Like many of us, British Independent Film Award-winning costume designer Grace Snell first picked up a copy of Sense and Sensibility as a teenager in English class. Instantly struck by Jane Austen’s “world” and the way “she writes women,” she pored over the novel’s pages before devouring Austen’s sophomore offering, Pride and Prejudice, with similar fervor. Some 20 years later, she has designed the costumes for a new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, directed by Georgia Oakley and opening in U.S. theaters on October 16. “It’s been one of my career goals—to do a Jane Austen adaptation,” Snell says. “And for that to happen, and to be my first period film, feels quite special.”
Known for her work on The Souvenir (2019), The Outrun (2024), and Pillion (2025), Snell was tapped by Oakley herself to outfit the cast, led by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles. The novel, written in the late 1790s and published in 1811, predominantly follows the two eldest Dashwood sisters as they adjust to life after the death of their father and subsequent loss of their family estate. For generations, readers have seen themselves in the rational, responsible Elinor Dashwood (the sense) or her emotional, passionate, impulse-driven younger sister, Marianne (the sensibility). And while costuming an adaptation of such a beloved literary classic might seem like a daunting feat for a first foray into period films, it was Snell’s fresh perspective and background in contemporary filmmaking that made her the perfect person for the job.
Less interested in familiar caricatures of late-1790s fashion (if you were hoping for cap sleeves, this won’t be for you) than in what real people wore, Snell turned to the “less documented” elements and “anomalies” of Georgian style. She instructed her on-set team not to steam the dresses in order to preserve wrinkles from the day before and encouraged the cast to wear their costumes out in the mud to create real stains that might result from a day out on the moors. In one scene, the youngest Dashwood sister, Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), eats blackberries, the juice running down the front of her dress. “There were obviously families in regency England that were completely pristine and pressing and cleaning and doing all that, but I wanted to show that this is a family that now doesn’t have a household looking after them,” Snell explains. “They only have been able to take one maid with them, and they’d normally have so many more. So I wanted to see a family of women learning what that was like to look after themselves for the first time.”
Against a backdrop of muddy fields, heavy downpours, childhood bedrooms, crumbling cottages, and grand ballrooms, Snell imagined the sisters sharing clothes, passing pieces down to Margaret, and experimenting with their individuality through color and styling. Working with a specific palette and picking unusual silhouettes, the team made 85 percent of the costumes from scratch and set up a natural dye room, where they used logwood to dye Elinor’s garments purple and elderflower to dye Marianne’s yellow.
