– From Deadly Doublets to Tudor Fetish Gear –
by Ben Jureidini | Tatler | November 27, 2024
In the world of Wolf Hall, what you wear is a matter of life and death. Take the opening scene of The Mirror and the Light, the BBC’s highly anticipated adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s final novel. Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn, sacrificed on the altar of King Henry VIII’s sexual whims, kneels shivering before her executioner. Her gable hood is slowly removed from her head and replaced with plain white fabric, a symbolic stripping away of the unimaginable power she once tentatively held. As the sword swings and her head tumbles to the floor, King Henry (Damian Lewis) is playing dress up, his servants wrapping him in furs and cloth-of-gold. His Majesty has literally never loomed larger, insulated from such trivial things as executions and excommunications by layers and layers of silken luxury.
‘He shines,’ explains Joanna Eatwell, the mastermind designer behind this most elaborate of costume dramas. ‘He has to be the top of the pyramid. Eyes have to go to the king.’ The Mirror and the Light tracks the descent of King Henry VIII into what we might nowadays call a populist dictator. His ego inflates after he dislocates England from the Catholic Church, and as his megalomania intensifies, his silhouette expands. Bells, brocade, and shoulders broader than the Hampton Court battlements – when it comes to the Tudor court, Henry VIII had to be the sartorial centre of gravity. ‘It’s the lushness of cloth, the richness and scale,’ says Eatwell. ‘His breadth – he’s just larger than anybody else. Damian [Lewis] is a slight man, but he becomes an immovable object.’
An immovable object, yes, but for how long? What makes Eatwell’s work on the Wolf Hall so integral to the show’s success is that, in a world of subtle machiavellian moves and countermoves, the power players’ clothing gives audiences an insight into the hidden psychologies of royal pomp and circumstance. Henry’s one job is to produce an heir, and he’s failing. How to respond to this lack of virility? By looking like more of a Man. The guy is huge.
‘It’s more about status than style,’ says Eatwell of Henry’s attitude to the royal wardrobe. ‘Because of Henry’s nature we are fetishising masculinity, hence the broad chests, hence the huge shoulders. It’s opulence in the very scale of men, going down to nice little turned calves. Henry was very fond of his calves. He had nice legs, apparently. He hadn’t quite reached the stage of complete disintegration.’
It may come as a surprise that the fetish du jour at the court was the male form – this was, after all, a culture where a bare Boleyn ankle could sever the thousand year communion of Church and State. But, Eatwell explains, the glory of The Mirror and the Light is that it’s completely true. Across period dramas such as The Miniaturist and Taboo, the designer’s attention to detail has garnered her multiple Emmy and BAFTA nominations – but the Wolf Hall series might just be her favourite. ‘It’s one of the few shows that I’ve worked on, where research has been God, and it’s been such a relief. Research has been respected and that can be from etiquette to clothing to dialogue.’
It means rigorously studying the portraits of Hans Holbein (projections of perfection, ‘like modern-day photoshop’) to see exactly how the fabrics fell on individual bodies. It means turning to the Church to find artisans who stay true to Tudor methods of material production. It means, Eatwell laughs, remembering that everyone was probably freezing their codpieces off in their cavernous country piles. ‘What I love about historical costuming is that people are practical. They didn’t want to get cold. They didn’t want to die! There’s no antibiotics, you know, so people wrapped up and wore appropriate clothes.’
And while layers upon layers of linens and furs might have saved the lives of many a courtier back in the 1500s, it made day-to-day filming a little challenging for the leading lights of twenty-first century television. The clothes were exceedingly heavy, Eatwell explains, and the men would be traversing the country house sets in footwear more suitable for battering rams than boom mics. ‘The boots!’ Eatwell laughs, her enthusiasm of the minutia of political power dressing completely infectious. ‘I always try and use the boots, because I think it’s more masculine, and in Henry’s court men were stamping around getting on and off horses. I don’t see it as a slip-on shoe time.’
Indeed, as a Tudor Lord there were really very few clothes you could slip on at all. No courtier worth their liveries would dress themselves – that’s what the gentlemen of the chamber were for. Or, nowadays, the costume department. Eatwell and her team would spend copious amounts of time pulling, tying, and sewing the actors into their outfits.
A hassle, but one that certainly paid off. For stars like Mark Rylance, Damian Lewis, Jonathan Pryce, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Will Tudor, and Henry Melling, this Henrician courtly fetish gear became integral for delivering the masterclass performances that have won Wolf Hall such praise – despite, perhaps, some initial actorly hesitations.
‘If you said to any man “come on in, we’re going to put a pair of tights on you and a frock and skirt” they’d say “don’t be daft”,’ says Eatwell. But when they see the gargantuan shoulders, the puffed up sleeves and the narrowed hips, the thespian alchemy begins to bubble away. ‘I really, really like the menswear of this period. Men are the peacocks anywhere, and I love the shape that we created for [them],’ she explains. ‘The actors enjoy it when they put the costumes on. You suddenly see them stand up and expand their chests, and feel very, very powerful.’
But if Hillary Mantell’s epic Tudor trilogy has taught us anything, it’s that power can be a fickle thing. The rise of a king and the fall of a queen can be a matter of doublets and gables. Many of King Henry’s subjects would have been illiterate, so status had to be signposted through an intricate ranking system of who was allowed to wear what. Sumptuary laws, as they were known, meant that a misplaced purple or an underserved cloth-of-gold could cost you your head.
Just take Thomas Cromwell. The puppet master at the centre of Wolf Hall, his rise from the son of a Putney blacksmith to the right hand of the King made him history’s ultimate social climber – much to the chagrin of the aristos whose frustrated ambitions he left in his wake. He was a fascinating figure to design for.‘We know that Cromwell upset the Lords of the land because he wore clothing way above his status,’ Eatwell says of the real life man behind Mark Rylance’s virtuosic performance. It’s no spoiler to say that things don’t end well for Cromwell, and eagle-eyed viewers will have foreseen his fall from grace foreshadowed in his transgressive decision to dress his son in purple.
‘Well, only the King can have purple!’ scoffs Eatwell. ‘It was beyond outrageous to the people then. To us it’s just colour, but at that point, to have purple, it was committing blasphemy, committing treason. They wanted his head for that.’
Something to think about, the next time you pull on your Barbour.
Read the rest of the original article at Tatler