Fashion fans have come to expect certain style elements from a Jane Austen adaptation: empire-waist gowns, romantic pastels, and an abundance of bonnets. For the new Sense and Sensibility, directed by Georgia Oakley, costume designer Grace Snell wanted to offer audiences something a bit more novel.
Snell—who also managed costumes for Pillion and The Outrun—had never done a period film. As a fan of Ang Lee’s 1995 interpretation, Snell tells Marie Claire she “definitely felt the pressure.” Her solution wasn’t to compete with costumes designed by Jenny Beavan and John Bright, but to “create our own world.”
With only nine weeks of prep—a window Snell says was even shorter given some of the cast wasn’t confirmed until later—she brought a dress historian onto the project to help with research. But being a period newcomer ultimately gave her confidence.
“I knew that I'd been hired for me, and my tastes and my eye, because it's my first period,” she says. The fact that Working Title and Focus Features, both well-versed in period filmmaking, had entrusted her with a project of this scale reassured her: “I felt confident that as long as I was true to who I am as a designer, that I would create something quite unique.”
Part of that meant shifting the fashion references to the late 1790s, rather than the early 1800s of previous adaptations, and building a palette that steered clear of the “sugary colors” Snell associates with period films. Her team naturally dyed many of the fabrics, reworked antique textiles into new garments, and made most of the principal wardrobe, supplementing it with pieces rented from costume houses for group scenes.
“I knew the only way I could approach this [project] is giving it a fresh, modern take whilst remaining historically accurate,” Snell says. That led the creative to some unexpected inspirations for an Austen adaptation.
Japanese tailoring from avant-garde brands like Comme des Garçons (in particular, Rei Kawakubo’s 1994 “Metamorphosis” collection) and Yohji Yamamoto became a major reference for the juxtaposition of structured jackets styled with voluminous skirts.
For the dreamer middle sister Marianne Dashwood, played by Esmé Creed-Miles, Snell went in a romantic direction. One starting point was a 1782 painting of Lady Emma Hamilton, portrayed as Greek mythology goddess Circe.
“I loved how clothing is painted in these romantic portraits,” she says. Another was John Galliano’s famously water-soaked 1986 “Fallen Angels” collection. For a pivotal scene, Marianne gets caught outside in the rain. “The collection for me was really inspiring—how fabric reacts with water,” she says. To recreate the effect, she sought out an almost weightless cotton fabric that became translucent when soaked.
Throughout the film, the Dashwood sisters are layered in shawls, jackets, and vests, seemingly thrown on for countryside warmth or modesty, rather than assembled into a perfectly styled look. That slightly undone sensibility came from an unexpected contemporary source: 2010s celebrity paparazzi photos.
“You know how sometimes when celebrities are being papped… with a coffee, and they’re traveling, and they’ve got swaddled in scarves, and they don’t quite go together?” Snell says.
Those off-duty images particularly influenced what Elinor (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne wear as they journey to London. “England being so perfect and refined and all coordinating—I wanted to shake it up a bit, so that it’s this modern injection of styling where we’re just a little bit more comfort-led and also a bit random,” Snell says. “I kind of really like random.”
That sense of imperfection also became essential to making women living in the late 18th century feel relatable to today’s audience. “My biggest goal with this film… is to feel like the audience are in the room with these sisters,” Snell says. “I want the audience to feel like they can see themselves here.”
That meant resisting the preserved-in-time quality of costume dramas. Hems appear muddied as the heroines run through the countryside, dresses get stained with berry juice, and outfits look as though they've been worn repeatedly.
“I have left things unironed, things that look like they could have been picked up off the floor from the night before, because we can all relate to that,” she says. “It is about relating to this film and Jane Austen in a contemporary way, trying to work out through costume how I can do that for the audience.”
The realism extended beyond wrinkles and stains to the whole looks, which are deliberately repetitive. “They wear their costumes quite a lot in the film and are reusing them,” Snell says.
The lavender dress Elinor wears later in the movie is meant to have been reconstructed from the fabric of an earlier one: Within the logic of the story, Elinor has remade the original into a slimmer, more practical gown for working at the cottage, after the Dashwoods lose their wealth. “That was one of the ideas we’d had early on to kind of recycle the fabric,” Snell says.
The clothes also reveal sides of Elinor’s and Marianne’s personalities. Marianne’s costumes are lighter, softer, and more decorative. “We have her with her open necks, and she’s very open to the world,” Snell says. She is also “more detail-oriented,” Snell adds, pointing to the embroidered stockings, ribbons, lace, and sashes that populate her wardrobe.
Elinor, meanwhile, is far more utilitarian. As the oldest sister, who now shoulders responsibility for the family, her clothes are functional. Snell describes Elinor’s approach as: “‘How does this serve me to get me through the day?’ rather than ‘What does it look like?’”
These differences are most apparent on the journey to London. Marianne wears a bright bonnet, reflecting her optimism and excitement about what might await her there. Elinor, anxious about being thrust into London society, retreats beneath a hood.
“She’s just not looking forward to this,” Snell says. “She’s not optimistic. She feels very nervous about being thrown into London.” Their surroundings change how they present themselves. “When we see the sisters behind closed doors, it’s who they are at their truest and their most natural.”
That expectation is especially visible when they interact with more affluent characters. Fanny Dashwood and Mrs. Jennings wear stronger patterns, shinier textiles and fabrics with more luster, along with jewelry and feathers—forms of adornment largely absent from the Dashwood sisters’ wardrobes. “They were my way to show a range of society and the different women in our film,” Snell says.
At the London ball, that difference becomes especially stark. For the scene, Snell consciously resisted going too far into the era’s extravagance. “Regency fashions do go very wild with all the frills and the fancifulness, and it’s kind of exciting, but I didn’t really go there,” she says. For Snell, “this was about the sisters and fitting into society and not quite knowing how to.”
Marianne arrives in an ethereally diaphanous gown. As beautiful as it is, it can’t compete with wealthy Miss Grey, who wore a gown fashioned from hand-painted Chinese silk dating to the 17th century. “I wanted us to recognize the wealth divide with [the Dashwood] family and still make them look lovely, but in their own way, they’re just a bit simpler,” Snell says. “They have done as best as they can with their ball gowns, and they do fit in, but they’re not as adorned.”
While simpler than Miss Grey’s, Snell calls Marianne’s dress one of her favorite looks from the film. Its layered, Grecian construction is rooted in the period, when, as Snell puts it, women could look as though they were “almost wearing underwear at these events.” Knowing the ball would be lit by candles, she chose fabric that would catch the light and appear water-like.
Mourning offered another opportunity for economics to shape aesthetics. Rather than put the entire Dashwood family into pristine head-to-toe black after the death of Mr. Dashwood, Snell asked what women who had just lost their estate could realistically do with the wardrobes they already owned.
Mrs. Dashwood, as the widow, wears truest black (another of Snell’s favorite looks), while her daughters appear in varying shades produced by dyeing existing garments. Marianne, naturally, pushes against convention in yellow. Lavender, lilac, and gray could also be worn in mourning, giving Snell room to build a more nuanced palette, instead of a uniform sea of black. She says she imagined the character declaring: “Because Dad loved yellow, I’m going to wear yellow.”
That same sense of individuality extended to the film’s smallest details, like accessories. Snell, who admits to “loving hats,” wanted to move beyond the expected bonnet. “We’ve seen every bonnet there is in all the adaptations,” she says. “To make our adaptation stand out, I was really interested in playing around with other shapes that existed at the time.”
The girls’ mourning caps, for example, help distinguish between their private and public selves. They put them on before receiving visitors, a small costume change that communicates how they are expected to present themselves regardless of what they are going through. Elinor gets her hood for London; Marianne wears a head wrap to the London ball; and Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Dashwood appear in dramatic calash styles.
The youngest sister, played by Bodhi Rae Breathnach, gets perhaps the most playful version: a straw crown that Snell imagined as a broken bonnet Margaret had repurposed. “The idea is it would be like a bonnet that had been broken that she just turned into this kind of straw crown,” Snell says. “It’s playful, and it’s fun, and it’s who Margaret is as a character.”
By the film’s end, the clothing helps reveal how much Elinor and Marianne have changed. Their wardrobes, initially so distinct, begin to echo each other. Marianne literally borrows from Elinor’s wardrobe, while Elinor takes on some of her younger sister’s ease. “They kind of lean in and borrow from each other,” Snell says.
She was careful, however, not to simply reverse their sense-and-sensibility roles. “We don’t want them to flip,” she says. “We just want them to have gained qualities from each other to become a bit more well-rounded in their emotional state and their rationale.”
Snell’s references may have spanned centuries, but they all served the same purpose: helping viewers imagine how two sisters might have lived in their clothes more than 200 years ago. The result is a wardrobe that feels personal, rather than purely period-correct.