The Production Designer and Costume Designer of ‘Hamnet’ on Bringing Shakespeare’s World to Textured Life

“I didn’t want to overpower her with details, because ultimately she’s very kind of punk and very down-to-earth,” Turzanska says. “But from that very, very first bodice—which is bark cloth, the fiber underneath the tree—there was a bit of uneven, organic embroidery through her garments, especially through her bodices. There’s always something kind of weaving through.”

Agnes is also, Turzanska adds, “mostly wearing plants, starting with the literal [bark cloth] and then flax or linens with those little embroideries. So she’s very connected to nature and looks almost like she came out of it.”

Where textures, colors, and silhouettes evoking the natural world define Agnes’s garments—which, Turzanska notes, are “worn without any understructure,” as if the character is willfully disregarding the sartorial rules and mores of the period—Will’s belong very much to the world of man. They also borrow much more literally from the Elizabethan era and details from the Bard’s real life, as well as drawing from O’Farrell’s portrayal of Will’s father, a once-successful glove maker, as a violently embittered man.

Turzanska and her team used iron gall ink, the most popular ink during Shakespeare’s time, to dye Will’s garments into a variety of blues and grays that also appear in the other Shakespeares’ clothing. As Will trades the padded, protective doublets and flowing shirts of an unmarried playwright for more tailored, restrictive garb that seems to harden with him, the shades progressively lighten until the dominant color is ash. At the same time, quilted lines and laser scratching on leather evolve into increasingly pronounced slashes, achieved through a period-accurate technique known as pinking.