Victorian Visual Culture

The second half of this post contains major plot spoilers for the film Crimson Peak. I will try to keep it as spoiler-free as possible up until plot points are required for context but will mark where the major spoilers begin.

Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 film Crimson Peak takes place in 1901, in an immediate post-Victorian world. To streamline the analysis, this post will primarily focus on the characters Edith Cushing and Lucille Sharpe. However, the costuming of Edith’s father, Carter, and Lucille’s brother, Thomas, also play heavily into the visual signaling of wealth and social status. While much of the movie’s visual symbolism is less than subtle, the particularities of Crimson Peak’s relationship with class and appearance are remarkably unique and nuanced, particularly for a horror film.

Edith and Lucille are foils both in personality and appearance. This contrast is played up with everything from the soft features, gentle brown eyes, and golden hair of Mia Wasikowska (Edith) to the intense blue eyes and striking dark hair Jessica Chastain (Lucille) dons for the role. Edith is young, 24, from New York, and she is in every way the quintessential metropolitan woman. Her father is a wealthy, self-made stonemason, and her clothes are tasteful but unquestionably expensive and modern. Edith is dressed exclusively in cream, gold, and bronze for the film’s first act, indicative of her wealth and comfort in the industry she lives in and around. Lucille is a bit older at 35, and next to Edith and the other young women from America, her English mannerisms and outdated dress style mark her as different. While the New York women wear the popular Edwardian leg-of-mutton sleeves and wide, looser skirts in lighter fabrics, Lucille remains in her heavy, dark velvet and constricting dresses that seem far more suited to an era twenty years previous.

Lucille’s brother Thomas appeals to Carter for financial aid in building a clay extractor for his property, which Carter refuses, accusing Thomas of not being a hard worker. Edith witnesses this interaction and later remarks to her father, “Did you notice his suit? It was beautifully tailored, but at least a decade old…. And his shoes were handmade, but worn”. Carter replies that she had observed more than he had, and the two leave it at that. While the Sharpe siblings’ clothes are out of style, they are still dignified and carefully made from expensive materials. The two families’ contrasting styles are further demonstrated when they attend the ball where Lucille plays piano, to which Edith dances with Thomas. The women’s dresses are complementary but tonally strikingly different. Lucille wears her hair tightly braided against her head adorned with a band of large glass jewels, and it is here that she wears possibly the most spectacular gown of the film – an intricate, silk, extremely constricting blood-red dress with a multi-layered train that pools on the floor around her. Edith also arrives in a silk gown with a train – but hers is cream-colored, looser, and exposes her shoulders, arms, and back. Notably, she also wears strings of pearls across her chest and arms – and unlike Lucille’s flashy glass gems, Edith’s appear to be real.

A short time later, Edith marries Thomas and returns to his and Lucille’s home in England. Their mansion, Allerdale Hall, is beautiful, dark, cavernous, and actively decaying. Bright red clay seeps up from the floors and runs down the walls, and a massive hole in the foyer ceiling lets in leaves and, later, snow to collect on the floor. It is in the home that the costuming again progresses to another level, with Lucille greeting the newlyweds in a dress the same color as the house’s inner walls – a deep Prussian blue. Thomas wears a coat in an identical color and fabric. Edith, however, dons her most striking costume yet – a silk gown in a shade of canary yellow so highly saturated it borders on garish. The brightness of her dress is a far cry from the muted, gentler, warm tones she has worn thus far. Not only does this dress follow Lucille’s red one in color intensity, but it also features pleated elements at the chest reminiscent of Lucille’s.

— MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS FROM HERE ON —

As several months go by, Edith becomes increasingly ill – and the more bitter tea Lucille offers her to soothe her stomach, the sicker she gets. As is revealed through an investigation back in New York, Edith’s father, who had died unexpectedly, was murdered, and his fortune has been steadily being drained into the Sharpes’ name to fund Thomas’s mining device. This is also not the first time this has happened – Thomas has been married three times before to women with significant inheritances and no living relatives. The siblings, left penniless by their father with a house in too poor condition to sell, were too proud to leave their home and so have been stealing money from and ultimately murdering isolated, well-off young women for the last decade to fund Thomas’s experiments (which have all failed, keeping them poor). This depiction of their lack of wealth turns the conventional “beggar in slums” trope on its head. The Sharpe siblings wear beautiful, well-tailored clothes because they could afford them in the past, but all the clothes are visibly worn because they have been unable to purchase new ones for over a decade. Despite their appearances, the Sharpes are not wealthy at all but were some decades before. As such, they are stuck in a liminal space where they possess many valuable items but have no money and are too proud to sell anything they own, and as such, have resorted to theft and murder. Edith is their next victim, and while the more empathetic Thomas begins to genuinely fall in love with her, the colder and more pragmatic Lucille increases the doses of poison she administers.

While Lucille and Thomas’s costumes mirror each other fairly uneventfully (they mainly re-wear the same blue and black clothes for the film’s duration), Edith’s clothes change more and more. She does not know it yet, but the Sharpes are actively draining her finances and life. Thomas’s failed inventions have already siphoned up nearly all of her inheritance, and she has begun coughing up blood nightly from the poison Lucille has been adding to her daily tea. As the Sharpes, the house, and the secrets both of them hide consume her, Edith’s color scheme transitions from golds and yellows to green, and her light, gauzy fabrics shift into thick, embroidered silks and heavy velvets. The darker green her clothes, the more of her life and wealth the Sharpes have bled out of her.

While more events play out before the film’s dramatic close, the most significant indicators of wealth and class in costuming have already been given to us. Edith, in her golden industrial shades and modern shapes, and the Sharpes, in their dark, heavy fabrics and long-out-of-fashion styles, give the careful viewer cues in their clothing as to their personalities, desires, and secrets.

The costumes for Crimson Peak were designed and executed by Kate Hawley.

Works Cited

Crimson Peak. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Universal Pictures, 2015.

All images are either promotional photographs or screencaps of the film.