"Hess and Hess" clothes are a love letter to steal your sister's clothes

Costume designer Grace Snell tells IndieWire about the modern and timeless influences that shaped the Dashwood family's wardrobe.

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Costume designer Grace Snell had never acted in a period film before contacting filmmaker Georgia Oakley. You can approach historical clothing in many ways, but Snell wanted to approach this project with both good sense (deep research into Regency England) and a distinctly modern sensibility.

"I often think of 'Little Women' that was made in the '40s, and 'Little Women' that was made in the '90s, and 'Little Women' that was made a few years ago. Even though you're designing for a period, even in the 1940s version of 'Little Women,' you can see the fashions from the 1940s. I love making something that feels like it belongs in the present, and where we are, especially. As Women: How We Dress and What We See in Our Friends." Related Stories Alex Gibney on How AI Helped Simulate Elon Musk's Interview He Could Never Get Is Meme-Acting a Sustainable Hollywood Marketing Strategy?

So 2026's Sense and Sensibility, of course, has the luscious dresses with empire waists and luscious ribbons and coats that appear in almost every adaptation of Austen's first novel, and charts the adventures of the realistic Elinor (Daisy Edgar Jones) and the romantic Marian (Esme Creed-Miles). But Snell was equally inspired by the fashion of the '90s and early '00s—which bears a striking resemblance to Austen's era—and by the relationship family and friends have with clothes that are timeless.

That is, sisters are in each other's closets and come out.

Snell wanted the Dashwoods to dress as if there wasn't a costume team behind them co-ordinating things - though proud sister-in-law Fanny (Stacey Martin) is another matter. Especially when they are kicked out of their family home and forced to live in a cottage in Devonshire, Snell wanted to show how the girls borrow from each other, match odds and ends and don't always match clothes. At the end of the film, Snell wanted to reflect what the two heroes learned from each other in the way they dressed.

But Eleanor and Marian began with the distinct philosophies that Snell brought to the first dresses. "You could tell right away how Daisy was Elinor and Esme was Marianne, even in the way she set up the fittings for them. Daisy was very structured, very formulaic, labeled; systematic in the way we tried. And then with Esme, I bought lots of fun things, decorative boxes and ribbons, and playing, and lots of things." Snell said. "I made him dress himself, and I wanted to see how he could make a 'mistake' in dressing himself, how things could not be done right."

After all, Marian doesn't really care about propriety or propriety (much to Eleanor's constant frustration), so Snell and Creed-Miles go with the first instinctive choices of making Marian look just a little bit jealous and defiant. Snell decided that the character would go back to the "vintage" fashion of an older era, keep the clothes he liked a little bigger and adapt them, and tie his waist - the smart cavalry officer he wanted the world to see.

In a "proper" London gown, Marian feels very vulnerable and out of place, with a crush on the handsome Willoughby (Frank Dylan) and no allies when she sees him again. "I really wanted to show how scary a place like London can be when you don't have the facilities through what everyone wears to the ball," says Snell.

The sisters are a lot easier at Barton, needless to say, and Snell finds sneaky ways to show how they adapt and learn from each other. She cut both Eleanor and Marianne's coats from the same pattern, but made them to express their different sensibilities.

Snell said: "We made Eleanor taller to make a longer jacket, something that was used at the time [of the period], and then they made them in different fabrics but the same color. They could wear the same dress, but have a different style. So [the characters] are in that detail." "It's about pulling down the pedestal of period drama and seeing ourselves in these costumed textual characters."

More than any of the Dashwoods, no one embodies that unabashed joy of expressing oneself through clothing like Miss Jennings (Fiona Shaw). By giving Ms. Jennings an exciting style, Snell wanted to challenge the audience's perceptions of how women of a certain age should dress. "I think she's a romantic at heart and very conscious of how she looks and what she wears and tries on things that don't necessarily fit some of the societal expectations of an older woman," Snell said. But I figured she just wore things she liked the way she looked, and I had a lot of fun with Fiona.

It was also interesting for Shaw, who had never worn a Regency dress before. “You know Fiona used to dress up with me all the time and say what are we wearing today? "It's been a wild ride," Snell said.

It's a wild ride for every character, from Miss Dashwood's (Catríona Balfe) slightly too-flattering dresses to the sheer betrayal of Willoughby's glittering vest in London (based on a CosProp archive piece that uses a natural material called cellulose for its sequins). But that's because Snell wanted to let the characters in Sense and Sensibility dress as they always have: expressing ourselves by choosing things from those around us.

"Hes and Hes" is now showing in theaters.