Passing Understanding

Angie’s Uniform

Kona cotton in light parfait and ice frappe. McCall 7084 for the dress.

You know you’ve gotten the diner period fabrics right when you’re looking at colors that are all named after ice cream flavors. The “ice frappe” may have been a tad too green, but “light parfait” was spot on for the dress, and it turned out to be just the right fabric - a heavy weave, that would have felt a little clunky in a modern dress, but seemed appropriate for a service uniform in the post-war years. It also ironed out beautifully, which made sewing considerably easier (something I came to appreciate once I moved on to Peggy’s suit).

I spent a lot of time staring at source photos (primarily this publicity still) and adjusting the angles on the hat, apron, and sleeve cuffs. The hat was tricky to get the right height on - it seems higher than it is, but is actually more like a headband then a real hat. I couldn’t find any good shots of how it was attached, either, so eventually settled for hair pins. It seems to just sit there magically, because you know that it will never perch that well on any of us in real life, much less stay there long enough to walk around (or make it through an 8 hour diner shift.)

The dress was mostly straight from the pattern. It’s not an exact match (the actual uniform has darts for shaping on the bodice, this has a full length seam down each front side), but it was pretty close, and really, I was just as happy to skip getting the darts to fit me right. I did change the front to make a hidden button placket, to match the original dress. And, the buttons are on what feels like the “wrong” side - like a men’s shirt (thank you, Encyclopedia Brown, for that bit of obscure trivia), which is what the pictures show, so I assume means that women’s clothing hadn’t moved the buttons over yet in the 40s. It didn’t make it easy to button, though.

Oh, and because the buttons were all hidden anyways, I added extra buttons around the bust to keep it from gapping. I’m actually rather pleased with how the buttonholes on this turned out, I’m not usually nearly this precise with my buttonholes.

Peggy’s Suit

Power poplin in royal. Simplicity 4014 for the jacket. 

There aren’t a lot of options for royal blue suit fabric, as it turns out, which meant we ended up with a 100% polyester fabric that I would normally have avoided. It was actually pretty nice to sew, but it did *not* want to be ironed. So it was a bit of a pain to get everything lying properly, and for a while the suit looked more like a puffy winter jacket. Of course, unlike Angie’s dress, it didn’t wrinkle if you so much as looked at it.

The jacket was chosen entirely on the basis that I already had the pattern, and the collar looked about right. We decided to add a lining, which the pattern didn’t have, but it turned out to be a relatively simple adjustment, although there were a few seams that kept getting ripped out as I figured out what order to put them together in with the lining. 

After a bit of waffling over the right buttons, we settled on cloth-covered buttons, which aren’t quite the same as what is on the blue suit (those have more texture under the cloth), but are at least period-appropriate.

The skirt is based on the skirt sloper tutorial on Sew So Easy. We found it came out a little big, though it was relatively easy to tweak (even with the lining) by taking in more fabric at the darts. I’m also not ruling out the possibility of user error in drafting the pattern - I’d happily try doing it again.

The Hat

The hat is the most distinctive part of Peggy’s outfit, and was the hardest part for us to source. There is an official version, at $80, which is a little pricey, and maybe more to the point, isn’t actually accurate - the ribbon ties differently on the version she’s wearing in the show. Still, it couldn’t be that hard to get a red fedora and just add the ribbon ourselves, right?

The hat wasn’t too hard (we went with a red fedora on an Etsy shop that had the right shape and color), but the ribbon proved more difficult. You would think there would be a million red white and blue striped ribbons - but, as it turns out, those are red white and blue. And we needed blue red and white (or white red and blue, depending on which direction you prefer). We eventually settled for three separate ribbons, of different widths, carefully glued together before tying them on the hat.

Incidentals

Most of the other parts of the costume were based more on research into 1940s fashion than the show, though there were a few things we were able to match by looking through interviews with the costumer.

The stockings had to be seamed (obviously) - no drawing on seams with a pencil for us! We knew from one of the interviews with the costume designer that, as a special agent with access to fancier goods, Peggy was able to have black stockings, instead of the nude ones that most of the women would have been wearing. There was also a semi-serious discussion about wearing modern stockings with elastic waists, or truly authentic stockings that attached to a garter belt. Comfort eventually won out over historical (but unlikely to ever be seen) accuracy, in the form of basic stockings from Urban Outfitters.

Shoes were basic black pumps - nothing fancy.

For Peggy’s earrings, we used an antique pair of clip on pearl earrings that matched the pictures pretty closely. Turns out, clip on earrings are really kind of painful - who thought these were better than putting a hole in your ear? (Supposedly, only immigrant women pierced their ears, so wearing clip on earrings was a sign that you were better than them. But then, Peggy was English, so who knows...) If we’d planned that farther in advance, we would have rigged them to look like clip ons while actually using a regular earring post, though.

Hair

Angie’s hair varies between shaped waves and moderately curly in the show - neither of which my hair (which is better suited to a 70s folk singer) does well. I did a number of test runs with varying degrees of tightness of curls, length of time up, and quantity of curling mousse. (The answers ended as, “very”, “at least 10 hours”, and “lots”, respectively.) In the end, I think I may have overshot a bit, though the curls settled out a lot over the course of the night, and were about right in the end. 

Pin curls would probably have been more accurate for the time period, but my hair’s a little long for them (and they’re a pain to sleep on), so I ended up doing rag curls, that, once they’re shaken out of the ante-Bellum like sausage ringlets, looked pretty close to a 40s pin curl set. It was a bit of a pain to put up - I think I counted 25 separate curls, each of which needed to be heavily moussed, curled around a knitting needle, and tied off - but they stayed up and out of the way pretty well once they were up. It had the added benefit of requiring a 40s head scarf to cover them during the day, which helped get into character!

Peggy has much bigger waves, which made it easier to just do some large, looping pin curls. (We also had a handy tweet from Haley Atwell showing how they did up her hair for the show.) These ended up working out just about perfectly!

Makeup

I passed the makeup planning to Izzi, who was much more knowledgeable about that part:

In terms of figuring out the appropriate makeup, I used a combination of articles on makeup of the era, pictures of Hayley Atwell, and YouTube video tutorials (both those specifically on Agent Carter and on '40s makeup generally.) From the photos, I knew that the most important thing would be achieving the bright and slightly deep red for my lips. For lipstick, I turned to the experts at Sephora who helped me select a Bobbi Brown lipstick that would be the appropriate shade and would also flatter my (more olive) skin tone,  Hollywood Red, as well as a matching lip pencil. They specifically recommended the pencil on the basis that it would ensure that the lipstick wouldn't bleed. In terms of execution, I used the lip pencil to outline my lips and then filled them in with the lipstick, trying to keep to even strokes. While I did end up reapplying it (in little bits) during Halloween, I didn't leave marks on anything, so: success. Next, I decided to use my normal concealer, Bare Minerals, though I applied it a tad more heavily than usual (to compensate for the sheer number of photos that I was sure we would take.) I combined this with a Bare Minerals bronzer, which I find works better on my skin than a blush might. To mimic the more natural eye look that was popular in the '40s while combining it with the slightly more made-up look that Ms. Atwell sports on the show, I used a felt tipped eye pencil (Kat Von D) to line my upper lid (thinly.) I combined this with a base layer of Bobbi Brown champagne eye shadow (extension to the brow line) and Clinique dark brown eyeshadow (on the lid-- to blend and tone down the eyeliner.) I also took care of shaping both of our brows, going for a shaped, but natural look.

The End Results