Creating Two Eras Of Costumes For ‘Outlander: Blood Of My Blood’

“Our clothes tell a story.” Ellen MacKenzie’s father says to her before he dies, this is is part a very early scene in Outlander: Blood Of My Blood’s first episode. Dad isn’t just any 18th century Scot, he’s Red Jacob MacKenzie, the (about to late) laird of Castle Leoch, and he is in the middle of promising his favorite daughter that he will always treat her like a son. Which, in this time and place, means he’s telling her he will treat her like a man and not force her into a political marriage the way he has, probably callously, done with her sisters.

Outlander: Blood of My Blood, is both a prequel to and spin-off from the Outlander book and TV series, both of which come from the novels of Diana Gabaldon. Blood of My Blood was developed into a series by showrunner Matthew B. Roberts, who wrote it with Gabaldon; it’s a similar set up to the bestselling author’s collaboration with Ronald D. Moore, the creator, writer and showrunner of the original series. The costumes in Blood of My Blood were designed by Trisha Biggar, who also designed for Outlander between 2020-2024. Between the 2014 premiere and 2019, Outlander’s costumes (remember that exquisite, scarlet red, Dior-Bar-Suit-inspired Georgian ball gown?) were designed by Terry Dresbach. When Dresbach decided to step back from the show, after five years of incredibly impressive work, she hand picked Trisha Biggar to replace her.

Also, I must tell you, Biggar was head of costume at Lucasfilm beginning in 1997, so she designed all the wardrobes in Episodes 1-3 of Star Wars, which means she is responsible for everything wonderful worn by Queen Padmé. I feel like this is important context, the quality of the work this designer is capable of, and how much her career has affected popular culture. I always wish costumes and their designers and makers got more credit from audiences. Let’s just say that I was thrilled to get the chance to talk to a designer of Biggar’s caliber about such a complex and decadently detailed multiple-periods-piece.

Like Outlander, this is a time travel story, though this time Claire Beauchamp’s and Jamie Fraser’s parents are our main characters. Which means this story takes place during World War One, and accordingly, the Jacobite Rising of 1715, instead of World War Two and the Jacobite Rising of 1745, which is when the first series takes place.

The 30-ish year difference, in both timelines, meant sourcing and making hundreds of completely different costumes from the original series. But, as is proven by the excellent casting, Blood of My Blood is a show committed to the little details that are noticed most when they are missing. The costume department worked backwards from the first show, finding ways to make both connections and distinctions. As always, and this is a fact about telling stories on film, the most important information an audience needs, the ineffable bits which cannot be trusted to words, those details are translated to the viewer through costume. Please understand, I am not being hyperbolic or facetious when I say that character costuming is the best, most efficient (and least recognized) systems for silent communication that humans have ever created.

When Biggar and I met, over Zoom, to talk about Blood of My Blood, I started by asking about the effect lighting had on this work. Many of the interior scenes, in the 18th century anyway, are dark because that is what it was like to live in a castle in Scotland in 1715. This was also an era when tapestries were everywhere, decorative textiles did a lot of heavy lifting for interior design during this era, and I was curious how the designer made sure her principal characters stood out and kept those less vital to the narrative from disappearing altogether.

“It is an interesting challenge,” Biggar told me. “But it’s something I think I learned when I was working in Outlander, because it also had lots of sort of dark interiors, and the use of natural light, firelight and candlelight. Also, looking at the sets as they were being built, and the plans for them, I sort of had an idea that if we used slightly lighter colored fabrics, it would allow the costumes to stand out against the beautiful sets built.”

Watching the show, I had the idea that the colors I was seeing in the costumes seemed realistic given the era and geographic location. Stuff like that isn’t ever an accident, and I wanted to know more.

“We’ve reinforced lots of natural fabrics,” Biggar explained, “lots of different types of wool, and from lots of small, small companies who are producing using sort of indigenous sheep or, you know, native versions of sheep. And from little island weavers and so forth. That’s been really nice, to be able to explore that, and they use natural dyes. And it’s lovely to see the tones, the variety of Scottish Highland flowers and grasses can give on different fabrics on different wools. That’s been a bit of a learning thing, there’s so many tones that can be found just in plants.”

I asked what the total number of costumes made was. I’d assumed it would be a big number and I was not surprised.

“Looking at principles,” the designer told me, “we made probably about 400 costumes. And about 90 sort of leather things, like baldrics and pouches and so forth. I mean, of the two main women, Julia had the smallest number of makes. We made 15 items for her. Whereas for Ellen, we made 55 items that created 13 outfits. There’s a lot of time that goes into those costumes. And they had quite a large number of clothes. So we weren’t just doing one costume for the whole season. Although then some people like poor Murtaugh, he’s still in his same outfit, really, because he’s a poor boy.”

And the less prominent cast? All those characters and extras in the backgrounds?

“We made a massive amount of crowd things too,” Biggar told me with a laugh. “Because, when I first started doing research, it turns out this part of the early 18th century is really not very well documented. I found that out years ago when I was doing another television thing, we were passing through the same period that this one addresses, which was a style that had originated in the French court of Louis XIV, and then carried sort of spread out through sort of Europe.”

I asked how it was possible to do the researching which would lead to the quality of costumes she’d made. It was obvious there was a solution, and lovely reader, those are my favorite stories in the world, to hear and to tell.

“There are only four or five left in museums anywhere in the world,” the designer explained, talking about extant, or surviving, garments made in this specific era, the early 18th century.

“There’s very limited accessible research,” she went on, “that we were able to find in the UK, particularly in this period, in 1715. I luckily found a series of French fashion plates that had been, I think, the first fashion plates ever printed, that are in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, that were printed in 1702. They were sort of a great find and sort of based the silhouettes of the ladies’ dresses on those slightly earlier looks and then moved them forward by changing sleeves and changing necklines and so forth, and changing fabrics, because in Scotland and in the highlands, wool fabrics were very much more appropriate for both the sort of setting and the climate of Scotland, then and now. We’re marvelous makers and the insides of the garments are usually rather lovely too.”

While there are challenges to costuming a film irrespective of genre, working in eras past, making period pieces, requires a careful balance between accuracy and plausibility which might be unique to this specific subgenre of costume design. Research, the place every designer I’ve ever spoken to has started, is only helpful as far as the historical record has been filled in. As much as we know about our shared past, there are tons of gaping historical holes, and when a story is told that occurs in those missing places, it’s not like that makes the costume department’s job any easier.

Tartans, the plaid textiles we see in this series and its predecessor, I wanted to know all about the logistics, thinking about it was mind-boggling.

“I think Outlander used the Tartans as a way to identify certain groups,” Biggar told me, “ like the Mackenzies and the Frasers, those Tartans were designed for Outlander. Now, because we had a new clan, the Grant clan, we decided we would design a Tartan for them, because we actually had a marvelous reference. We came across a painter called Richard Waite, who absolutely amazingly and fantastically for us painted a huge number of the Grant clan in 1715. I mean, who could believe it? Research was so hard to find, and we discovered this painter.”

“There’s a Museum in Granton, in the north of Scotland,” the designer continued, “and we talked to the curator there. He was able to also give us access to some of the paintings that are not in the public domain, which was really kind and very helpful. I still have a wall of the copies of the Grant paintings in my office.”

I would keep such treasures forever, I told her, because to me, those print outs sounded like trophies.

“It was so brilliant,” Biggar told me, “but as part of that, Waite had painted the Grant champion fighter and the Grant Piper, and they were both wearing a checked sort of plaid, in a sort of a mustard and a red. So when we were designing the Tartan for them, we based the colors on those paintings. When we had the Tartan made, we had 100 metres in one size, one set size, and 50 metres in another set size, and we used that for the people playing the characters who work for the Grants.”

This is where I pause to provide some context; it’s important to understand how our current understanding of the past relates to what Biggar needed to achieve.

The costumes in a historic series are expected to do two main things, (1) achieve the level of accuracy a a project needs, not just to be taken seriously, but so that the audience is willing to engage with suspension of disbelief; and, (2) find solutions to the logistical realities in filmmaking that sometimes make literal accuracy impossible, or, when keeping strictly to era hurts the story because it confuses the audience or creates more problems than it solves.

The successful costume designer deals with both of these assignments, even when doing so is literal cognitive dissonance. Then, like Trisha Biggar did on this show, they get to work and try ideas until they find solutions that serve the production while also elevating the work as a whole by maintaining a real connection to humanity’s actual past. All of this, obviously, fascinates me.

Please know I am greatly condensing a lot of history here, this is the stuff I think is helpful to know. Obviously, there’s a lot more info out there. I’m hitting some of the high points.

When Elizabeth I died on March 12, 1603 without ever having married or, as was said, ‘producing an heir,’ it was the beginning of centuries of royal chaos in England. Her closest living relative was James Charles Stuart, aka James VI, King of Scotland, her first cousin once removed. And when James VI assumed the British crown (becoming James VI and James I simultaneously, I suspect purposefully to mess with dyslexics like myself) he put a high priority on unifying the two totally separate countries ASAP. Though he worked at it for decades, James VI/I never achieved his colonialist fantasy. Then his son, Charles I, rather famously picked enough fights with English Parliament and that story ended with the King getting beheaded for treason, which was kind of a big deal.

Charles I’s eldest surviving son, creatively named Charles II, kept the Stuart family in charge for minute, but, despite having something like a dozen illegitimate children with a slew of women, there were no “recognized” heirs born from his royal marriage and his brother James II, his heir, was Catholic, and Parliament wasn’t cool with that. Within three years of assuming the (still separate) thrones of all three nations, James II was deposed, in an apparently Glorious Revolution, and his daughter Mary II (who Charles I insisted be raised Anglican) and her Dutch husband William II of Orange in what’s thought of as the Hanover succession.

James II, and later his son James III hung out in France, mostly supported by Louis XIV and spent the rest of both their lives unsuccessfully trying to regain the throne. The Jameses are the namesake for both Jacobite Risings, and the Outlander universe explores the conflicts, and conflicts of interest, between Scottish Clans as they try to maintain their national independence before infighting can divide their common interests. The families are fictional, but they are based on actual history and I asked Biggar if she would tell me about that.

“The Grants themselves were one of the richest families in Scotland,” Biggar explained, “and they might have worn a plaid as a sort of a sash across the body, but the kilts were known as great plaids then, and they were a big length of fabric that was just pleated up around the waist and belted. Richer people didn’t tend to wear Tartan unless it was an event where they were wearing a beautiful coat and britches and so forth, they then did the across-the-body-sash and put their clan badge on to hold it. We did the same, and we created this other Tartan so that this particular clan would also be recognisable, you know, against the Mackenzies, the Frasers and the Grants.”

Color choices, like those which make up all these plaids, were an important consideration, that was obvious watching the series. I felt like clans, groups, were grouped by color in times and places where it was helpful to the viewer. I wanted to know more about this obviously conscious choice.

“We did group people in colours,” the designer said, “but it is true, Tartan as we know it now really is a Victorian thing, the Victorians loved Tartan and made a lot of things in the 19th century, they were wearing a lot of Tartan. There was a marvelous exhibition a few years ago at the National Museum of Scotland of mainly Victorian, some older Tartans and some very old paintings of checks. The wool was woven as checks, and they were using dyes that were available in the area where they were being woven. A lot of people did their own weaving, if they were sort of poor, they would be weaving their own fabric to make their great plaid, and also the women, their Arisaid, which was something they wore outside, like a large plaid, but one you could belt and turn into all sorts of handy sorts of coverings. Something that would cover you, but it would give you places to put little things that you were carrying.”

“The Highland men did use their kilts,” the designer explained, “they would take them off and use them as a blanket, roll up in them to sleep in at night if they were out on the hills. They weren’t formed in any way, they were just a length of fabric, but they’re a wide, you know, double width, they were a double width at that time, now fabric’s woven wide enough to get what would have been a double width then on the smaller looms.”

This immediately made me think of the other era this story sometimes takes place in, WWI, and the trench coat which came out of it. I said something to Biggar about how impressed I always felt by how much history was crammed into that single type of apparel, how interesting it was to me that the trench was still fashionable more than a century later, and how many designers the coat has inspired over all that time. Plus, as my lovely readers must know, I am a little obsessed with productions that require a designer to recreate World Wars. I asked to know everything.

“It was great,” Biggar said with a smile. “I was very, very pleased at how it ended up looking. I think the set looked fantastic, and Jamie Payne, who was that director, was very immersed in the period. We had the uniforms sent here several months before we started filming, and it took weeks and weeks to do the breaking down on them; to make them look lived in, and that people had been living in the trenches, so there were masses and masses, buckets of mud, layered on very carefully. Not poured on, but layered on in all the right places, which is most places, but it took the breakdown team a long time.

We had brought in lots of extra help for that and Kathryn Tart, who was my assistant on Season One, is now an associate designer on Season Two, she loves uniforms. She loves the uniform research and we had a specialist, also a costume specialist, not just a military specialist, who specializes in military wear, making sure that everything was absolutely right.

When we were doing our research, it was nice to discover that we had, at the Somme, with the unit that Henry was in, there were also soldiers from Canada there, who were First Nation.There are a lot of the First Nation in Canada volunteered to fight in the battles, and having had the sort of mohawks and so forth on Outlander, it was lovely to be able to feature them in the trenches too, with the right badges on, so showing their unit, I mean, it was just a tiny thing for us, I’m sure not anybody saw.”

It is a huge deal, I told the designer. It matters a lot.

Perhaps that is the most important point; this is a show made by a whole team of people who live what they do and care about each other. That’s literally my favorite story to tell, and I feel like it’s the loveliest explanation for the decadence so patently obvious in this series; in its costumes and its sets, in the entirety of the project’s production design.

In a world focused on any/all places perfect for some heavy handed AI “streamlining,” to me, work like this feels like an unimpeachable argument for things physically made by human hands. Because no matter how magical our technology, it is the ability to achieve an emotional connection that draws us in. We want to connect, we want to indulge our innate curiosity, and we already know that the art which does this best has a component of human touch.

All ten episodes of the first season of ‘Outlander: Blood of My Blood’ are available to watch now on Starz. In June of 2025, long before the series premiere on August 8, the series was renewed for a second season which is currently in production.

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