Costume Designer Jane Petrie On Crafting Realism In 'Say Nothing'

The Emmy Award-Winning Costumer shares her insights on working on this epic true-life limited series...

Say Nothing is the Peabody award-winning limited series about the decades of conflict in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. A true-life incident precisely recounted in the bestselling book by Patrick Radden Keefe that the series is based on. The series was created by Joshua Zetumer, who painstakingly researched the time period and brought on one of the best costume designers, Jane Petrie (The Crown), to get a sense of realism to this all too real ordeal. Petrie recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom.

[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]

How did you first get involved with this project? How familiar were you with this piece of history?

I'd read the book before I got the call. Ten years ago, I designed a film called '71, a fictional movie about The Troubles. When I got the call, they knew I had done '71, and when they said it's from a book called Say Nothing - I've read that book, it's unputdownable, I love it, stuck it on my Instagram recommending it and everything. I couldn't believe it. I was very interested immediately. I was able to meet everyone, and it happened.

Talk a little bit about your research on this project...

I did all the factual research and visited Belfast and the Republican Museum. I also visited all the places where our cast had grown up and tried to familiarize myself with everything there. A lot of the city has been damaged, and some of it isn't there, but a lot of it still is. I wanted to think about the fact that they were just teenage girls at secondary school and what that was like.

I started looking at old magazines that they might have read. There was one in particular, Jackie, which I loved when I was young. It was all the rage with young girls right up to the eighties. The fashion pages were always so good. It was well documented that they wore a different outfit every day by the time they were in court. That was a challenge for me because I am realistic. So, I worked hard at finding clothes that would be fashionable but also affordable.

How much did you find? Did you make versus thrifting...

We did all of the thrifting, vintage, eBay, and all of that and knew we would have to make a fair bit of it, too. There are quite a lot of repeats. So we figured out where those costumes were and what they might be. We knew exactly what couldn't be original and what we would have to make. I started finding garments and making up the rest.

I made many quiet clothes that fit well, like trousers and flares. Sometimes, I found a blouse, piece of jewelry, or something that felt right, and we built around it. I wanted to be tethered to real finds and tie everything to reality. If you start using too many theatrical devices, you're just taking steps further away from keeping that sort of visceral feeling that it needed. I had to go from the script.

These were real people. Of the stuff you made, how much would you weather them?

Everything, everything. I put nothing new on camera, so, you know, even actually if it's a new garment, in my head, she got something new for court... for example, there was one outfit that I did at the end of episode five that was a Bonnie and Clyde style "seventies does thirties." It would be a new outfit for her, but you can't put new on camera. Everything goes through the breakdown department. I had conversations with our breakdown artist, and we've worked together a lot. We always get down to the real details: Where's it been? What have they been doing? Have they stayed up all night? Have they slept in it?

What colors did you find you gravitated towards? Does anything stick out like that to you in terms of this story?

Dolours is quite earthy, her colors were quite a lot of oranges and earthy colors and Marian were blues. When I do all the research work before I start pulling any garments, I find that my instincts take me to the right place. The colors of the seventies can be brash on camera. We didn't want that. I grew up in Scotland in the seventies, and the clothes that I used to want to wear, you couldn't get, you know, you'd go to the next big city. Belfast was isolated at that time, really isolated.

Any favorite moments?

Coming to London in episode five was such an amazing switched on, a bright experience for them. We tried to show that, and we worked hard on the background of London and the people in the gallery, streets, and theater to show as a support network. The decisions that they were making were shutting the door to other horizons that would be available to them if they didn't choose the route they had chosen. We deliberately held back on many of those bright seventies colors so we could use them in that London episode. It was a way of showing the two teenage girls in this bright, colorful city where everything is going on. I wanted to show the freedom of a creative, free London regarding youth.

What unique challenges did you have doing this?

The challenges were often logistics, really. The size of the crowd and the bombings, and because we did a lot of work on set with the crowd team, that's where the pressure was. Packing, moving, dressing, checking, delivering, and getting it in front of the camera, then dealing with the logistics of the crowd team, was tough. The challenges are time; the speed that it goes at is relentless.

There's also a time shift in this. Talk a little bit about how the people of today are dressed in contrast to the past.

It's more about having a thru-line so that there's no confusion about character, holding onto the essence of the young and older people, and trying to carry that through the older cast. They channeled it, and they were fantastic because we were all a bit unsure. We're going into different people here. We're not aging our cast. They got such good actors that it was much easier because they were confident and experienced. I don't think about anything other than trying to make it the best possible. It's only afterward that you think everyone's gonna see this. We all felt we were all really invested in it. I felt proud of it when I saw it.

All 9 Episodes of Say Nothing are streaming at FX on Hulu.