What does Agnes’s red dress represent in Hamnet? Costume designer Malgosia Turzanska has the answer.
Hamnet costume designer Malgosia Turzanska has a special talent that helps with her designs: She has face blindness.
“It’s honestly terrifying because, you know, I don’t want to offend someone that I’ve met a thousand times!” says Turzanska. “I always try to take pictures of people. But what it means, design-wise, is that I try to make characters look different, subconsciously, because that’s what I want as a viewer. I want to know who is who, very clearly.”
Jessie Buckley’s Agnes is someone who definitely stands out immediately in Chloe Zhao’s critically acclaimed drama. When we meet her, Agnes is crouched in the woods in a red dress — the living, beating heart of the film.
“The first bodice, when she’s laying there in the woods, is actually made of bark cloth, which is not an Elizabethan fabric. It is literally wood fiber that is between the bark of the tree and the trunk of the tree, and it’s from Uganda. It’s just this incredible, fibrous textile.”
So Turzanska and her team dyed the fiber red (“It just made so much sense that it’s like she’s part of the forest”). However, the colors and the fabric change throughout the film. At one point, Agnes has linen sleeves, at another point, leather ones.
“I was thinking about blood very much, about this fresh blood. When blood gets a little bit dry on the edges, it turns into this slightly rusty, orange color. So she goes through that. And then when she’s going through Hamnet’s death, it turns into a scab, like a purplish gray. And then when we see her last, it’s like the blood is starting to course through her veins a little bit again. That last dress is the one thing that is a repeat. It’s the same one she wears when Will is leaving for London when she’s pregnant with the twins. And she is this giant red egg. But this time, she’s wearing it closed up.”
Red not only represents her blood, but her vitality and womanhood, how she connects to nature and life.
“When Will sees her for the first time, he cannot look away. When we see her arrive at his family home, everyone is in grays and blacks, and she’s this ball of red. Suddenly, the house changes, you know, because she’s just like casting her light. She stands out.”
For Will (Paul Mescal), Turzanska didn’t want to be swayed by the research and felt it was important she remain true to the characters. However, she did use little period details, like scratches on Will’s suede.
“It felt like using the Elizabethan pinking of leather as an emotional tool. We used the period details to help us tell the story rather than having the period tell us what to do. We used it to our advantage emotionally.”
Also, instead of a dagger on his belt, it’s actually a place for his pen.
“One leather tube that had the quill, and the other tube had a little bottle with ink.”
Hamnet is in theaters starting November 26.
