Warning: This post contains some spoilers for season one of Hulu's The Testaments
There is a final boss in the tradwife universe, and she lives in Gilead. In The Testaments, Hulu’s sequel to its hit The Handmaid's Tale, we meet a new generation of young women and girls who were raised in the Christian dystopia first introduced in Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel and adapted for the screen three decades later. Members of this new generation—some adopted into this world as children, some born into it—have been training their whole lives to become the perfect wife, mother, and homemaker.
In Gilead, clothing is a signifier of value for women and girls in the most literal sense, as color is used to determine their societal worth. We learned this in the original series, in which the handmaids wear red shapeless capes and white hats to hide them from view; while the wives wear blue-green dresses and fitted caps, often with hair neatly tied back, indicating a stark, scarlet difference in how they are seen in the social order.
In the modern-day Gilead of The Testaments, this distinction is exaggerated in colorful and terrifying ways, where clothing is both a symbol of oppression and an opportunity for rare moments of agency.
Costume designer Leslie Kavanagh tells Teen Vogue, “I was really trying to toe the line of, they're not a wife yet, so I don't want them as mature as our wives that we see, but I don't want them to be super-duper young, because they're starting to transition there very quickly.”
When they are little, the girls of Gilead wear pink; as they become preteens, they graduate to plum, a color chosen as a mix of the red handmaid and the blue wife, Kavanagh explains. When they get their period, everything changes; they ring a bell, and all the women around them cheer. They don green tailored dresses for a brief moment before their new lives are chosen and settled for them. The proud patriarchy then puts them in blue.
The Testaments centers on this transition time. Chase Infiniti’s Agnes (the daughter of the original show’s June Osborne) and her friends Becka (Mattea Conforti), Hulda (Isolde Ardies), and Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard) want nothing more than to get their period. Newcomer Daisy (Lucy Halliday), who is a Pearl Girl—an outsider from Toronto who chose Gilead—threatens their social order and shakes up these dreams. But even she is not immune to the structures, traditions, and pressures of their world.
When the Pearls enter Gilead, they are immediately stripped of their past, and put in all-white outfits. “The pearl costume is completely blank, head to toe," says Halliday. "They're not supposed to have personality. They are the cleanly pearls of Gilead.”
It’s almost too on the nose, but then so are all the sartorial signals in Gilead—and it’s meant to be that way. “Our other girls are very pious in what they're wearing," says Kavanagh, "but this is a bit more, almost, angelic. It's about the rebirth.”
The costuming was designed to be a physical experience for the characters, to situate them in the oppressive world of Gilead, even if those bodily restrictions are not always visible to viewers. The outfits they wear to school are a world away from the experimentation and personality-driven looks we see in flashbacks to Daisy’s life in Toronto, where she is a teenager learning who she wants to become, using style to support that.
“The clothes are so influential in the experience of Gilead both as a viewer and a performer," Halliday says, "because they were so prescriptive in terms of your movement and physicality. They were very restraining. Physically, [we] couldn't lift [our] arms a certain way, and you were having to hold your posture in a certain way or walk a certain way.”
Adds Infiniti, “The costumes really informed the way that we moved in the world. You can only move your torso so much, and you were wearing heels all day long, stockings all day long. Which, after hour 12, that little four-inch heel starts to really hurt.”
It’s this very literal interpretation of clothing as a visual language that leads to the season’s most powerful moments. During episode five, the girls who have started menstruating are invited to a ball, which they think of as their (twisted) version of prom. It’s the first time they get a say in choosing their outfit, though only in small ways. The dress has to be green and floor length, and their shoulders must be covered, but they have a choice of silhouette and fabric—a tiny bit of freedom.
The night of the ball isn’t about choice, though; in fact, it’s the opposite. They are there to interview with grown men, often three times their age, for the role of wife. Their clothing, then, is weaponized against them; they are canvases for men to project upon.
This intentional approach to costuming in The Testaments shows how inextricably linked clothing is to personal choice. When that choice is restricted—through, say, a school dress code all the way to Gilead’s extremist clothing policies—it sends a message that says your power can, and should, be constrained; that your identity as a person is worth much less than the value you bring to the capital machine that upholds society.
Clothing exemplifies how you show up in the world. Even if the message isn’t totally clear, or even if you don’t nail the reference, you chose it. For the young women and girls of Gilead, living under an American fundamentalist-Christian fever dream, we see that stripping agency from style is the physical manifestation of control and, thus, fear.
The irony here is that you can strip choice, but you cannot always effectively assign implicit meaning; that is up for the interpretation of the wearer. Daisy, who is there to liberate the girls and take Gilead down from the inside, messages a different meaning for a girl in white: It's not about purity but liberation.
While the patriarchy (in fiction and rooted in reality) is deeply afraid of the power of teenage girls, teenage girls are more powerful than their bodies and their clothing.
