watches. Hannibal may be a master of conspicious consumption, but it's always towards a very specific goal. Super-expensive timepieces are altogether a different flavour of connoisseurship than a bespoke suit or an art collection, particularly since they all seem to include these functionally useless extra features like the ability to work in zero gravity or ten miles underwater. I like the idea of Hannibal with an antique watch, perhaps an heirloom from his uncle. I pitched this idea to my brother and he came back with this:

Good point. The least expensive watch I listed is (I think) the mammoth ivory one at around 30,000 Euro:

Source: ablogtowatch

One of the reasons why I was put off by the Patek is it was a little TOO expensive. I can see Hannibal shelling out maybe $50k at maximum if he found something that really tickled his materialism tastebuds, but Patek are infamous for being aggressively highly priced. They kind of rely on being more expensive than their competitors, which is part of the con of "exclusive" luxury products. 

Regarding your more specific issues about jewel-encrusted watches and pointless zero gravity stuff: the brands I listed are considered to be the conservative elegant options. Part of their branding is focussed on them being restrained as opposed to the really ostentatious stuff you see from people like Rolex. Brands like Patek and Lange & Soehne make their name on not being jewel-encrusted. Each kind of mechanism has a different market audience, so for example, Chronograph functions are marketed at "practically minded" clients (i.e. playboys with yachts), while Minute Repeaters (which sound out the hours and minutes on musical gongs inside the watch) are seen as the haute couture complication, and are a source of prestige for any brand.

Ultimately I was only speaking in the context of wristwatches that I would substitute into that modern, posh, exclusive bracket that the show dictated with the Patek. If I were to pick any watch for Hannibal I would agree that an heirloom would be the best choice.

In an antique heirloom context we are limited to wristwatches from around 1930 to 1960. Early men's wristwatches were very small by modern standards, and non-military watches from the '30s and '40s might actually be too small for showy Mads Hannibal with his big ties. I'd probably recommend a classic Jaeger Lecoultre Reverso. Why? It's the perfect murder watch: you can flip the case around to protect the glass from being damaged. It's also just as classy and refined and exclusive as the other watches, but less expensive. Modern Reversos retail at around £10k I believe: much more comfortable.

Source

If we were talking about something really old-school, Hannibal might conceivably have what is known as a "montre-a-tact." In many ways this is the polar opposite to some of the watches I originally listed. It's a pocket watch designed to be both as luxurious and discreet as possible. In early 19th century France the famous maker Breguet made a few of these. The watch is designed to have a hand on the outer case that you can feel in your pocket to tell the time without looking rude by checking your watch in front of your guest. It's the ultimate rich asshole watch. 

[Note from HelloTailor: I particularly appreciate this choice because it plays into the tactility of Hannibal the character and Hannibal the show, which always attempts to engage all five senses rather than just concentrating on sight and sound. Hannibal's sense of smell is often in the foreground, and we regularly characters discussing and experiencing the taste of his cooking. Plus, Hannibal clearly appreciates the sensual pleasure of high-quality clothes, furniture, and so on. It's also worth noting that Will Graham has the habit of touching and stroking things all the time. A watch that works partly by touch wouldn't be a bad choice for Will, either.]

Source

One last thing: Bone clocks. There is a subgenre of clocks called "skeleton clocks," which despite the name are not typically made out of dead things. The descriptor is visual, as in a skeleton leaf. They are clocks where the brass plates have been finely cut away into patterns and swirls. In the mid 19th century a few (and by "a few" I mean only a handful as showpieces by famous or skilled makers) were made in papier mache, ivory, and bone. Bone is a poor material for clock wheels due to humidity issues and it isn't very tough, hence the mammoth ivory watch having all the important bits made out of metal. For obvious reasons, a bone clock would be absolutely ideal for Hannibal Lecter.

(If you want to read more where that came from, my brother has a Tumblr blog all about watches and watchmaking: Practical Horology.)

Next: Costuming and design in NBC's Hannibal: Abigail Hobbs.

Previously: Costumes and design in NBC's Hannibal, Part 1 and Part 2.

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