Sense and Sensibility, Dressed in Two Chapters: Country and City
Georgia Oakley's new take on Jane Austen's 1811 novel stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. According to Variety, costume designer Grace Snell approached the job the way a novelist works: in chapters, with the country and the city as the most distinct ones. The first is Barton Cottage, shaped by Devonshire, and it comes before the sisters' world shifts to town. Wardrobe in a period adaptation is also geography — the same family dressed for two different settings, with the move between them doing part of the storytelling work.
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Chaptering a wardrobe by country and city is a tidy way to make a two-hour adaptation legible — the audience learns the emotional map of the film partly through hemlines and bonnets.
Or it risks making place do work that character should. Two sisters who are supposed to differ in temperament shouldn't be distinguishable mainly by postcode.