The third season of The Wheel of Time wrapped a couple of weeks ago, and while we wait for Prime Video to do the right thing and renew it, there's plenty about the new episodes worth taking a closer look at.
For instance, the costumes in the show are incredible. Sharon Gilham, who came aboard the show in season 2, sat down with Collider for an incredibly deep dive into her process. These are just a few of her insights, beautiful outfit by beautiful outfit.
Egwene's Accepted Test
Gilham and her team made painstakingly beautiful costumes even for scenes that lasted only a few minutes. Early in the season, Egwene (Madeleine Madden) underwent a test to become Accepted among the Aes Sedai. In one of the visions she saw, she was the Amyrlin Seat, the leader of the Aes Sedai, with Nynaeve (Zoë Robins) and Elayne (Ceara Coveney) as her powerful lieutenants. Together, they confronted Rand al'Thor (Josha Stradowski), who in this vision had succumbed to madness.
For this one scene, Egwene, Elayne and Nynaeve wore splendid, completely bespoke outfits designed just for the occasion. "Egwene’s costume is the top banana, the top of the top, as the Amyrlin, so it has to be gorgeous gold fabric," Gilham said. "It was inspired by an Alexander McQueen dress, which is kind of edgy, which is Egwene. The print on it is the flame of Tar Valon. When I was talking to Rob [Goodwin], who made her armor, we wanted her to be grounded because Egwene is grounded. She's not Elayne. She's not a princess. She's a real person who knows what her roots are. So, her armor has this insignia of the flame of Tar Valon, but it also has all those roots woven through it, so you can feel that she's grounded. It's kind of beautiful-ugly. It's not classically beautiful armor, but it's got a real strength to it and power to it that is very different from the other two."
"Then Elayne, as I said, she's a princess, so her armor is almost more fantasy," Gilham continued. "It’s probably the most fantasy-style armor. That's what's so great, as well, about having a huge team like I had. You can ask different people to interpret the idea of armor, and they will bring their personality to it, as well as your direction and my explaining of what the characters are. You can see the rose of Andor incorporated into her armor as well. So, you've got all those cultural references that are important to her, but the whole feeling of it is lighter and more classic princess-like. She's got those two green fabrics weaving around her body because Elayne isn't just a princess. She's much more than that. She's a really complex person. She's not in some big princess frock. She's in something that has a strength and an energy to it, as well."
Finally, there's Nynaeve. "She has these armored pieces, but I wanted to just do another take, basically, on armor," Gilham said. "Armor traditionally is metal, but it's also it's quilted. People used leather for armor, as well, a long time ago, and so I thought it'd be interesting to quilt that silver leather to make it feel like it could just be metal. She’s a healer, so her costume is going to be yellow. She has a connection with plants and flowers, so there's a flowery pattern in the fabric, but it's not girly, it's not soft. It still has a real strength. There was also both gold and yellow, so I was a bit like, “How am I going to make it different?” But I think we achieved a real unique identity for each of them while still keeping all of the important elements that we needed to."
And all of this for the sake of one scene!
Queen Morgase of Andor
In the second episode of the season, Elayne's mother Queen Morgase Trakand (Olivia Williams) shows up at the White Tower to check on her daughter, looking every inch the monarch; that's her on the left in the image above.
"This is the royal family ofThe Wheel of Time, so it's got to have real pomp and circumstance to it," Gilham said. "Morgase is not going to just come in on her own. She's going to have an entourage. She's going to have ladies in waiting, she's going to have servants. She's going to have the soldiers and people carrying the banners. Everything was done for show. It was all like, 'Here they are! Blow the trumpets. They've arrived.' So, her costume is absolutely a big dramatic show of force, showing her power."
"The color is Elizabethan. I kind of pushed it slightly because, for Andor, the influences are supposed to be English Tudor, so the Tudor rose comes into that as part of Robert Jordan’s iconography for Andor. So, there was the idea of the Elizabethan collar, the Tudor collar. That's what that was referencing. But also, the beginning of that idea was about her being the Rose of Andor. She is the rose, and this is almost like the vase that shows off the rose, so that she is absolutely the focus of attention. We played around with this shape a lot because it's quite a big thing. Olivia [Williams] was very good about saying, 'It's fine. I know it's a bit heavy, but I can wear it.' I wanted it to be a really dramatic image, for her to have this incredible showing off of her character, and then the rest of the dress is almost like her; it's quite straight. It's kind of her locked into her responsibility and who she is as the Queen."
We also met Morgase's paramour Lord Gaebril (Nuno Lopes), who was supposed to "look like he's at the Met Gala." Mission accomplished:
Finally, there were the dress uniforms worn by Morgase's sons Galad (Callum Kerr
) and Gawyn (Luke Fetherston):
All of these outfits are stunning, but it's time to examine the real star of the show:
Moiraine's sunhat
One of the more curious items this season is the hat Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) wears during her trip into the Aiel Waste, a blistering desert. The costumes on The Wheel of Time look fantastical as a rule, so when one of the main characters show up in a hat it looks like they could have picked up at an outlet mall, people notice.
The internal justification is that Moiraine may indeed have traded something for this hat pretty far into the journey, since she at first thought that Rand was leading her to the city of Tear; she didn't realize they were going to the Aiel Waste at first, and she needed a sunhat however she could get it.
"Wearing a hat is a very personal thing, and it is important that it suits your face," Gilham said. "We also talked about her having a sort of turban at one point, which would have linked a bit more directly to the Aiel crowd. There was always the option of a hood, but we've seen that a lot on Moiraine, and we've seen it a lot in fantasy. I thought it would be nice to have something that wasn't that, to try something new. And yes, we tried several different hats. In fact, we had that hat made somewhere in Cape Town, South Africa, by a local hatmaker. We had several variations of that made, as well. In the end, this was the shape that Rosamund liked. I put the little porcupine quill in there because I thought it was just a nice little touch that made it feel like somebody had made it and considered it in the way that people all over the world make things with their hands, and they decorate them, and they always have since time immemorial."
"We love the idea that she bartered it for something on the journey. I did make sure that everybody else had something covering their heads, apart from Rand. I think he does at one point, but everybody else, you have to have something on your head in those temperatures, because otherwise it would just frazzle. It was a practical thing, as well, but it had to fit into the world. The fabric that it's made of, which is kind of Hessian, feels appropriate for the Aiel world. It doesn't feel like it's a straw hat that's been steamed and put over a hat block or something."
Visions in Rhuidean
If you needed to prove that Sharon Gilham was dedicated to her job, the above photo collage should be all you need. In the fourth episode of the season, "The Road to the Spear," Moiraine has possible visions of the future. In one of them, Moiraine is on her knees in the Ways, confronted by alternate reality versions of characters like Rand, Egwene and Nynaeve, all of whom have sworn themselves to the Dark One. As such, they all wear evil outfits in shades of black. This was all done for just. One. Shot. Take a minute and scroll through the pictures above to appreciate what that means.
"[T]hey did love it, because when are those young people ever going to be in those outrageously mad costumes, which are also quite futuristic, or contemporary, really, for us?" Gilham asked. "I did what I usually do, which is I Googled, researched, looked around for different silhouettes because I knew that’s what we were going to see. It wasn't going to be lots of detail, although there is lots of detail on everybody's costumes, as usual. Again, it was responding to their characters."
"Egwene’s character, with those big clunky boots and lip jewelry and shorts, she's really expressing herself as tomboyish, shall we say. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but she's feisty," Gilham continued. "She's not sexualized. She looks amazing, but that's not what she's interested in. Nynaeve, again, the front piece, the long piece that hangs down at the front, that has flowers and herbs and so on, and stylized cutouts. That's where that came from. It's supposed to look like it's something to do with her world as a Wisdom, or her rationale, and what she is, who she is. Rand’s armor had dragon scales on it, and gold inside the shoulder piece, and a gold and red glow coming out of it that was also significant."
Even the normally placid Perrin (Marcus Rutherford) goes to the dark side in this reality. It's maybe a bit easier to imagine Mat (Dónal Finn) going that route. "Perrin, with the dreadlocks, was moving towards the wolf thing, but I didn't want to go with fake fur or fur with him. I wanted everything to be very clean. He's very tall, but it also just gives him more height, more shoulders, in a way, I suppose, sort of preempting his armor down the line," Gilham said. "Then Elayne has all of these metal feathers. Again, there's a sort of lightness and an elegance to it. They nested it with this skirt that has different shapes at the back, like a fishtail skirt, so she still feels very feminine. Then Mat is such a character — Dónal [Finn] is such a character — and I wanted to do something that was a bit androgynous, and so the idea of putting him in a skirt just made sense really quickly. Because he would do it, and he would enjoy it. Then the top piece is a little bit too short. It's slightly falling apart, like the armor is deliberately hanging off, and it's sewn together with big stitches and falling off one arm, and the makeup is a little like Mat trying to do a rock star, not quite getting it, but sort of getting it at the same time."
"That was the thought process behind them all. It was such good fun to do and such good fun to keep adding to it, even though, again, it's like Egwene and the three girls; the scene was so short, but you can't not do it. You either do it 1,000% or you don’t do it at all. That's the way I feel and felt. It's a lot of extra work for my team, but I just think it's an opportunity. It would be such a shame to just do a half-hearted version, because it just wouldn't work."
There were other blink-and-you'll-miss-them visions during this sequence, many of which included bespoke costumes, like this blue number Moiraine wore during a hypothetical trip back to the Two Rivers:
Or how about this brief glimpse of Egwene as the Keeper of the Chronicles?
I think the phrase "You either do it 1,000% or you don’t do it at all" sums up Gilham's philosophy.
Fashion in the Age of Legends
In that same episode, Rand sees visions of the distant past, before the Breaking of the World when life was easier and more civilized. Certain characters like Lanfear — then known as Mierin (Natasha O'Keeffe) — were still alive during that time, looking very different from how they do now, as you can see in the clip above.
"The Age of Legends was a time of simplicity and beauty where things were functioning, and the Aes Sedai were dressed in black and white," Gilham said. "Their lines were very long and simple. Everything was plain fabrics, beautifully cut, draping, very elegant. Mierin's costume, actually, was supposed to be a lab coat. That was the idea. So, what is an Age of Legends lab coat? Again, it's just all of these things so that you see that connection to our contemporary world, and it doesn't jump, but it feels appropriate. It feels authentic, and it feels really clean. Because I think that's what we all kind of hope is that our future will be simple. Things will have been simplified. All this mess will have gone away, and we'll just have gone back to basics, which is straight, clean lines, white, big beautiful, simple buildings. That place that we shot in was so incredible, and it had such a heart to it, and I think that was reflected in the costumes."
The show has to be renewed if for no other reason than to let Gilham and her team make use of the warehouses full of costumes they've made.
Tanchico
In season 3, several of our characters visit the city of Tanchico, which has a very different culture from any other place we've been. The outfits are more elaborate and gaudy than some of the characters are used to. "Mat, obviously, totally embraces it because he loves the seedy side of it," Gilham said. "That's his absolute happy place. He's got that big jacket with all the frou-frou bits hanging off that Mat would have chosen. There were lots of options in the shops that were much more conventional, and he would have gone for that."
Mat did indeed look at home in the bright colors of Tanchico:
"Elayne, she's still in this princessy-type kind of shape, and her turban and her veil are made with this vintage scarf that I found," Gilham continued. "It's very old, semi-transparent fabric with old sequins on it, and it was falling apart, which is also very appropriate for Tanchico. It’s a nightmare for the standbys, because it kept ripping and having holes in it. But it was also very delicate, and so it felt like it was very appropriate for Elayne to be wearing something that was so delicate and fragile-looking."
And then there's the buttoned-up Nynaeve, who could not be less at home amid all this showiness. "That is just not what she does. She's not interested," Gilham said. "So I was like, 'What can I give her that isn't just really low cut?' Because she wouldn't do it. She just would say no. So we came up with the idea of showing her shoulders, which already is so outside her comfort zone. When you see that still that was posted a while back with Mat wearing that veil with all the beads on it and she's behind it, you could see by her body how uncomfortable she is because she’s showing her shoulders, and to her, that's just outrageously rude. It's so much of herself that she's showing that she wouldn’t normally. So, it was great fun to do that and to find fabrics."
Tanchico was just one of several far-flung places our characters visited in season 3. Let's travel next back to the Aiel Waste to see how the natives dress:
The Aiel
At first, Gilham was worried she wouldn't be able to make the Aiel people look interesting. “A whole culture that's just beigey desert colors. Where am I going to get the inspiration from that?” she remembers thinking. But soon she starting thinking about ways to differentiate the different Aiel clans, like the Shaido from the Taardad, and soon she was off to the races.
"[I]n the Golden Bowl scene [in the season finale], you need to see the Shaido as separate from the Taardad. You need to see that they are two clans clearly, even though they are wearing similar shapes," Gilham said. "So, that was the idea. The Taardad, I thought if people were traveling a lot across the landscape, they'd be thinking about the contours of the landscape, and that would be reflected in the way they create their clothing. They weave their clothing like the contours, like lands moving."
And there are some Aiel, like the vampy Sevanna (Natasha Culzac), who still dress to the nines; that's her in the image above. "With Sevanna, we were doing the fittings with Natasha in South Africa, and [showrunner Rafe Judkins] was like, 'Eh, it’s not really working.' And then he said, 'Did I say to you that Sevanna is supposed to be the Suroth of Season 3?' And I went, 'What?!' [Laughs] 'No, you didn’t say that.' It was like, 'Whoa! Okay.' So that's where that spiky costume with the porcupine quills came from — Moiraine already had one that was sort of Easter egg-y in her hat. I said to Rob, 'Come on, we've got to make something really dramatic. What can we make that's like some kind of jeweled collar, but really aggressive looking?' And then the headpiece was made by another amazing person in South Africa, who made Moiraine’s hat, actually, called Tink. She's a costume props person, and she worked with Rob to create a headpiece that would echo the drama of that neckpiece."
Suroth was an elaborately dressed character from the second season of the show, from another completely different, entirely distinct culture. When it comes to clothes, The Wheel of Time's cup overfloweth. And as unenthused as Gilham was initially about dressing the Aiel, clearly she found ways around it. Just look at her designs for characters like Rhuarc (Björn Landberg)...
... and Bair (Nukaaka Coster-Waldau:
Not for the first time, I implore Amazon and Sony to renew this show. There are lots of good reasons, but seeing more costumes like this is definitely in the top 10.
Moiraine vs Lanfear
The season ended with a knock-down, drag-out battle between Moiraine and Lanfear. Fireballs were hurled, blood was spilled, and looks were turnt.
Lanfear wore black for the occassion, which is common for her. "That fabric’s got metal woven through the fabric; it's like molten metal," Gilham said. "She is so furious that she's almost turning to liquid. It's very strong. It's like armor made fabric. But they have to be able to move their arms, and some of the stunt doubles were also on harnesses, so everything has to function really well in a fight sequence, but it also has to look absolutely stunning from a distance and very clearly separate one from the other and make sure you can really see who’s who."
As for Moiraine, she wore her traditional blue, but with lots of interesting accents. "[T]he blue starts coming back in, and by the time it's there, that blue is about as blue as you could get, like zingy blue. It's also because it's going to look amazing in that landscape. That color looks so beautiful against the sand and against the rocks," Gilham said.
But Gilham wasn't quite satisfied leaving it there. "I was like, 'She's got to have something else. She can't just be in a beautiful blue dress.' So we came up with this idea. I found these references to armor that had semi-disintegrated from museums. I can't remember what culture it's from, unfortunately. I need to find that out. But I love the idea of this armor that's very fine, but because it's Moiraine, because it's magical, it has a power, it has a protective layer. It's also a beautiful thing, as well. It's part of Moiraine’s elegance and style."
"Again, I showed this to Rob, who’s done all the amazing leather pieces. I said, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could have some text in this,' because I always love the idea of words in costumes somehow. So I was like, “Rafe, what is Moiraine’s rationale? What is the thing that she has written on her tombstone, written on her heart?” There’s this text from the books, which is 'Remember and heed, it is time, and I must do what must be done.' Those lines, we had them transcribed into Old Tongue, and then Rob created a graphics file, and we laser cut the leather with that text written on it, but the text is mirrored. One side would be the text, and then it's flipped so that it ends up just looking like a pattern. Then more of the text is layered on top and layered on top and layered on top. Within that armor is her belief in everything."
If you want more of this kind of thing, and why wouldn't you, feel free to check out Sharon Gilham's Instagram.
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