Downton Abbey is entering its final period-costume era | Canada Voices

For British costume designer Anna Mary Scott Robbins, dressing the Crawleys in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale meant creating a closet of paradoxes. While curating the wardrobe of the beloved wealthy English family, she had to craft a vision rooted in the 1930s that balanced opulence with the looming Great Depression.

“More than anything, this film represents a window into a disappearing world,” says Robbins. “There’s poignancy in knowing what this family and world will eventually go through and I had to showcase that.” While the task was historic in nature, it was, as Robbins notes, “deeply important to reflect the sharp tailoring, emotional valour and character-driven details” coming out of Julian Fellowes’s sharp script.

When Robbins joined the franchise in Season 5, the world was already in the grip of Crawley fever. TikToks and memes featuring the show made vintage attire and decor not just fashionable, but cool. Influencer Zach McLeod Pinsent, who wore Regency-era looks on TikTok before it was a trend, garnered a profile in The New York Times. Tourism boomed at grand estates like Highclere Castle (the real Downton), and decor bloggers on sites such as Charish.com and TheInspiredHome.com were advising city-dwellers to channel their inner aristocrat by styling their condos as if they were prepping for a Yorkshire garden party.

Bonhams auction house took note of Crawleymania and capitalized on it with an online sale ending Sept. 16, featuring authentic props and costumes with starting bids from £3,000 to £35,000. The film’s backers hope this auction and The Grand Finale film will spark a new wave of enthusiasm for period design and style-defining figures.

After all, the Crawley sisters – Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael), and Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay, gone too soon in Season 3) – were the supermodels of the stately home. Their lives were a non-stop fashion show, strutting through drawing rooms, dining halls, and tea parlours like it was Paris Fashion Week, changing outfits so often you’d think Vogue was shooting their luncheons and their boudoir confessionals.

Robbins says dressing the women in the final film was pivotal to the plot and each character’s evolution. And Madeleine Vionnet, a French fashion designer who championed and popularized the bias cut in the 1920s, remained a constant on Robbins’s mood board. The film is rife with Grecian-style soft draping and subtle graphic details the designer was known for.

Lady Cora’s costumes for example, reflect a stylistic shift coming from across the Atlantic, with a Vionnet-inspired execution. “I wanted to show the influence of American fashion as we moved into the ’30s – cleaner lines, a softer approach to pattern. Cora’s blues are cornflower, her purples, mauves – pared back for her character and generation, shaped by fabrics and trims I found.”

Lady Cora’s garments – black, leaf-patterned, slightly withered – cling to fading ideals, echoing the Edwardian past while reflecting the loosening of formalwear in a softening economy. “In the first film, Cora wore bold prints and rich embroideries, but here, those patterns are smaller and subtler in tone – it’s a quiet signal of her awareness of evolving style.”

It is, however, Lady Edith and a newly divorced Lady Mary that undergo the most noticeable aesthetic evolutions. Edith, long cast as the frumpy, overlooked sister, emerges victorious through Downton’s swan song. “She’s come full circle,” says Robbins. “Moving from autumnal tones and hard times to cutting-edge London fashion. Her closet is a clear indication of a career she loves, of marrying her rich husband Bertie, and outranking them all because of it.” Edith is confident, wearing diamonds and daring pieces with an air of quiet luxury.

Mary has her share of fashionable mic drop moments though. She opens the film in a 1930s revenge dress – tomato-red and Lalique-inspired – turning her scandalous divorce into a statement of rebirth.

Some pieces paid direct homage to Chanel’s 1930s flair – a style Robbins was inspired to emulate after Chanel’s recent Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition. There Robbins spotted a Chanel ensemble displayed in a glass case: delicate chevron-cut lace paired with a light, flowing full skirt – an unmistakable departure from the stiff-upper-lip embrace of English fashion and a step toward French couture.

Military wear also strutted into her imagination, as Mary steps out in what can only be described as a navy “Fall From Grace Frock Coat” once the news of her divorce begins to leak. In this sharply tailored piece, she is exposed – yet buttoned up to the world – and her emotions are protected in tight seams.

Mary’s last look in the film features a Prince of Wales check skirt – a strategic mix of schoolmarm, no-nonsense governess and lady of the manor. “It ties her firmly to the estate and everything she’s built,” Robbins says. The pattern appropriately reflects Downton’s long-standing pedigree.

While both sisters dominate the narrative, Robbins highlights two queer figures – composer/playwright Noël Coward (Arty Froushan) and actor Guy Dexter (Dominic West) – whose dandyism eclipses codes of traditional masculinity. “They’re the advent of change,” Robbins says, referring to scenes where the pair sport flashier suitings than the rest of the gentry.

Their looks are deliberately eccentric and ostentatious, and rooted in her research. “Noel’s silk dressing gowns and smoking jackets … that’s all taken from history and photos that exist,” she says. “His jewellery and the carnation – they are all Easter eggs in their own way for those who are looking for them.”

In the end, Robbins says it is Lady Mary and the dandies who reflect fashion’s next steps. “They are the future living in the past … a symbol of Hollywood coming in, shifting celebrity from titled aristocrats to movie stars.”

Their attire also hints at a mixing of gendered codes, the boldness of new silhouettes, and the flux of style which disturbs convention. This lasting sartorial note from Robbins is a reminder that great style has never been about fitting into the present, but about breaking free from the past.