The weirdest thing about Hulu’s much-discussed serialization of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale is the Handmaid’s Tale cosplay industry.
It seems that every woman in America—or at least every woman in America who knitted herself a “pussy hat” to march against President Trump in January—now wants to look and dress exactly like “Offred” (Elisabeth Moss in the Hulu adaptation), forced by the totalitarian theocracy that rules Atwood’s dystopian “Republic of Gilead” to become a sex-and-pregnancy slave for one of the theocratic “Commanders” in the novel and his infertile wife. (In Gilead, most of whose women have been struck barren by an environmental catastrophe, the Handmaids are among the few women able to conceive and bear children.)
The polarized-light female fixation on Offred’s bright red “Handmaid” dress and starched white bonnet is fascinating in itself. No one seems the slightest bit interested in any of designer Ane Crabtree’s costumes for any of the other categories of Gilead inhabitants created by Atwood: the Aunts, the Wives, the Marthas, or even the Commanders. So we have this May 2 article in the Los Angeles Times: “Dystopian Apparel: The Making of ‘The Handmaid’s’ Blood-Red Robes,” devoted entirely to what Moss wears in the series. The article includes a photo of a costumed Moss and a bullet-point list of every single item of Handmaid clothing she’s wearing:
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White caplet
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White wings
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Blood red gown
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Blood red wool cape
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White undergarments
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Brown boots
- Brown boot guards
Just in case you’d like to copy her Handmaid outfit for yourself. And on the website CostumeDIY you can find out how to copy her Handmaid outfit for yourself. The site includes links for buying snow-white cotton yardage for the caplet and winged bonnet as well as a tutorial for stitching up the items on your sewing machine—and if you’re too lazy or too sewing-impaired to make your own, CostumeDIY also provides links where you can buy the items (you can cannibalize the headgear from a Puritan-maiden Thanksgiving costume advertised on Amazon). The long red Handmaid dress—or at least a reasonable approximation—is also for sale on the Internet, CostumeDIY advises.
Furthermore, the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills is currently showing a pop-up exhibition of Crabtree’s actual Handmaid’s Tale costumes for those ladies who want to make sure they’ve copied Offred down to the tiniest stitching detail. And then there are the endless media interviews with Crabtree (Vanity Fair‘s”The Hidden Meaning in Those Eerie Costumes,” Think Progress‘s “Dressing for Dystopia”) in which the designer—like practically every media commentator on the Hulu show—links the series’ darkness (or redness, if you will) to the current dystopian rule of President You Know Who:
Even before The Handmaid’s Tale began its series run on May 1, women were crafting their own homemade Handmaid outfits. A bunch of them showed clad in red capes and white bonnets at a session of the Texas Legislature in March to protest abortion restrictions that the lawmakers were then debating.
Now there are lots of possible reasons for the fascination with this one particular costume: Handmaid red is the new pussy hat pink. My own theory is what I call the 50 Shades of Red theory: Women love them some fantasy of being dominated, and what could be more submissive than wearing one of those eyesight-confining white bonnets, sort of like the blindfold that Anastasia of the other 50 Shades fame is obliged to wear at the behest of her own particular Commander. That plus a dress that screams, “Hey, I’m fertile! Come and get me!”
Indeed in real life, if the few fertile women left—who would coincidentally be young women at their peak of attractiveness—were walking around announcing their childbearing eligibility by their conspicuous clothing, men, instead of enslaving them, would be fighting over them like wolves over deer carcasses. There wouldn’t be a Republic of Gilead. There would be Armageddon.
