![]() (Fascinatingly, Eatwell says there is not a single full-length portrait of Anne Boleyn as they were all removed or destroyed once the ill-fated queen fell from grace.) And even though Henry VIII was portrayed with a prominent codpiece in several paintings, you will not notice any below-the-belt bulges on Wolf Hall. She designed coats with ermine fur and gold, silver, and purple fabrics-colors that could only be worn by the king or queen according to England’s sumptuary law of the time. Given the number of Henry VIII’s portraits available, Eatwell had considerably more to work with when designing for the extravagant monarch played by Damian Lewis. ![]() “When you look to art of this period, there were quite a few paintings around this time of the River Thames having frozen and having what they called “frost fairs”, where they would literally roast oxen in the middle of the river, so it was incredibly cold.” Interestingly, while men’s chests were exaggerated with clothing, women’s chests were minimized in constricting barrel corsets that flattened the bust.Īnother perk of Holbein’s portraits was that he created a drawing of a woman of the somewhat new merchant class of the Tudor period-a rarity considering that most portraits at the time, according to Eatwell, depicted “court life or the deserving poor.” As such, the designer considers a piece worn by Cromwell’s merchant-class sister-in-law-a simple but elegant charcoal dress with square neck and black head covering-to be the most interesting ensemble she created for the series. “It is very masculine and lovely,” Eatwell says of the men’s silhouette, which was also bulky for practical reasons. The final result of this careful layering was that the men-who out-dressed females to be the real fashion peacocks of the period-looked as though as they had cartoonish-ly broad chests. We researched completely how to pin these women into these clothes and how to layer the men.” Everything was held together by pins or ties, and we used all of the original fasteners. And when that sleeve wore out, you’d remove it and replace it with another one. “If you look, every sleeve has got a series of ties. “They were ingenious, the Tudors,” Eatwell tells us. And she did not merely study the style of clothes-the BAFTA-nominated designer also studied how the clothes seemed to have been constructed, and created the costumes for the primary characters in as close to the same fashion as possible, down to the fasteners. His portraits were one of Eatwell’s primary resources when creating painstakingly precise costumes for Cromwell ( Mark Rylance), Henry VIII ( Damian Lewis), Catherine of Aragon ( Joanne Whalley), Anne Boleyn ( Claire Foy), and the other 16th-century characters that factor into the British miniseries, which aired in the U.K. And when she arrived he did not recognize her and the marriage was never consummated.”įortunately for Eatwell, Holbein appeared to be more faithful in his representations of clothing than he did faces. “We know that Henry VIII sent Holbein to paint Anne of Cleves, who was to be his future wife. “We manipulate images and I think that happened very much in paintings,” Eatwell told us during a phone call last week about Wolf Hall, the six-part series adapted from Hilary Mantel’s 2009 novel about Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in Henry VIII’s court that premiered on PBS on April 5. Those living in Tudor period England may not have benefited from such modern inventions as photographs and Photoshop but they did, as Wolf Hall costume designer Joanna Eatwell points out, have portraits and eager-to-please painters commissioned to create them.
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