Attolia
This costume is based on one of the main characters from Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series. I started it just after the last book in the series came out, in late 2020, and finished it in July of 2021.
This particular dress is, in my opinion, one of the most significant pieces of clothing in the series, especially to this character. It represents her struggle to maintain power as a single queen ruling over a divided country. In The Thief, one of the other main characters remarks that, “everything about her brought to mind the old religion, and I knew that the resemblance was deliberate, intended to remind her subjects that as Hephestia ruled uncontested among the gods, this woman ruled Attolia.” Unlike many rulers throughout history, Attolia doesn’t use her clothing to represent the wealth of her country, but instead uses it to create an image of herself as an uncontested ruler. Because of that, I wanted to keep it relatively simple; I wanted it to be, within the context of this world, immediately recognizable from afar, and really focused on the symbolism rather than intricate detail.
Below is a breakdown of the inspiration for this dress, as well as the design decisions I made while making it.
Inspiration
The first step in making this costume was collecting quotes that describe it. I ended up only going for descriptions from The Thief, since those gave me a pretty good idea of what I was working towards. The main quote I used as inspiration for this costume was, “Her robe was draped like a peplos, made from embroidered red velvet.” (The Thief, pg 182)
To the right, you can see the first sketch I did of this costume. Despite the fact that the books take place in a roughly Byzantine-parallel time period, I decided to not include any imagery from that, and stuck exclusively to a peplos-inspired design, due to the important symbolism of this costume. The design itself did end up changing from that original sketch; below, you can see three of the statues I ended up using as inspiration for this costume. All three feature a layered peplos with a belt at the waist, which is the style I decided to go for, since it offered me a lot of places to put embroidery.
Fabric
In the original text, this dress is described as being made out of red velvet. However, I ended up choosing to not follow that. For one thing, The Queen’s Thief takes place in a Greek-inspired area, and velvet can get hot, so it just doesn’t seem practical to wear something like that every day for years, like the character Attolia seems to do for the first few books in order to maintain the symbolic status this dress helps to promote. In addition, velvet is difficult to work with and heavy, and I was worried about how that would affect the draping of the dress.
Despite all that, I did want to get the same high contrast between shadows and lighted areas that appears in velvet. To achieve that, I decided to go with this shot silk, which you can see to the left. Shot silk is made with two colors of thread, one of which goes in the weft, one in the warp. In this case, the dominant thread is red, and the recessive thread is black. This means that you do still get really dark, rich shadows, and really bright, saturated highlights, which I think works well as an alternative to velvet.
Embroidery
From what I could find in the books, there wasn’t a description for the embroidery mentioned in the quote I used as my main inspiration for this costume. Since I couldn’t find anything specific, I decided to design my own embroidery.
This dress is mainly referenced as a call-back to religious imagery in the books, but I thought it could also be interesting if Attolia chose to include some more country-based symbolism as well, to support her power with both religion and national pride. Because of that, I chose to use the symbol of her country, the lily, as inspiration for the embroidery. I wanted it to be very Grecian, so I started looking for ancient Greek art that featured lilies, and ended up finding the Prince of the Lilies, a Minoan fresco (pictured to the right). I used the flowers in that as inspiration for the embroidery design.
The embroidery appears in three places on this dress; the waistband, where the smallest embroidery is, the tunic, and the hem of the skirt. The design features a single gold bead in the center, and the parts on the skirt were done with applique rather than satin stitch, to more evenly cover such a large area.
Waistband
Tunic
Skirt
The Skirt
In the third book in this series, there’s a specific scene were Attolia is dancing, and she’s described as looking, “…like a flame in the wind…” (The King of Attolia, pg 101) The dress in this scene and the costume I made are not the same, but I wanted to capture some of that with this costume, since this dancing scene is one of my favorite scenes in the series.
To capture that effect, I chose to make a circle skirt for this costume. A normal peplos would likely have had something more like a rectangle skirt, but as usual, my costumes are only loosely historically inspired. As you can see in the photo to the left, the skirt does flare out nicely when you spin in it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do so quite as nicely as I would have liked. Mostly, it twists, and I think the weight of the fabric and the embroidery drags it down. It’s something I’d like to test more in the future, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out here.
Hair
Attolia’s hair is described as, “…black and held away from her face by an imitation of the woven gold band of Hephestia.” I’ll be talking about the jewelry in the section below this, so I’ll leave that out for the moment, but the hairstyle itself was something I had a lot of fun with. I bought this wig, which has long, black, curly hair, and twisted it into a half up half down bun. There are braids and twists throughout, and two leave-outs at the front. The circlet I used feeds into the bun itself, though it doesn’t serve any functional purpose for holding the hair back. To the left, you can see a dramatic photo that shows off the hair and circlet; below are two detail shots that better display the detail in the hairstyle.
Jewelry
There were two main pieces of jewelry, the circlet and the matching earrings, which were especially important to this costume due to their significance in the story. The circlet is another piece of Attolia’s imagery as an uncontested ruler, and the earrings are a bit of a spoiler. Both of these I purchased; jewelry making is something I’d like to get into in the future, but that I haven’t been able to seriously spend any time on yet. The circlet is from this store, and the earrings can be found here.
The rest of the jewelry I actually played around with a lot. As I mentioned at the start of this page, Attolia relies a lot on her imagery, so her focus isn’t on a display of wealth in terms of her clothing. However, we know from the books that she had an extensive collection of royal jewelry (of which I won’t mention more due to spoilers), so I’d like to think that her main way of expressing wealth and really just playing around with her outfit is through the rest of her non-symbolic jewelry. Because of that, I used three gold bracelets that I already owned, and a gold arm cuff which you can find here.
The last parts of the jewelry were the two necklaces. The shorter red one is one I made, using a number of different kinds of gold crystal beads. It’s based on this necklace, which I didn’t buy because of expense, and because the color wasn’t quite right to match the fabric of the main costume. I also wanted a layered effect with the necklaces, so I bought this second one, which is a replica of a Minoan pendant. I liked that it had a connection to the original inspiration for the embroidery on the dress, and it also just fit really well with the shape of the embroidery. It also references a pair of bee earrings that are mentioned in one of the books in the series.
Additional Photo
This one photo didn’t make it in anywhere else on this page, but it’s one that I really like, so I wanted to include it down here.
If you’d like to see a more detailed documentation of the creation of this costume, this link will take you to a playlist of all of my costume progress videos that feature this costume.
Acknowledegments
I’d like to thank my mom for all of her encouragement, help on the skirt, and for taking the dramatic photos!