How Dried Crusts Influenced the Red Tones of ‘Hamnet’ Costumes

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

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

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

Turzanska says that when she first met Zhao, there was no script. Both worked according to the rules. “We talked about blood, menstrual blood, pumping blood, drying blood and so the different colors of blood are definitely in her.”

The first time the audience meets Agnes, she is a young woman dressed in red barkcloth in the woods. When she settles down with William Shakespeare and has children, the red becomes more muted. “She is less herself and more concerned about her children,” she explains.

The turning point comes when Hamnet dies of the plague. Agnes’ clothes become darker and when her husband returns, the couple mourn their loss. But he must soon return to London and leaves her. When he tells her that he is returning to London, Turzanska wanted to show how stylish the two are. She wears a brown blouse with a gray bodice. On the other hand, he wears layers and leathers.

When Agnès gets up from the table, it looks like the character is not wearing a skirt. “The idea was that the character had started to dress up. She still has something to live for. She has other children, and she started to get her act together and forgot to put the skirt on.”

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

At one point, she wears a plum-colored skirt, which Turzanska describes as a dried crust.

At the end of the film, when she goes to London and sees her husband’s play at the Globe Theatre, the character regains some life. “Actually, she’s wearing the same dress that we saw in the scene where she’s very pregnant. It’s the same dress, but closed.” Turzanska adds: “She comes back to herself and tries to reconnect. So she ends up red, but it’s not that young anymore.”

For Shakespeare, Turzanska breaks with the traditional images that the world has of the bard. “The images we have in our minds were painted years after he died. So knowing that freed me from trying to stay true to it all,” she says. He has Tudor details in his clothing. Shredding and cutting textiles was used as an emotional tool to express one’s state of mind.

However, her diapers were simple. The first doublet he wears when he meets Agnès is quilted. In this outfit, the cuts are small, but after Hamnet’s death they became larger.

For her ghost costume, Turzanska looked at how other artists had interpreted “Hamlet” over the centuries, and she stumbled upon a cracked clay sculpture. While showing Zhao other costumes, the director was drawn to the photo. “That’s how we got to the clay. But I was also looking for the origin of a ghost in sheet form, and where it came from. And, of course, that’s because the bodies were wrapped in sheets when they were buried. And so, you know, it’s not a sheet.”

In the end, Shakespeare is covered in dried clay which cracks and disintegrates. Turzanska says: “It reveals that he is raw and open.”