How Dried Scabs Informed the Red Tones in ‘Hamnet’ Costumes

“The first image in my head was a giant beating heart muscle, throbbing and pulsing with blood,” says “Hamnet” costume designer Malgosia Turzanska.

Red becomes the main color palette for Jessie Buckley’s Agnes.

Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, “Hamnet,” now playing in theaters, tells the story of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley) as they grieve the loss of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. The film follows the couple as they attempt to reconcile the loss of their child, and how William Shakespeare began to write his play “Hamlet.” Directed by Chloe Zhao, it is a story of love and loss.

Turzanska says when she first met Zhao, there was no script. The two were working off the book. “We talked about blood, menstrual blood, pumping blood, drying blood and so the different colors of blood are definitely in her.”

The first time audiences meet Agnes, she’s young in red bark cloth in the woods. When she settles down with William Shakespeare and has children, the red becomes more muted. “She’s less herself and more about her kids,” she explains.

The turning point comes when Hamnet dies from the plague. Agnes’ clothes get darker, and when her husband returns, the couple grieves their loss. But he soon has to return to London and leaves her. When he tells her he’s going back to London, Turzanska wanted to show how far apart the two are sartorially. She’s in a brown smock, with a gray bodice. In contrast, he’s in layers and leathers.

When Agnes gets up from the table, it looks like the character isn’t wearing a skirt. “The idea was that the character had started to get dressed. She still has something to live for. She has these other kids, and she started putting herself together, and forgot to put the skirt on.”

Turzanska, who used the varying colors of blood to reflect Agnes’ journey, says, “It’s a heartbreaking moment,” because at that point, she’s grieving the loss of her son, and the silhouette is no longer voluminous.

At one point, she’s in a prune-colored skirt, which Turzanska describes as a dried scab.

At the end of the film, when she travels to London and sees her husband’s play at the Globe Theater, the character has regained some life. “She actually puts on the same dress as we saw in the scene where she’s very pregnant. It’s the same dress, but closed up.” Turzanska adds, “She’s going back to herself and trying to reconnect. So she does end on a red, but it’s no longer that youthful.”

For Shakespeare, Turzanska broke away from the traditional images the world has of the Bard. “The images that we have in our heads were painted years after his death. So knowing that freed me from trying to stay true to any of that,” she says. He has Tudor details in his clothing. The pinking and slashing of textiles were used as an emotional tool to express his state of mind.

However, his layers were simple. The first doublet he wears when he meets Agnes is quilted. In that outfit, the slashes are small, but after Hamnet’s death, they have gotten bigger.

For his ghost costume, Turzanska looked at how other artists had interpreted “Hamlet” over the centuries, and she stumbled on a sculpture made of cracked clay. As she showed Zhao other costumes, the director was drawn to the photo. “That’s how we got to the clay. But, I also was searching for the origin of a ghost as a sheet, and where it comes from. And, of course, it is because bodies were wrapped in sheets when they were being buried. And so that’s, you know, it’s not a bed sheet.”

In the end, Shakespeare is covered in dried clay that cracks and disintegrates. Turzanska says, “It is revealing him to be raw and open.”