If you’re not sure how much fashion plays into the world of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Tale, remember that in the very first scene of the Bridgerton prequel series, in the very first episode of the show, the first conversation focuses on women’s clothing.
“I’m wearing Lyonnaise silk with Indian sapphires and 200-year-old lace,” young Charlotte, played by India Amarteifio, tells her brother, Adolphus (Tunji Kasim), to make clear her boredom during the nearly six-hour carriage ride to meet her husband-to-be, King George of England. And let’s not forget the whale bones—“The whale died so I could look like this!”
Fashion—and with it, hair and makeup—has never been a secondary concern in the world of Bridgerton. And that’s not the case in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, a six-episode limited series now streaming on Netflix and created by Shonda Rhimes and directed by Tom Verica about the rise of Queen Charlotte in a foreign land.
Fashion, hair and makeup are as important to the story as music, production design and character development, because without every piece of fabric, lock of hair or mole, the beautiful fantasy world that is the Bridgerverse would be lost.
With that level of dedication and detail, Queen Charlotte costume designer Lyn Paolo and hair and makeup designer Nic Collins have dedicated their extensive research and knowledge of Georgian-era London to Rhimes’ original rendition of the love story between a young Queen Charlotte and a young King George III.
Collins, known for her work on Downton Abbey and the 2022 PBS Masterpiece limited series Victoria, says working on a show like Queen Charlotte is like opening a box of chocolates: “You have all these different flavors in there, but you get to decide what to take out of the box.”
Paolo, who has been in the Shondaland family for years, with her wardrobe adorning the casts of Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder and Inventing Anna, describes the look of the show as a modern interpretation of Georgian aristocracy. Her reference was a 1948 photograph of a model wearing a dress by British-American designer Charles James by Cecil Beaton.
Beaton was a British fashion, war and portrait photographer, as well as an Oscar-winning costume designer, among other talents, and Paolo sought to recreate the feel of that image for the overall aesthetic of Queen Charlotte.
“I’m crazy about Charles James and his designs. I used that [photo] as a template for our look, and from there, I turned to impressionist paintings for the [color] palette,” Paolo says.
Neither Paolo nor Collins wanted to recreate Georgian fashion exactly, as Rhimes’s intention was always to build a fantasy world around real history in the Bridgerverse. “We wanted to make things more youthful and appealing to the modern eye,” Paolo says. “I think that’s something Ellen Mirojnick did really well in the first season of Bridgerton [when] she transformed the Regency look into a modern, lived-in feel.”
Here, we’ll break down the five Queen Charlotte characters and their looks, with detailed descriptions and explanations from Paolo and Collins about how they created and crafted what we see on screen.
Queen Charlotte, played by Golda Rosheuvel
One of the key aspects of Queen Charlotte’s costumes in both this show and the Bridgerton series is that she retains the Georgian silhouette throughout: tight corsets, wide skirts, cinched waists, three-quarter sleeves, voluminous wigs. Paolo wanted to explore the origins of that decision in his designs.
“It wasn’t something that was just created for the first season of Bridgerton,” Paolo says. “Queen Charlotte, like a lot of older women [at the time], still kept the silhouette that was the silhouette of youth. So it was clear that it had to be a through line because it was established in Bridgerton.”
However, apart from Queen Charlotte and Princess Augusta (more on her below), co-costume designer Laura Frecon and Paolo decided to stay away from the super-stuffy brocades and heavy fabrics. For young Queen Charlotte, they went in a more modern direction by changing the weight, cut, and construction of the fabrics. But for Rosheuvel’s dresses, they sourced fabrics from places like Vanners Silk, a nearly 300-year-old textile company in England that specializes in heavier, traditional silks.
Paolo drew on the sadness in Queen Charlotte’s life to design her costumes, which Paolo feels is sadder in this show than Bridgerton. She points out that the story begins with bothi’ve never done on the show. No one ever wears dark colors in the Bridgerton world.”
There was a great deal of research done about mourning jewelry, and Paolo’s team re-created it all for the Princess Royal’s funeral scenes.
“Georgians were fascinated by death,” she says, “and they would weave their [loved one’s] hair into a brooch, or into a pair of earrings, or a necklace, and even rings.”
For Charlotte’s hair, Collins created an arc to show how the queen would eventually get to the enormous and intricate wigs she’s so well known for. In doing so, Collins decided that young Charlotte would have had her natural hair upon coming to court, but that it would grow throughout the story, getting more elaborate in height and shape at each ball.
It was also important to Collins to always have young Queen Charlotte in her natural hair color — in fact, that was across the board for all the cast, to stay with their natural hair color. By the time we reach Rosheuvel’s Queen Charlotte, however, Collins created a palette of silvers and grays.
“Each wig is a story,” says Collins, “and each story shows us where she is in that journey, and each one flows into the next one. We set off with the knowledge [of what we wanted those wigs to be], but those wigs definitely evolved as we created each one because each one spins into another. So, if we used one texture in one, we maybe would take a little bit of that and place it into the next one, and then add something more or different [to help it evolve].”
To illustrate this point, Collins points to a Queen Charlotte wig in season one of Bridgerton that had white bows and diamonds on it. As an homage, she created a wig entirely of bows — the Georgians loved bows, so it made sense — and then reused that concept with a line of bows down the back of a few of the queen’s other wigs. They even placed some bows on one of young Queen Charlotte’s ball wigs.
“We were always kind of merging the two queens’ wig texture, shape, and style,” says Collins. “And if you’re a really keen viewer, you’ll be able to see the story represented in her wigs.”
