Ane Crabtree
Handmaid’s Costume from The Handmaid’s Tale, 2017
Medium/Presentation: Costume design, fabric
Big Idea/Subject: Power
Major Theme: Feminism
Visual Components: Shape, form, color, environment
Category: Pop Culture
Description/Interpretation:
The costumes in The Handmaid’s Tale are works of art in themselves. Although all of the costumes have some symbolism, I chose to focus on the costume of the handmaids specifically. They are dressed in bright red, long dresses, with bright red hooded robes worn over them. The fabric is heavy and cut with little to no skin revealed. The dresses hang down to the ground and have some movement but for the most part they droop with a sadness that is at odds with their bright color. The dresses adorn the fertile women characters in the show, at a semi-post-apocalyptic time when fertility is scarce, and religion has taken over politics. Fertile women who do not follow the rules are essentially taken as slaves who have one job – to bear children for powerful men who have wives that cannot do so. The color of their dresses was chosen carefully, symbolizing many different aspects of the women, including sexuality, menstruation, fertility, power (in spite of their circumstances) and anger. Their headwear is a white cloth covered by a white bonnet, reminiscent of a time when purity and chaste behavior was revered. White is often seen as the color of purity and virginity, ironic in this case as most of the handmaids were women that had been living non-traditional lifestyles including prostitutes.
Use in Teaching:
In the classroom, using symbolic costume design such as this, taken from a popular television series that has many parallels to currently relevant social justice issues, can be a powerful way to show how art can be used to spread a message in a symbolic yet subtle way. Students can study the strong use of color and form in a medium that is not normally considered “fine art” in the sense that the way to view it is on a television screen, rather than in a gallery or museum, which emphasizes critical thinking and viewing from different lenses. For an art lesson, the class could create costumes using fabric or other materials that symbolize a social justice issue, first using drawing skills to design the costumes and then using creativity and ingenuity and non-traditional media to construct the costumes. This could also be interdisciplinary, where performance is combined with costume design to spread their social justice messages to their communities.
Discussion Questions:
What choices did the costume designer make that emphasized the symbolism of the handmaids?
What feelings or messages do you get from viewing the costumes?
If the costumes were in another color, such as blue or black, would you view them differently? What about a different material or pattern?
How much does the context of the environment and circumstances have an effect on how we interpret these costumes?
How do you think what we wear affects others or says something about ourselves or personalities?