(Regarding the Austenian series of posts, it’s going to take some time for me to get the Elliots, Musgroves and Hayters straight in my head and write them up. In the meantime, here’s a followup on the latest Sense and Sensibility adaptation).

These are about a week old or a little more, and I was hoping to find some source other than a reddit thread, but I didn’t, so here we are. I’d been a little anxious about costume designer Grace Snell, who didn’t seem to have much in the way of period work, but I like the clothes so far, which look solidly Regency (don’t ask me to match them to a particular year) and have some cool details in terms of embroidery and lace. Wealthy Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw) wears flamboyant green and gold. Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esme Creed-Miles) wear shades of gray/black and purple/lavender, with Elinor being the more somberly dressed of the two. I’ve seen conflicting claims about whether these were in fact “half-mourning” colors as far back as the Regency, or whether they were more of a Victorian thing, but it’s a useful visual shorthand for “our dad has been dead between six and nine months,” and it looks good on them.

A couple pictures include Ceara Coveney (Elayne in Wheel of Time, one of the brighter points of Season Two and Three), wearing a very pretty light gray outfit. Possibly our Lucy Steele? One shot has a very tall, well-dressed man in the background with a slight receding chin. He might or might not be Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon. If so, cause for rejoicing, dude does have enough neck for Regency collars! The group shot of Mrs. Jennings with the Dashwood sisters also has a couple of men in the background, although it’s not really clear who they are.

All in all, good job so far. My main beef with what I’ve seen of the Netflix Pride and Prejudice costumes is that they don’t really feel like a unified aesthetic, just “here’s a bunch of clothes from about the right period, with some effort to distinguish between characters who care about their looks and those who don’t. Hope you like them!” These S&S clothes do feel like there’s more of a coherent idea behind them, if that makes sense. Unlike the P&P first look, these seem to be informal behind-the-scenes shots that aren’t meant to give a sense of the production’s cinematography. As a result, I don’t know if the final film will be as gray-toned as these images suggest. On the one hand, S&S lends itself more to that kind of somberness than P&P. On the other hand, the last BBC S&S, which is admittedly 17 or 18 years old at this point, did something similar. We shall see.