Dressing with drama

IT is a truth universally acknowledged that, in costume dramas, the beautifully detailed dresses, tailored suits and bonnet and lace accessories worn by the characters play a starring role.

Now some of the most glamorous and instantly recognisable outfits imprinted on our minds through screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s and Charlotte Bronte’s best loved novels are taking centre stage in the North Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate.

Clothes last worn on screen by stars including Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Ehle, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman and Michael Fassbender will be on show in the town’s Royal Pump Room Museum, which is renowned for its exceptional costume and textile collections.

Fans will be able to inspect, up close, everything from the intricate and lavish wedding dresses worn by the Dashwood sisters in the 1995 film Sense and Sensibility to the classic Mr Rochester dark brown suit, with plaid waistcoat, silk cravat and black leather brown top boots from the 2011 film Jane Eyre.

Many of the long, flowing empire dresses and restrained, buttoned-up Victorian garments on display are far more revealing than they might at first appear. For Austen and Bronte, fascinated by style and fashion, were renowned for using clothes, as signifiers of class and status, to help advance plot and characterisation in their novels.

Harrogate Museums assistant curator Nicola Baxter emphasises that, far from being superficial, clothes convey powerful visual images which reflect the social history of the time.

As a result, TV and film costume designers often end up playing the role of historians, social commentators and anthropologists in order to help bring novels such as these faithfully to life. “During the Regency period of Jane Austen, clothes were freer, allowing people to move more easily, unlike the corsets and heavy petticoats of the restrained Victorian era of Jane Eyre,” explains Nicola.

Certain outfits take on particular significance: “Jane Eyre moved between social classes and her costumes, made from more expensive patterned fabrics with intricate trimmings after she came into her inheritance, reflect that, while the earthy coloured dress worn by Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice was designed to allow her to move easily and naturally, reflecting her character’s active nature and free spirit.”

Similarly, the riding habit worn by Billie Piper when she played Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price, one of Jane Austen’s favourite heroines, has a practical, wide skirt made of basic fabric in subdued colours, with various pins and straps to keep it in place in the face of strong gusts of wind. “There is something about the Cinderella about her, the outsider, the poor relation. But she is also a bit of a tomboy with a sharp sense of humour,” explains producer Suzan Harrison.

The clothes portrayed in the films also say much about the different periods and parts of the country Austen and Bronte were writing about. While Austen’s stories were set in the polite Regency world of parlours, tea parties and cultivated southern provincial English gardens, Bronte’s tales unfolded against the Victorian backdrop of Yorkshire’s wild, windblown moors and passion-filled heaths.

Getting the details right is important, says Nicola, who points out that the precise fabrics, patterns and colours used all had to be correct for the periods featured in the films. In Victorian times, men didn’t wear underwear, she explains, so Michael Fassbender as Mr Rochester had to wear a long shirt tucked into his trousers, which doubled up as a pair of underpants. “This is how people wore shirts at that time,” she says.

Alongside the Austen and Bronte exhibition, the museum is displaying a selection of dresses from its own fascinating wedding gown collection to expand on the theme of clothes reflecting social history. Dating from the mid-1900s to the 1980s, each has a fascinating story to tell. “We have always considered dresses an important part of our collection, they are a fantastic way of revealing social customs of the past,” says Nicola.

Farmer’s daughter Martha Dawson, for example, wore a dress sprigged with orange blossom and a flamboyant pair of gold heeled ankle boots when she married Thomas Hartlet Lawton at Pudsey Church in May 1873. “People were superstitious and orange blossom symbolised good luck and fertility. Inspired by Queen Victoria, who wore orange blossom in her hair at her wedding, it was very much the fashion at the time,” says Nicola.

Harrogate’s dress collection has grown over the past 60 years to include everything from Victorian formal gowns to elegant beaded 1920s dresses and modern outfits constructed from Crimplene, a material developed in 1955 at the ICI Fibres research centre just outside Harrogate. Indeed, the dazzling white of a 1985 mock Edwardian style wedding dress on show could only have been achieved thanks to the development of synthetic fibres.

The museum’s own wedding display perfectly complements the four matrimonial outfits worn by Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman in the famous double wedding scene of Sense and Sensibility which sit at the centre of the new exhibition, open until the end of December.

Nicola’s favourite is the wedding dress Kate Winslet wears as Marianne Dashwood, who is marrying into wealth, featuring the sort of straw work embroidery, with heavy gold and silver beading, popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. “It is just so intricate and very beautiful , with a cream gauze underskirt studded with tiny silver stars.”

This contrasts with the printed cream and brown striped muslin dress with lace trim worn by Emma Thompson as her sister Elinor Dashwood, marrying a poor but happy cleric and wearing her best dress to get married in rather than one made for the occasion. While Marianne’s new husband, Colonel Brandon, played by Alan Rickman, wears an impressively dashing military uniform, Hugh Grant, as Edward Ferrars, a young man who has just joined the clergy, dresses in a plain, black clerical suit.

More than 200 years after Pride and Prejudice was first published, Austen’s novel, which reached new heights of popularity after it was adapted for the BBC in 1995, still sells about 50,000 copies a year. The exhibition also marks the bicentenary of Charlotte Bronte’s birth. “It’s a perfect opportunity for us to showcase costumes worn by some of her much-loved characters,” says Nicola.

Styles may have changed dramatically over the last two centuries. But Austen and Bronte are writers who will clearly never be out of fashion.

The Royal Pump Room Museum, Crown Place, Harrogate, until the end of December 2016

W: harrogate.gov.uk/royalpumproommuseum T: 01423 556188