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‘WILL YOU AT LEAST LET ME TAKE YOU TO NORMAN HARTNELL, AND BUY YOU A WEDDING GOWN?’
LADY BROWNE
‘YOU CAN TAKE ME TO NORMAN HARTNELL, AND BUY ME A SKIRT SUIT. PREFERABLY CRIMPLENE.’
CHUMMY
Once, when I was on the set of Cranford, a very senior actress took exception to the term ‘costume drama’. ‘Why must people always speak of costume drama?’ she asked, in vexed but beautifully modulated tones, ‘I wear a costume in everything I’m in!’
She had a point. Costumes are literally woven into the very fabric of every film and television show, be they contemporary or set in the past. As much expertise and care goes into choosing the right jeans and jacket for a cop show as the tippets and gloves of a Gaskell adaptation. But when a drama is set in a different time all aspects of visual design are more immediately apparent and therefore, perhaps, there is more delight to be derived.
I first worked with Amy Roberts on the revival of Upstairs Downstairs, for which she received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Costume Design. When Pippa suggested her for Call the Midwife, I knew at once that she’d be absolutely perfect. Amy already had several BAFTA wins for Costume under her belt, including one for the 2007 BBC production of Oliver Twist and the previous year’s Elizabeth I: The Virgin Queen.
One of the most interesting things about Call the Midwife is that although it is set long enough ago to qualify as a period drama, the 1950s are within living memory for many of the show’s core audience. This throws up challenges for every department, but people remember details of what they and their loved ones were wearing far more vividly than they can recall the finer points of the vehicles in the street or the news on the radio. I knew from the start that we couldn’t let the show become a fancy dress parade. And that, to my mind, was why we needed Amy, because she doesn’t just do costumes, she does clothes. Detailed, thoughtful, authentic garments that speak of lives lived, and work undertaken. ‘These were real people, doing real things, that really happened,’ she declares. From the outset, creating complete outfits for every single character from the smallest newborn to the oldest nun, Amy has been passionate in her desire to represent the tough, vibrant people of Poplar. Her determination to do justice to this world comes, in part, from her own family background. Her mother Jo, one of 13 children, grew up in the tough East End district of Custom House and left school when she was just 14 years old.
Unfortunately for Amy, her family was one of many at the time that didn’t own a camera, so there is no family archive for her to draw upon. However, over the years, she has accrued a wide-ranging personal library of reference material, which includes many photographs, newspapers and magazines from the fifties. Intriguingly, Amy also has a magpie’s eye for fashion spreads in the present-day glossies – these often provide clues as to how a character’s individual ‘look’ should be shaped, and give fresh insights into colour and texture. In her files, images torn from Vogue rub shoulders with black and white snaps snipped out of Picture Post.
Colour is vitally important to Amy. Thanks to the lack of colour images in contemporary journalism and newsreels, it’s tempting to think of the fifties as a rather drab decade. This was not necessarily the case, but clothing rationing had only ended in 1949, and less than ten years later many people were in the habit of making ‘serviceable’ choices in apparel, on the assumption that everything must last. There was still a lot of brown and grey about, and many young men and women were still in military uniform due to the demands of National Service. Amy has developed techniques for making sure the muted tones don’t dominate.
‘To make a crowd scene more arresting we will throw in an acid-yellow cardigan, or a plum-coloured headscarf to catch the eye. We are making a show and not a documentary.’ These small details do much to enliven and enrich the overall visual experience, and can act as a happy antidote to the carefully observed realism of many of the clothes.
‘Nobody looked box-fresh in the fifties,’ says Amy. ‘If the collar of a bloke’s shirt wore out, you would take it off, turn it around and sew it back on. That’s what my mum did with my dad’s shirts! Or, maybe you had a coat that your mum had made and you either wore it out completely or until it got far too small.’
Amy applied these principles to the Cub pack featured in Series Two. Take a picture of a group of fifties’ cub scouts from Amy’s extensive collection, for example. A few were proudly wearing full uniform but most were missing some element of it. ‘People struggled to save up at the time before buying items like that. One month they would get a cap and the next, a scarf. No one went out and bought everything all in one go,’ explains Amy.
Despite this rigorous authenticity, chances to showcase the more glamorous aspects of fifties’ fashion do arise. Popular interest in clothing and style grew throughout the decade, even when many women could only afford to window shop. Jennifer Worth loved the wasp waists and full skirts that swept the world after Christian Dior unveiled the New Look in 1947. In homage to her I created a scene in Series One that shows the young Jenny ironing numerous underskirts in readiness for an outing to a concert at London’s Festival Hall. Trixie – svelte in a pencil skirt – pours scorn. ‘New Look’s old hat, darling!’ she opines – and by 1957 it was, but only just.
Although well into her seventies, Coco Chanel had sensed that the tide was turning and steered the market back to slim skirts in 1954. Christian Dior responded with H-, A- and Y-line clothes, with dropped waists, boxy jackets and a generally looser fit. One thing led to another, and in 1955 Cristobal Balenciaga presented the tunic dress. Two years later Hubert de Givenchy introduced the ‘sack’, a simple shift that caught on more slowly, but then endured in popularity for years.
Then, as now, however, personal taste was more powerful than the dictates of couturiers, and women used clothes to express themselves, rather than simply following the rules. Amy bears this in mind with every ensemble she creates. Each principal actor has a wardrobe that not only reflects the period, but speaks of the character they play. ‘The young nurses have very distinct personalities,’ explains Amy. ‘Their clothes are actually telling a little bit of their story.’
Jenny Lee’s feminine, fawn-like look was unveiled in her very first scene in the series. We first see her as a poised but perplexed young woman picking her way through the heaving dockside district,
