Costume designer Lindsay Pugh has dressed the conniving guests of And Then There Were None, the various realities of The Matrix Resurrections, and the glittering musicians of Dancing on the Edge. But her latest project might be her most intoxicating cocktail yet: a 1950s-set reimagining of Hedda Gabler, dripping in silk, deceit, and cigarette smoke. “I really enjoyed the loucheness of the characters,” Pugh says from what she jokingly calls her “broom cupboard” workspace. “All the manipulative qualities of everybody, the dishonesty—it’s so much fun to design.”
For Pugh (and, frankly, the audience), the post-war setting offered a kind of emotional immediacy often lacking in productions of Henrik Ibsen’s classic. “The ’50s is still period, but we can grasp it,” she says. “We know these parties. We recognize the drinking, the drug taking. It’s accessible to us emotionally.”
That accessibility becomes the visual language of the film: decadence just beginning to decay. Pugh and production designer Cara Brower found their palette in one perfect phrase from the script: “rotting fruit.” “That was it for both of us,” Pugh says. “The colors are lush but a little overripe. Nothing bright or sparkly. Even the pinks are gray-pink. Until Eileen walks in.”
Ah, Eileen. So here’s the twist with Hedda as opposed to Hedda Gabler: Her former lover, Eilert Lövborg, here is Eileen Lövborg. Played with fearless sensuality by Nina Hoss, the character makes her entrance like a Valkyrie, towering over most of the men and striding through the room in a white blouse that might as well be a beacon for Hedda’s cruelty.
Pugh designed a dress that could disintegrate along with the character’s defenses. “I had to design that costume knowing that this is what we had to do, but not to flag it in any way,” Pugh says. A bolero jacket helped disguise what the costume would ultimately need to achieve: After getting wet, Eileen’s white blouse becomes sheer, a moment of vulnerability that Hoss transforms into a moment of power.
If Eileen’s dress is a slow unraveling, Tessa Thompson’s Hedda is a study in confinement. “ It was difficult for Tessa to wear,” Pugh says, before adding that Thompson loved having that confinement to use in her performance. “It’s way low at the front. It’s hung on right at the shoulder point. It is as tight as anything. And the skirts in full flight are huge. There’s everything going on!” And in keeping with both that rotting fruit aesthetic and the character’s wiliness, the dress is brown tulle over green. “It’s a beautiful dress, but what is it?” Pugh says. “Is it green? Is it brown? What are you hiding?”
The dress also tells a subtle story over the course of the film. “It’s very subliminal,” Pugh says, “but Hedda walks down the stairs at the beginning, she’s in three petticoats. She’s taking up a lot of space. And then as the movie goes on, we take the petticoats off. And off. So it’s a much slimmer silhouette below the waist by the end of the movie.”
Those same storytelling instincts peek out from the supporting costumes as well. Imogen Poots’s character is trapped in a borrowed dress that’s “wrongly fitted, slightly matronly before her time,” an act of psychological warfare from Hedda herself. And every man’s suit—trim, elegant, perfect—provides a foil for the chaos. “I love a well-fitting suit,” Pugh says. “The men take visual second place here. But even second place should be good.”
As the night wears on, the clothes collapse, skirts rip, silks stain, and the clothes become a symphony of tattered glamour. “I love a good breakdown,” Pugh says with a laugh. And when it’s this gleefully, devastatingly enacted, who can argue otherwise?
Lindsay Pugh is an Emmy and CDGA nominee whose costume designer credits include The Mists of Avalon, The Marvels, and Sense8. Her go-to at craft services? “Oh, an oat milk flat white. You don’t really have a lot of time to sit and enjoy, you just need a little hit. And then you can have drunk it by the time you get to the thing that you’re meant to do.”
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