‘A Thousand Blows’ Costumes Reveal How Far the Characters Are Willing to Go
There’s a moment halfway through Season 1 of Steven Knight’s East End caper “A Thousand Blows” where criminal mastermind Mary Carr (Erin Doherty) takes rising boxer Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) for a posh night out; she does this ostensibly to introduce him to a promoter (Ziggy Heath) who can get Hez into more society-friendly exhibitions — colorful belts and boxing gloves are just now replacing bare-knuckle brawls at the start of this Hulu series — in exchange for his help in pulling off a heist. Also to flirt a bit.
What convinces the Jamaican transplant, though, is seeing a performer (Jessica Reeve) do a trapeze act and cast the whole room under her spell. Dressed all in silver like a cross between a heron and a Greek goddess, she has power over everyone else at that moment, and her skin color isn’t something the English are looking down on but looking up at. That is what Hez wants — the ability to be seen not as an other but as exemplary.
Part of the reason the show really spends time on that moment is because “A Thousand Blows” takes care to set up contrasts between the (obviously racist, exoticized) expectations Victorians have for everywhere beyond the London boroughs and the lived reality of folks from all over the world coming to the city by the Thames. For costume designer Maja Meschede, this required crafting subtle distinctions between the different characters.
“When we first see Alec [Francis Lovehall] and Hez arrive in London — my team and I dressed everyone [in the background] in quite dark, earthy colors, jewel tones. London itself was a colorful and amazing place, but I wanted to create a contrast between Hezekiah’s and Alec’s color palette,” Meschede told IndieWire. “ For me, it’s really important that any costume I create with my team expresses where the person comes from and what their ambitions are.”
The warmer linens and cottons that Alec and Hez sport initially set them apart, and tracking their clothing choices as Hez rises through the boxing ranks and gets a little more disposable income is an interesting exercise in seeing just how comfortable each of them is with assimilating versus standing out. “I wanted to express [Alec’s] confidence by his clothing, his choice of colors. Hez is quieter, a bit more in the background, and Alec is supporting him as his best friend, but I wanted the costumes to really show that he’s very grounded and calm,” Meschede said.
The other character Meschede wanted to feel distinct and like a pillar of the neighborhood is Lao (Jason Tobin). “He seems like he’s run away from something, you know?” Meschede said. “But he’s an extremely clever, wise man, in part because of what he’s gone through before he arrived in London. So I was very lucky to find a very antique Chinese blanket that’s made of lots of layers of cotton stitched together so it’s really thick and keeps him warm. We made one of his jackets from that.”
The touches of heritage that hint at Lao’s backstory but don’t fully alienate him from the need to wear a coat in London are sharply contrasted with the outfit Mary wants him to wear as part of her heist plan and the outfits the Chinese delegation to London actually show up in. Just through the costumes, we feel the mismatch between the Victorians’ broad expectations and the more complex reality; Meschede and her team wove layers of research into the delegation’s outfits based on research that instantly situates them, and Lao, into a hierarchy we intuitively know exists.
“ We worked on this for months,” Meschede said. “I spoke with a Chinese historian and [did] extensive research. So their costumes, with emblems embroidered on the chest, express their rank and there’s so much symbolism going on. Like, the kind of bird or color or the stars or moons are all symbols and we made that from scratch and painted into [the robes]. It took a long time to pull off.”
Period accuracy can be more or less important depending on the type of world that a series wants to build. “Bridgerton” is a fantasy of riotous colors and patterns that would make actual Georgian-era aristocracy pale. Something like “Sandition” or Steven Knight’s own “Peaky Blinders” strives to appear much more grounded. “A Thousand Blows” wants to create layers where we can see broad expectations of appearances, and these allow all the core characters, to varying degrees, to be underestimated by bucking them or to move unseen by playing into them.
“There’s a fine balance between the reality of images, the photographs we have, paintings, and drawings, but what do we take from that to make the show unique? To not just represent something from the past, but to tell the story we want to tell our way, right? And what was really important was to stress the vibrancy, the energy of [the characters],” Meschede said. Particularly with the 40 Elephants, Mary Carr’s gang, energy was key to not just color and fabric but also the structure of their clothes, giving them a swagger.
“The corset made Erin walk that way because it’s very hard to walk in a corset really fast, and she really got into it and exaggerated slightly. It’s amazing how she did that,” Meschede said. “[The work is] not just me creating these characters, it’s meeting with these wonderful actors to talk about how they feel about it so I help them with their performance so the costume doesn’t work against them. That’s the other element. You can’t just impose something on someone.”
Indeed, the journey both the characters and the costumes go on in “A Thousand Blows” is to find ways where they can impose a bit of themselves onto the world.
