The Handmaids Tale designer loves seeing her costumes at protests

“I don’t think there’s ever been a moment bigger in my whole career. But it’s beyond my career. It has nothing to do with that, in the same breath. What it did was grab my soul.”

Source: Think Progress

In March, Ane Crabtree, the costume designer for Hulu’s new series The Handmaid’s Tale, got an unusual request: A group of women in Texas wanted to dress up like Handmaids for a protest. Could Crabtree help?

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Crabtree told ThinkProgress that the message she received from these Texas women, via Twitter, was “essentially, woman to woman, are you able to help us?” One of the women had seen Handmaids costumes at SXSW — part of the series’ promotional road show — and wanted to see if Crabtree could give them advice about how to replicate the costumes “and make it look right.”

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But she wanted to help. “The point is this amazing plan to be this strong, quiet voice of womanhood and using this iconic thing that really has nothing to do with me. It was really moving, to be honest with you,” she said. So she passed along some ideas — “what I would tell anybody who is, on the fly, trying to make it look the same” — and told them, “good luck, I wish I was with you. I am in spirit.”

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This Tuesday, women in Texas were at it again: In Handmaid gear from head to toe in the Texas Capitol Rotunda, chanting “Shame! Shame!” in protest of an anti-abortion bill. Expect to see more Handmaids at a state capitol near you in the future. Crabtree got another note two weeks ago from someone planning an upcoming protest. “Every time it happens I actually, physically fall to the floor crying, because it’s more than emotional. It goes through my soul, when I read this. I never thought that a girl from my upbringing, from Kentucky, from a very conservative place, from my background, I never thought that I would have anything to say, even indirectly, via costumes.”

Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/handmaids-tale-costumes-protest-559b7f598e36