‘Bridgerton’ Changed How Period Shows Dress

Dearest readers: It’s Bridgerton Week at IndieWire. We’re celebrating the new season by diving deep on one of the best romance shows on TV.

Lady Whistledown’s innovation among the scandal sheets is that she uses people’s names to dish about marriage-mart gossip. But the “Bridgerton” costume department has had quite a novel innovation on an old form, too, and one we deem worthy of celebration.

More from IndieWire

• 'Thelma the Unicorn' Review: Brittany Howard Provides Animated Netflix Musical with Plenty of Soul

• Yup, the 'Bridgerton' Part 1 Cliffhanger Really Just Did That

How we feel about old-timey clothes is influenced by an intuitive set of conventions that reflect our contemporary fashion tastes. A costume designer’s choice of color, silhouette (the outline or shape of a garment), fabric, and texture all work to tell us who is conceited, who is shy, and who is, as Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) would put it, a sparkler.

But if one looks at costumes from Regency romances 10 or 15 years before “Bridgerton” first aired in 2020  — your “Pride & Prejudice” circa 2005, your 2011 “Jane Eyre” — that visual language of Regency romances is a little different than it is now. One finds lots of Regency heroines in white or muted colors, with rather modest fabric patterns, and at least sometimes wearing the bonnets and cloaks that were part of women’s dress in that era. Shiny fabrics, richer colors, and bigger or more geometric, sculpted shapes appear rarely and only for the high society women we are meant to regard with suspicion.

“Bridgerton” goes much farther and way harder. The show has created a heightened, alternate version of Regency England, and its costumes echo that in their more fantastic, stylized approach to clothing. All three seasons of the show embrace patterns — including, gasp, floral prints! — heavily embellished and embroidered details, blended cultural influences, and modern shapes that would have no place in strict period authenticity. It’s not the first TV show to take highly stylized approach to a time period, of course. But while the costumes echo Regency styles, but “Queen Charlotte” costume designers Lyn Paolo and Laura Frecon credit the Met Ball as much as any museum piece for their work on the spin-off series.

The florals and bright colors are noticeable amongst the characters we’re meant to understand have garish tastes — Cressida Cowpur (Jessica Madsen) and Portia Featherington (Polly Walker) will never stop trying to make big shoulders happen — but the characters we’re meant to root for get to have fashion fun, too. Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) and Lady Violet (Ruth Gemmell) can have equally embellished dresses and/or the kind of strong lines at their collars that indicate their authority.

Even something as small as a sleeve can carry a character’s vibe. Season 2 costume designer Sophie Canale found that the empire-line dresses could give “Bridgerton” an echo of period correctness, but sculpting particular details on individual dresses is where the costumes can really do character-building work with modern shapes that are intuitive to the audience.

“I always made sure within a scene that no same dress had the same sleeve,” Canale told IndieWire. “The head of Prudence’s [Bessie Carter] sleeve is naturally bigger. The Featheringtons tend to have tulle inside, so they stick out, and then there’s the delicacy of the tulip sleeve that Daphne [Phoebe Dynevor] has, and which I used on Kate [Simone Ashley] as well.”

Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) provides a handy example of the full range of what the costumes on Season 3 of “Bridgerton” accomplish as she liberates herself from her mother’s taste. The beat drop moment in the Season 3 trailer is the reveal of Pen’s glow-up, where she discards citrus colors in favor of a striking dark green gown.

That color shift is the most obvious change, but “Bridgerton” Season 3 costume designer John Glaser is also shifting fabrics and the silhouette, giving her sheer black gloves that compliment her skin and her hair in a way the flowery yellow dresses never did.

Historical fashion writer Bernadette Banner, in her 2023 roundup of historical accuracy in film and TV costumes, even called this attitude towards costume “the Bridgerton route” — crafting period costumes that have accurate historical shapes but embrace modern materials and fabrics. Once you see it, it’s hard not to spot the same approach among the Netflix series’ contemporaries, be they the polished and prestige-y “The Gilded Age” or the cheekily modern “The Buccaneers.”

Glaser told IndieWire that the show has opened up people’s ways of thinking about how far costumes can go to support a more dramatic, romantic version of a world like “Bridgerton.” It’s neither better nor worse than series that take a more naturalistic approach, but “Bridgerton” showed a path forward for shows that don’t want to deal with bonnets. “It definitely let people know that you can expand out and vary that world into something you want,” Glaser said. “You can get rid of a major element of a period and still have a period piece.”

“Bridgerton” is a marriage of period foundations and contemporary imagination, and like all marriages, the show has its ups and downs. But Glaser, who also worked on Season 1 in addition to heading the costume department for Season 3, is excited about the ways that the costumes on “Bridgerton” can continue to change with the times — both because fashion on the show moves ever closer to the 1820s in Season 3, and because the “Bridgerton” costume department now has an incredible stock of clothing to play with from prior seasons.

“Visually, I think the show looks better this season because it’s more organic in that it’s got old clothes and clothes that are supposed to be on the cutting edge of fashion,” Glaser said. “We’ve mixed it up and I think it gives the show a deeper feeling, a more realistic feeling, even though it’s still a fantasy.”

Best of IndieWire

• The 13 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in May, from 'Fair Play' to 'Emily the Criminal'

• The Best Father and Son Films: 'The Tree of Life,' 'The Lion King,' and More

• The 10 Best Teen Rebellion Films: 'Pump Up the Volume,' 'Heathers,' and More

Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.