In ‘The English,’ Costume and Character Are Inextricable

There’s no way to easily summarize Hugo Blick’s modern, revisionist Western The English, a series that roams from Oklahoma to Wyoming over a thousand miles of skeleton-strewn open country in the course of six hours. As with many road narratives, it tends towards the picaresque: characters are introduced and brutally dispatched within the course of a single 60-minute episode, then left for the “bushwhackers” and vultures to pick clean. Blick’s unlikely protagonists? Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt), a Victorian aristocrat who’s traveled to the late 19th-century frontier to avenge the death of her son, and Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a member of the Pawnee Nation and a retired cavalry scout, who intends to press his claim for a few acres of land in Nebraska as a U.S. veteran.

In accordance with the genre’s Hollywood tradition, this is a series where dialogue is limited largely to veiled threats; if someone is talking at length about anything even vaguely emotional, it’s usually a sign that they’re about to be dispatched with a pistol, which means costume designer Phoebe De Gaye (Killing Eve) had to develop a wardrobe that could both semaphore characters’ psychological states and stand up to The English’s stark prairie backdrops. “I realized early on that the costumes were going to be very exposed,” the BAFTA winner recalls. “It really is just figures in a landscape. [Production designer] Chris Roope did these fantastic sort of skeletal structures [to represent the frontier towns], but that’s really it.”

In the first episode, when Cornelia arrives at a tumble-down hotel in the middle of the sprawling expanse of the Great Plains, Blunt’s costumes make the extent to which she’s out of her depth immediately, painfully obvious. Her rose-pink dress, complete with mutton sleeves and a lace-trimmed bonnet Cecil Beaton might have designed for My Fair Lady, feel wholly unnatural in the American landscape—the sartorial equivalent of an X on her back. “In the first drafts of the scripts, she’s described as wearing white when she arrives in America, but I came across an interesting portrait from the period by the academic painter James Jebusa Shannon, where the woman was wearing a traveling costume in a very pale pink. Hugo responded to that straight away.”