Studies in Costume & Performance - Costume and Character in Film and Television, Dec 2025

Ane Crabtree’s costuming of The Handmaid’s Tale continues to have a huge social, cultural and political impact. The designs are endorsed by Atwood, who made a cameo appearance in the series and has been accompanied by Handmaids dressed in Crabtree’s style at author events. This article explores Crabtree’s iconic designs, considering the contemporary styling in the context of the Puritan heritage, the colour, fabric and cut, in order to analyse the symbolic significance and mobilization beyond the series. To explore the costuming the article analyses extracts from Atwood’s novel alongside Crabtree’s voice in various interviews. Colour analysis and a consideration of cut is used to understand the Puritan echoes in the contemporary contexts of the costumes. The appeal of the costumes will be understood through both the cut and styling as well as a cultural contemporary cultural relevance. Importantly, the huge cultural reach of the costumes through protest to the catwalk gives some understanding of how fashioning fabric can give voice to the silenced and why Crabtree’s costuming is such a compelling narrative in the series and beyond.

The Handmaid’s Tale television adaptation (Miller, 2017–25) produced a cultural and media phenomenon inspiring feminist and human rights activists in dozens of different contexts to dress as handmaids in protest, particularly to challenge the rhetoric of Donald Trump. This article considers the handmaid’s symbolism from book to screen into protest, as well as the costuming and performances of participants dressing as handmaids in protest. Drawing on interviews with those who dressed as handmaids in the United Kingdom between 2018 and 2019, this article will investigate what the handmaid symbolizes and how handmaid-dressed protesters have approached costuming, tactics and the performance of the handmaid in protest. The handmaid inhabits a polysemic positionality as a costume of conflict, oscillating between various contradictory states to produce a popular and accessible figure to explore the multifaceted activism of feminist practice. The handmaid in protest produces and denies submissive femininities, which creates a vehicle for participants to contend with their own political identities and feelings. The handmaid is powerful because of its complexity and ambivalence, allowing participants to find it useful from multiple different angles. At the same time, the handmaid is at risk of being interpreted as a post-feminist figure, in which traditional conventions of femininity are reinscribed.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is a set of thirteen metafictional novels intended for young readers. Snicket’s distinctive tone establishes the series as metafiction through his use of reflexive literary devices, references to language and narrative structure, and direct address to his readers. The series was adapted into a Netflix show in 2017, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. Angus Strathie designed the first season and Cynthia Summers designed the second and third. This article focuses on Summers’s designs. Summers was tasked with translating Snicket’s trademark voice into costume. By interpreting not just the content of the novels but also the language used to write them, Summers included ironic, self-referential and contradictory elements within her designs. The manifestation of literary devices within the series’ costumes qualifies them as meta-costumes. The metafictional elements included in the designs serve to heighten the relationship between the viewer and the film. Just as is the case with the reader encountering Snicket’s narration, the viewer is simultaneously implicated in the mysterious story and made aware that it is fiction. Summers achieves this awareness in viewers through her consideration of children’s perspectives, concerning both the perspective of the young viewer watching the fiction and the perspective of the young protagonists within the fiction. She makes use of the contrast between authenticity and artifice within disguise tropes to draw attention to the deductive powers of child viewers as well as emphasize the conflicting narrative layers within meta-adaptation. The inclusion of diegetic costumes or costumes that exist in the world before they are acknowledged by the plot, emphasize the discontinuous temporalities of the world of the viewer and the world of the fiction. Finally, Summers designs Snicket himself, who, in a stark departure from the form of the novels, appears as a character within the series, marking the most literal translation of Snicket’s narrative persona to the screen.

While many figures in Malayalam cinema have entered the industry through elite artistic networks, a parallel history is shaped by individuals whose artistic journeys emerge from domains of labour that have remained under-recognized within dominant cinematic narratives. Among them is the National Award-winning actor Indrans, whose humble beginnings as a costume designer and tailor constitute a framework for his foray into the film industry and a key component of his distinctive identity. Drawing on a reflective in-person interview with the actor, this conversation explores how Indrans consistently affirms and mobilizes his tailoring background, not as a past remaining in the periphery but as a vital source of embodied knowledge, aesthetic sensitivity and cultural authorship. The conversation foregrounds the continuities between material craft and screen performance, revealing how his artisanal expertise informs his minimalist acting style and creation of characters. Through evaluating his labour within broader shifts in the monetary systems of costume designing and holding an acting career in Malayalam cinema, the conversation situates Indrans as a unique prism, a befitting case in point for revisiting class, skill versus talent and performative authorship from the Kerala context, India, whose four decades of positioning in the Malayalam film industry become a repertoire of data, as an individual who possesses extensive experience and knowledge in the industry, and has witnessed the shifts for nearly half a century. An account of his journey invites a re-examination of the hierarchical structure of cinematic labour, where backstage artisanal work substantially impacts and optimizes on-screen performance.

Review of: Palace Costume: Inside Hollywood’s Best Kept Fashion Secret, Mimi Haddon (2024)

Los Angeles, CA: Chronicle Chroma Books, 340 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-79722-885-3, h/bk, USD 29.95

Review of: Insubordinate Costume: Inspiring Performance Susan Marshall (ed.) (2025)

New York and London: Routledge, 219 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-03237-597-7, p/bk, USD 49.99

ISBN 978-1-03237-598-4, h/bk, USD 180.00

ISBN 978-1-00334-100-0, e-book, USD 49.99

Review of: Textiles on Film, Becky Peterson (2024)

London: Bloomsbury, 184 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35002-655-1, h/bk GBP 80.00

ISBN 978-1-35043-072-3, p/bk, GBP 28.99

Review of: Leigh Bowery!, Various Artists, Curated by Tate Modern and Nicola Rainbird, Tate Modern, London, UK, 27 February–31 August, 2025