To source items for the costumes in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, costume designers Lyn Elizabeth Paolo and Laura Frecon visited museums, silk mills and jewelry houses. They went to Spain, Italy, England and the US. They even custom-made hundreds of 1760s-accurate underpinnings in order to outfit the cast in the new series, which follows the early romance of Queen Charlotte and King George, played in their younger years by India Amarteifio and Corey Mylchreest and in their Bridgerton era by Golda Rosheuvel and James Fleet.
While Queen Charlotte and King George are real-life historical figures, the series is fictional. But nearly every aspect of the costume design was rooted in actual history, from the Georgian dress silhouettes to the exact replica crowns fabricated by Italian jeweler Pikkio.
As a result, Paolo and Frecon, along with assistant costume designer Jovana Gospavic and costume supervisor Alex Locke, were nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Period Costumes for a Series category. (To complete the look, Nic Collins and Giorgio Galliero were nominated for Outstanding Period and/or Character Hairstyling as well. Check out the rest of Netflix’s nominations here.)
Below, Paolo and Frecon take Tudum on an in-depth journey through the gorgeous costumes of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.
Foundations
While the gowns and jewels are what catch your eye on-screen, the quest to transport the Queen Charlotte actors back to the 18th century began with hundreds of custom-made undergarments. The underpinnings for the principal cast were made by skilled English corset-makers — “especially for the corsets that you see on camera where Charlotte or Lady Danbury is being laced up,” Paolo says.
The rest were crafted in Los Angeles and shipped to London. “We ended up making most of the corsets for the background and the tutus and the bum rolls in Torrance, of all places, and had everything shipped over because the amount of volume that we needed to make — there was no way we were going to get it done in England.” Paolo and Frecon made hundreds of corsets, they calculated, in order to give every extra in every crowd scene a period-appropriate silhouette.
Over the corsets were fabrics sourced from New York and all over Europe, including silks from Sudbury, Suffolk, the UK’s historic center of silk weaving; brocades and damasks from France; and plenty of inventory from the London fabric store Joel & Son, which works with the current royal family. The actual amount of fabric Paolo and Frecon used for the series is impossible to tally, Frecon tells Tudum.
“For instance, one of young Charlotte’s gowns, just the taffeta that we used for the over-robe was between 13 and 20 meters per gown,” she says. “That doesn’t include all the lace and organza and everything else.”
A new look
After Paolo and Frecon brushed up on their Georgian history, they dug into more modern fashion archives for inspiration, which Frecon described to Netflix as “high fashion meets period style, with a twist.”
specifically, that meant ’50s Christian Dior and Roger Vivier — the house that made Christian Dior’s shoes and also made young Charlotte’s shoes in the show. The designer Charles James, one of Paolo’s personal favorites, was another ’50s-era inspiration.
As Paolo told Netflix, “Dior was a huge inspiration for us, especially because I think a lot of the Dior New Look actually came from this period, that shape and that silhouette. We were echoing the 1760s and the late 1940s, 1950s, and that Dior New Look is reflected in many of the costumes on the show.”
In keeping with the show’s modern take on aristocratic aesthetics, the designers would kid each other about the show launching a revival of the ’80s New Romantic look, with foppish lads gallivanting about in fancy embroidered waistcoats — “or maybe Harry Styles will wear one of the jackets,” Paolo jokes.
Crown jewels
To give you a sense of how important jewelry was to Queen Charlotte, the code name for the production was Jewels. “That was our secret name. And so the Jewels of it all, and the layering jewels on every body and in everyone’s hair, became all-consuming,” Paolo says.
In addition to the custom Pikkio pieces, Paolo and Frecon sourced jewelry from the companies Larkspur & Hawk (which created several significant pieces for young Charlotte) and Autore (which created Princess Augusta’s pearl designs), as well as rental-and-sales house Joseff of Hollywood. While some pieces evoke historic royalty — including a replica of Marie Antoinette’s three-strand diamond bracelet, seen briefly on the young Queen Charlotte’s wrist — others evoke Hollywood royalty, including pieces used in the 1938 film Marie Antoinette, starring Norma Shearer.
The most elaborate piece in the series is Queen Charlotte’s wedding tiara. Frecon told Netflix the headpiece was inspired by “historic images of other royals, includingQueen Elizabeth II, and this beautiful tiara en tremblant from an Elie Saab runway show. Our incredible milliner, Jen Lewis, and in-house jeweler, Stephen Rogers, teamed up and meticulously, by hand, put together that wedding tiara. We ordered pieces in, we used existing pieces, we shopped pieces, but that was all completely handmade. And many fittings later, we made sure it worked well.”
