'A Thousand Blows' costume designer on using real Victorian clothing

In the opening sequence of the Victorian London-set series A Thousand Blows, you might notice a character wearing a beautiful silk dress chequered in red and blue. What you won’t notice is that sometimes the dress is a real Victorian piece of clothing and sometimes it is a replicated version.

“We were shooting outside, and it started raining,” recalls the show’s costume designer Maja Meschede. “This item made of silk, and over 100 years old, started falling apart. We were watching on in horror.”

While there was no saving the garment, hence the need for replication (done using a local screen printer), the designer did learn a valuable lesson. “Never expose an antique piece of clothing to the rain,” she warns.

Despite being well-versed in period projects – Meschede’s previous credits also include Downton Abbey: A New Era and Catherine The Great – the costume designer is always learning. For A Thousand Blows, the Steven Knight-penned boxing drama for Disney+, she spent three months researching. As well as plenty of reading, Meschede visited many of the city’s museums and art galleries and drew upon her own private collection of Victorian clothing.

“I’m a bit of a hoarder,” she jokes. “It really helps me see how things were sewn and what a garment looks like inside. I love to take the audience on that full journey.”

'A Thousand Blows'; Source: Disney+

The designer also worked with antique dealers in the UK, Paris and Italy to purchase Victorian and other era pieces, including UK-based Sands Films’ Costumes department. When it was feasible and weather-safe, these were worn by the actors themselves; otherwise, they served as inspiration. “We’d get a similar fabric, and we’d print on it several times just to get that Victorian feel,” Meschede explains.

The Elephants in the room

For an era so regularly depicted on screen, Meschede was keen to highlight a new side of the fashion. “It is often perceived as very dark and gloomy with lots of black and dark tones, but there was actually a lot of colour,” says the designer. “We chose really bright colours for the [Forty Elephants] ladies to express their emancipation and rebellion.”

Unsurprisingly, there was not much unearthed in Meschede’s research about the Forty Elephants, led in A Thousand Blows by Erin Doherty as gang leader Mary Carr. “We know they made a good living as thieves but that they also got together to protect themselves against men, to be each other’s support,” she explains.

'A Thousand Blows'; Source: Disney+

To reflect this, the designer found ways to hide knives in the costumes, from garter belts to socks, or give some of the women lots of “knuckle duster” rings. She also chose outfits that deliberately clashed in patterns and colours. “Some of the clothing would be better quality because they had the means to steal it,” Meschede continues. “But it didn’t always match.”

There were also more practical elements, she adds: “We made sure they had trousers underneath their skirts so they can lift up the top layer and run because bloomers would have been too restrictive.”

Eastenders

From Jamaica to China, many cultures butt heads in A Thousand Blows. Set primarily in east London, Meschede focused on making the locals' clothes look like real hand-me-downs, as would have been common for this poorer area of the city.

'A Thousand Blows'; Source: Disney+

“It was really important to show that the clothes had been worn for a long time,” she elaborates. “Our wonderful breakdown team was shredding the material, sanding it down. Our embroiders added patchwork to show where clothes had been repaired.”

For two of the show’s central characters, Hezekiah and Alec (Malachi Kirby and Francis Lovehall), who have newly arrived in London from Jamaica, Meschede took the time to research and understand what that journey looked like and why it was being made.

“I thought about how I wanted them to be perceived when we first see them walking through this big Victorian crowd. They needed to stand out,” she explains. To achieve this, the duo wore linen and cotton despite it being late winter in London. As for the colours, the designer focused on warm tones and pale blues. “When you think of Jamaica, you think of the palm trees, and the beach and the blue sky. I wanted you to see all that when you looked at [these two characters].”

'A Thousand Blows'; Source: Disney+

In a rarity for the television industry, Disney’s A Thousand Blows has already shot its second series, with filming on both series taking place across 2023 at London’s The Story Works studios. “It was like speed designing. I was almost designing on a factory belt,” Meschede jokes, adding that she was able to work with a bigger team than normal to match the demand thanks to producers The Story Collective, Matriarch Productions and Water & Power Productions. “We had three big workrooms, and I was lucky to have two assistant designers as opposed to one."

As for what the second series holds, “there’s so much happening, and the costume changes reflect each character’s evolution,” Meschede teases. “There’s some wonderful characters coming up too.”