The Met Museum's "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" will launch in three weeks' time, but there is an exhibition celebrating the costumes inspired by a religious cult that will be opening sooner than that. "Dressing for Dystopia - The Handmaid's Tale Costumes by Ane Crabtree" (until 12th August) will indeed start next Tuesday at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion and Film, in Atlanta.
The event will showcase costumes from the Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning Hulu original series, produced by MGM Television "The Handmaid's Tale", adapted from the eponymous 1985 dystopian book by Margaret Atwood, and with costumes by Ane Crabtree.
The story - set in the Republic of Gilead, a modern totalitarian theocracy in the former United States in which women are divided into castes - follows the vicissitudes of handmaid Offred (interpreted on the screen by Elizabeth Moss), one of the many handmaids, fertile women dressed in bright-red dresses and stark white bonnets used as the reproductive organs of the state and forced to bear children for the infertile wives of the Commanders.
Born in South Dakota and raised in Kentucky, Crabtree studied fine arts at Harlaxton College, Lincolnshire, England, and fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. She has earned nominations for her work on shows such as "Masters of Sex," "Pan Am" and "Westworld."
Co-curated by Alexandra Sachs, executive director of SCAD FASH and Atlanta Exhibitions, Rafael Gomes, director of fashion exhibitions, and SCAD alumnus Mangue Banzima (B.F.A., fashion marketing and management, 2014), the exhibition will feature around 40 costume designs from season one and season two (premiering today).
The main costumes are obviously the uniforms of the handmaids, inspired by cults and religious groups around the world from the 1900s to the present, including the Amish and a Danish cult called Tvind, but visitors will get the chance to discover further symbolisms behind them, from the red colour - inspired by blood - of the handmaids' dresses and cloaks to the horse blinder-like bonnets that were designed in a special way and that, while filming became lightboxes that framed and highlighted the heads and faces of the actresses.
Costume design students should pay attention to details such as the absence of buttons and zippers in the handmaids' uniforms and of the laces in the boots (replaced by a leather spat), elements hinting at imprisonment and jail and at being forced not to even think about committing suicide.
But there's more to discover in the many shades of teal employed for the Commanders' Wives' dresses and the olive-brown clothes of the Aunts. The former also feature little tailored details hinting at a subtle but repressed form of elegance and style; the latter move from the colour and texture of German uniforms from the Second World War.
The second series of "The Handmaid's Tale" promises to be even bleaker judging from the images of handmaids in black cloaks and with their face hidden behind a red veil and from the moods and themes of the first episode in which we follow pregnant Offred on a journey to freedom.
Since series one was first broadcast, the handmaids' uniforms became a symbol of resistance at various political rallies and marches, in particular the ones against US President Donald Trump and eventually infiltrated the catwalk shows, arriving on Vaquera, Vera Wang and Preen's runways.
"Dressing Dystopia" will be anticipated by a museum members and SCAD card holders only reception next Monday, accompanied by an exclusive screening of "The Handmaid's Tale" season two, episode three, and a discussion with select cast and crew from the show (both open to the public).
You wonder if the white wide-brimmed chapeau designed by Hervé Pierre (evoking in its shape the hats seen on Marc Jacobs' S/S 18 runway) and donned yesterday by First Lady Melania Trump to welcome French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte in Washington was somehow referencing the handmaids' iconic white bonnet. Who knows, maybe Melania too is crying for freedom.
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