You on the Moors Now
I designed the costumes for Smith College’s production of You on the Moors Now, written by Jaclyn Backhaus and directed by Monica Lopez Orozco, in Spring 2024. This play is based on four novels: Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, and Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. It takes the characters from those books and positions them in a literal war of the sexes. I had the opportunity to play with mixing historical garments with more modern elements, and also had my first experience designing for a set of chorus characters who needed to be visually distinct without being distracting.
One of the particularly unique challenges with this production was that it was set in the round, with audience on all sides of the actors. Because of that, a lot of work went into making the costumes visually interesting from as many perspectives as possible, largely by incorporating some of the interesting tailoring seen on the back of historical garments.
I won the Peggy Clark Kelly Design Prize for my design work on this production.
Lead Characters
While designing the costumes for the eight leading characters, I wanted to make some sort of obvious signal for which characters belonged to the same book as one another. I couldn’t rely only on the audience being able to make that connection by the era of historical clothing each book belongs to, as Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice both belong to the regency period. Instead, I assigned each book a color and print; Little Women, for example, was blue plaid.
That created its own interesting challenge, as I needed to make sure none of the costumes stuck out. Trying to balance the colors of the costumes to make the characters distinct without being discordant was definitely tricky, and that can be seen in the difference between the colors of my original drawings and the eventual fabrics that made their way on stage.
Wartime Looks
As this play puts these characters in a war of the sexes, they each needed a wartime look. The director and I wanted the men and women to feel very different in how they approached the war.
For the women, this felt like a much more serious affair, in which they were dressed more for practicality rather than for fashion. Each woman got their own wartime garments. Jo’s skirt was shortened, showing trousers underneath, and her plaid jacket was replaced with a camouflage jacket of the same style. Jane ends up stealing some clothes in the script, and therefore was given a set of brown and green men’s clothes, which were intentionally slightly too large for her. Elizabeth got a regency-style camouflage spencer jacket. Cathy got a camouflage apron, and got rid of her bodice, instead wearing just her stays and chemise.
Ending Looks
At the end of the play, all of the characters come together in a party at a museum dedicated to the war. Originally, the director had asked for party clothes from each of the characters’ time periods. While that would have been very cool, we unfortunately did not have the practical ability to do that; the quick change would have been very difficult, and trying to source or make party outfits for all of the characters would have been almost impossible.
Instead, I chose to build on the base costumes for each character in ways that made sense for the ending of each of their stories. Due to certain events in the play, Cathy and Heathcliff stayed in their wartime outfits. The other three men had various medals that they wore, as acknowledgement of their participation in the war. Elizabeth, in the script, had rushed from her work at a lab to the party, and so was still wearing her lab coat. Jo got rid of the skirt entirely, showing up instead in a suit. Jane, who became an astronaut, was in a stylized astronaut suit, complete with a helmet.
Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre
For Jane Eyre, I chose the color purple, based on the darker colors seen on many of the cover designs for the book. Despite the fact that most versions of this story are costumed in the style of the 1840s, when the book was published, I chose instead to base my designs on the Regency period. This decision came from a number of quotes in the book which, to me, sound like the book was actually set in the early 1800s.
For Jane herself, I chose to go with a walking coat. Part of her story in this play has her doing parkour, and so an outdoor garment felt fitting for that. I wanted all of her costume to stay fairly simple, to stay in line with how she was described in the book, and her financial position.
With Mr. Rochester, I wanted his clothing to feel very dark, and so used purple very sparingly, keeping just a touch of it in his vest. To break up some of that black, I used a style of low shoe with white socks that I found in fashion prints from the 1810s. We unfortunately couldn’t find a striped vest in the right color, to match the stripes of Jane’s dress, but because it showed so little, it ended up not being an issue.
The Players
One of the most challenging parts of this play were the players; a set of five actors who played nineteen different characters over the course of the play. I knew from the start that they would have frequent quick changes, so their costumes had to be distinct but simple to change into and out of. Because of that, I gave each of them a base costume, upon which they could layer different costume pieces, an example of which can be seen in my sketch for Player One.
I also had some concerns about the players being too busy on stage. The main eight characters needed to stand out, and so the costumes for the players needed to be simple on a visual level as well. They also weren’t meant to feel like fully fledged people; instead, they acted as a sort of Greek chorus. To make that effect, I costumed them all in shades of white, gray, and cream; a choice that allowed them to feel almost ghost like without taking any focus away from the main characters.
Cathy and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights
Similar to my approach with Jane Eyre, I ended up going a different costuming route than most other examples I saw in my research. While reading the book, many details seemed to point to this relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff primarily taking place in the late 1780s; because of that, I chose to set their costumes roughly in that period. Early on, someone on the production team mentioned taking inspiration from the color of blood for Wuthering Heights, an idea I ended up borrowing for my own designs.
The director and I ended up talking a lot about what we wanted for Cathy. In the book, she is not upper class, so a redingote-inspired dress like this one wouldn’t necessarily be accurate. However, the director wanted to give her a ‘sportier’ look, and so this felt appropriate given the story we were trying to tell. We also gave her red sneakers.
For Heathcliff, we wanted him to look slightly wild and disheveled, with less nice pieces and buttons undone. Because of that, all of his pieces came from stock, and stuck to a simple color palette of reddish browns.
Acknowledgements
A very special thank you to my assistant designer, Rex Tans, my advisor, Kiki Smith, and the Smith College costume shop team, including Emily Dunn and Tilly Adams, for all their help making these costumes come to life.
Jo March and Laurie Laurence from Little Women
The design for Jo March was actually one of the first that came to mind for me. I really wanted to see her in a blue plaid, with a jacket cut in a way that was inspired by both men’s tailoring and women’s tailoring. Something the director wanted to play with in this production was the idea of Jo being queer, and so I wanted this costume to lean into that, including a sprig of purple flowers at the lapel. Eventually, the color of my original sketch was toned down significantly, both because we found the perfect fabric for her, and because that bright blue with such a busy print would have felt out of place. To tie in the more modern elements of this play, she also got hiking boots.
Laurie ended up being in a much more subtle plaid, a smaller print on his trousers. Using a smaller print here broke up some of the plaid, which might have been overwhelming; because the audience was so close to the actors, though, the print was still visible.
Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet’s pink dress was the only one of the opening looks for the four women that we didn’t build, as it was already in the Smith College Costume Department’s stock, and matched what I was looking for perfectly. I wanted to use pink and florals for this particular book, to nod to the fact that it’s often viewed as a frilly romance despite it being a pointed piece of social commentary. Like Jo, we decided to go for modern shoes for her, and found a pair of white sneakers.
Finding pieces for Darcy ended up being much more of a struggle; trying to find a pink vest that wasn’t salmon-y ended up being surprisingly difficult, and in the end, lighting helped a lot to blend the color of his vest and her dress. His jacket also ended up changing significantly from my sketch to the finished costume; this was partially due to what we had in stock, but also because he and Rochester ended up looking too similar if both were in a closed jacket.
The men, on the other hand, felt like they took this much less seriously. For them, I came up with the idea of a sort of toy soldier uniform, which was meant to feel almost cartoonish. We found a set of matching red jackets for them with gold details. Some of them war the uniforms slightly differently; Darcy, for example, popped the top button of his uniform to show off his cravat, while Heathcliff had the cuffs rolled up instead of getting them altered properly.
