The Testaments Costume Designer Decoded: Plum, Wool, and Power Dressing in Gilead
TL;DR: Costume designer Leslie Kavanagh built an entirely new visual language for Hulu's The Testaments*, hand-dyeing fabrics and sourcing military-grade wool from the UK to dress Gilead's most powerful and most vulnerable women. Here's what every design choice actually means — and why it matters for the show's storytelling.*
Inside the Gilead Fitting Room: How Kavanagh Rebuilt the Colour Palette from Scratch
Deep in post-production on The Testaments — Hulu's long-awaited spinoff of The Handmaid's Tale — costume designer Leslie Kavanagh was standing in a dye room, mixing red and teal together and hoping the result wouldn't look like a bruise. It did, at first. Then it didn't. That precise moment of chromatic collision is where the visual identity of the show's newest female group, the Plums, was born. Kavanagh, who had already worked on The Handmaid's Tale, knew she was stepping out of one of television's most recognisable colour palettes — that blood-red — and into something that needed to feel like its spiritual child. What she arrived at was both deliberate and, in places, genuinely surprising.
What the Show Is, Who's In It, and When You Can Watch
The Testaments is a Hulu original series adapting Margaret Atwood's 2019 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name, itself a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. The show picks up the story of Gilead through three intersecting female perspectives, most notably Agnes (played by Chase Infiniti), a young girl raised inside the regime who attends Aunt Lydia's elite premarital academy.
Key facts at a glance:
- Platform: Hulu (US); Disney+ (international markets)
- Premiered: 2026
- Stars: Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia, Chase Infiniti as Agnes, Lucy Halliday as Daisy, with Elisabeth Moss and O-T Fagbenle reprising their roles as June and Luke
- Based on: Margaret Atwood's The Testaments (2019)
- Costume designer: Leslie Kavanagh
The series introduces two new groups of young women — the Plums and the Pearls — both attending Aunt Lydia's school, where girls are groomed to become commanders' future wives. The Plums are biological daughters of handmaids, on the cusp of womanhood. The Pearls are outsiders, enrolled from beyond Gilead's inner circle. Visually and narratively, they couldn't be more different. And Kavanagh made sure you'd feel that difference before a single line of dialogue was spoken.
Movie OTT is currently tracking streaming availability for The Testaments across US, UK, Indian, and Spanish markets — worth bookmarking if you're outside the US and trying to pin down your access point.
Why the Plum Colour Took Months to Get Right
Here's the thing nobody really talks about when they praise prestige TV costuming: getting a shade right for camera is completely different from getting it right in a fabric swatch. Kavanagh started with the logic of Gilead's existing palette — the handmaids' red, the commanders' wives' teal — and literally blended them. The Plums are the daughters of handmaids, so their colour is a genetic metaphor. Red plus teal. But the result had to survive multiple lighting setups, skin tones across a diverse cast, and the cold visual environment of the show's production design.
Kavanagh told Variety she "custom-dyed a lot," buying existing fabric and overdyeing it to create unique hues exclusive to The Testaments. Each girl in the Plums group was assigned her own shade of purple — subtly different, calibrated to her complexion. That's not a minor wardrobe detail. That's a full-scale dyeing operation running in parallel to production.
The Pearls presented a different crisis entirely. Atwood's novel describes their garments as gray and sparkly. Kavanagh loved the sparkle idea, pitched it to showrunner Bruce Miller — who was hesitant, reportedly telling her it "might be going too far." She convinced him otherwise, sourced an oyster-coloured fabric with genuine pearl-like luminosity, and built the costume. Then, with 36 hours until the presentation, she looked at it properly and knew it wasn't working. She scrapped it. Rebuilt from warmer tones: off-white, winter white, vanilla. The final result gives the Pearls an almost ethereal quality that sets them apart from the colder, more institutional tones around them.
What's striking is how much of this decision-making happened under time pressure that never shows on screen.
Leslie Kavanagh on Aunt Lydia's Wool: Power, Penance, and a Fabric from the UK
For Aunt Lydia — Ann Dowd's terrifying, complicated cornerstone character — Kavanagh went military. Literally. She sourced a wool from the United Kingdom that, as she explained to Variety, "you can use in the army." The aunts' original costume concept was brown and militant in feel, and Kavanagh leaned into that fully. The wool is heavy, structured, deliberately uncomfortable. Not decorative. Functional in the way a uniform is functional.
Episode 6 of The Testaments is the episode Kavanagh has described as her favourite to work on — it reveals the backstory of how the aunts' uniforms came to be. In it, Lydia is shown making the choice of fabric herself, selecting the harshest, most punishing option available. As Kavanagh explained: "She chose it as penance and as punishment because it's not the nicest... she chose what she deemed in that moment as the worst, most uncomfortable fabric, as a penance and punishment for what she was doing."
That detail reframes every scene Dowd has ever played in that brown wool. The costume isn't just a uniform — it's a self-imposed sentence. A fascinating through-line that the blog 123wanders explored in depth when analysing costumes across both The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, noting how colour and fabric in Atwood's world function as a social grammar.
The Ball Sequence and What the Commanders Are Wearing
Episode 5 contains the show's most visually charged set piece: a prom-like ball where the Plums are presented to commanders searching for future wives. The girls wear gowns — each in her own shade of green, consistent with the individualised dyeing approach Kavanagh used throughout. She added caplets to each dress, knowing the girls would be spinning during the dance sequences and that the movement needed to be architecturally supported.
The commanders' styling is where Kavanagh made a choice that's easy to miss but quietly disturbing. She dressed them in long, lean silhouettes — "almost GQ-like," she told Variety — stripping away the bulk of the standard military jackets and cargo trousers. The effect is that they look attractive. Intentionally. Because the narrative logic of the scene requires the girls to find them attractive, even though the entire situation is horrifying. Costume doing the work that dialogue doesn't need to.
How The Testaments Lands for Indian Viewers and Where to Stream It
For Indian audiences, Disney+ Hotstar is the primary access point for The Testaments, consistent with how the platform has carried The Handmaid's Tale in previous seasons. As of May 2026, the show is available in English with subtitles; dubbed regional-language versions have not been confirmed for this spinoff, though Hotstar has previously offered Hindi dubbing for select Hulu originals.
Indian viewership for The Handmaid's Tale has been consistently strong among urban streaming audiences — particularly women in the 25–40 demographic — making The Testaments a natural carry-forward. The themes of institutional control over women's bodies and identity have found pointed resonance in Indian cultural conversations in recent years.
Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker has current region-specific availability listed for both The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, which is useful if you're trying to catch up on the parent series before starting the spinoff — or if you're in Spain or the UK and need the Disney+ confirmation.
Lucy Halliday, who plays Daisy, has spoken about the costume experience in a YouTube short discussing The Testaments costumes, giving fans a performer's-eye view of what it felt like to wear the Pearls' look versus the more vibrant layers Daisy wears in her Toronto flashback sequences.
The Franchise History and Why This Spinoff Exists
The Handmaid's Tale premiered on Hulu in April 2017 and ran for six seasons, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in its first year — the first streaming series to win the top drama prize. Elisabeth Moss won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Ann Dowd took home Supporting Actress. The show made Hulu a serious prestige player.
Margaret Atwood published the original novel in 1985. The Testaments, her sequel, arrived in 2019 and won the Booker Prize that same year, shared with Bernardine Evaristo. The fact that Atwood wrote a sequel at all — 34 years later — signalled that the story had more structural ground to cover. The spinoff was always going to happen.
Cast bios worth knowing:
- Ann Dowd (Aunt Lydia) — Emmy winner, also known for Compliance (2012) and The Leftovers
- Chase Infiniti (Agnes) — a younger cast addition central to the spinoff's perspective shift
- Lucy Halliday (Daisy) — British actress whose costume arc from colourful Toronto civilian to blank-canvas Pearl is one of the show's more visually articulate character journeys
- Mabel Li (Aunt Vidala) — her premiere look, covered by Who What Wear, generated significant fashion press ahead of the show's launch
Movie OTT has the full franchise page for The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments if you want episode guides and streaming availability across all six seasons of the parent show.
What Comes Next for The Testaments and the Gilead Universe
The Testaments is still mid-run as of May 2026, with Episode 6 — the Aunt Lydia origin episode Kavanagh cited as her favourite — either recently aired or imminent depending on your market. The costuming conversation will only intensify as the season progresses; awards season is months away but the crafts categories are already paying attention.
Hard to say if The Testaments will outlast its parent series in cultural impact, but the costume work alone makes a strong case for longevity. Keep an eye on Emmy submissions in the Outstanding Costume Design category. For the latest streaming availability across all regions — including updates as episodes drop on Hulu and Disney+ internationally — Movie OTT has the current picture.
