Tweeds,
Jumpers & More: An Interview with All Creatures Great and Small’s Costume
Designer
From
richly colored jumpers to cozy tweeds, All Creatures Great and Small‘s costume
designer Ros Little has the characters covered…literally! In an interview with MASTERPIECE, Little
takes us behind the scenes to reveal how she helps bring the characters to life
and, above all, make them believable through their clothes. Get the scoop on
the overalls, the Fair Isles, the wedding gown and more, plus how Little would
outfit Tricki the pekingese if given the chance.
Masterpiece:
The
characters of All Creatures Great and Small have grown and changed over time.
Is that reflected in their costumes?
Ros
Little:
Maybe in
some, and not others. The one that maybe has changed a little bit is Mrs. Hall,
only because when we first see her, she’s very much the professional woman
wearing very modest clothes—very uniformed looking, rather dowdy. And gradually
she’s come out of her shell a bit and is more part of the family, and her
clothes are in richer colors.
Another
one who has changed is James Herriot, because initially we had a color palette
for Glasgow, which is very much gray, so when we start off in Glasgow at the
very beginning of the series, everything’s gray tones. And then we go to the
Dales, and it’s all rich, warm colors, a very cozy and heathery sort of
richness. We had James originally arriving in a gray suit, which was a
quadrupled suit [four identical suits] because we immediately see him being
kicked by a stallion! That was in the first series. Then at the beginning of
the second series we saw him back in Glasgow again, making up his mind whether
he was going to make his life in the Dales or not. So occasionally he’s in
gray, but largely he’s more in sort of tweedy things.
Generally,
their clothes don’t change a lot, the men in particular, because it was the
Depression. There wasn’t much money. It would be wrong for them to have lots of
clothes. Occasionally, we need special things for them, the white tie ball,
suddenly Helen, who works on a farm, has a gorgeous evening dress. There are
things that we’re able to do with the story, but they wouldn’t really be in the
wardrobe. We are just trying to make them look nice in their everyday look.
Masterpiece:
Can you
describe a departure from the regular wardrobe for Mrs. Hall and Helen?
Ros
Little:
Well,
we’ve seen Mrs. Hall in things that are not exactly glamorous, but for example
in Series 2 there was a cricket match where she’s in a lovely green stripy
dress and it’s very fresh looking. She’s relaxing and she’s with Gerald and
she’s having fun. That’s very different to the image we have of her most of the
time.
With
Helen, there’s the evening dress I had made for her in the first series, a sort
of petal-y blue velvet thing. It was really nice. That’s a good contrast for
her because she’s worn quite a lot of nice summer dresses of the period, but
they’re nothing special. They’re originals, most of them, hired from the
costume house Cosprop. Quite a lot of the clothes are originals when we can
find them. We have made some blouses and things with reproductions of original
prints, but only original things like dresses really last—and even barely.
They’ll do for a few scenes, but they’re about 80 years old, so they’re quite
fragile.
Things
like the beautiful evening dress, we vaguely modeled on another dress, and
recreated. A lot of the things in the costume houses we use as a sort of
pattern to try on different things, find something that suits her, and then go
from there. Because it might not be really quite the right fit, but it’s the
idea of finding a look that suits.
Masterpiece:
Is there
something in each character’s wardrobe that you see as emblematic of who they
are? Maybe we can start with Helen and her overalls, which viewers far and wide
have fallen in love with…
Ros
Little:
Yeah, I
think everybody likes the overalls, but it’s just what people would wear. I
mean, dungarees come and go, but they were very in fashion around the time that
she started wearing them. I try to keep her wearing nice trousers at home and
overalls when she goes to the farm, because she’s now married and living at
Skeldale. So the overalls are just to be what she wears for work. Helen’s got
two sets that we’ve used—one set is blue, and those are hired, then there’s a
brown set, and those are actually bought from a workwear company.
Some of
these things are specially made, and some are hired. At Cosprop, for
example…with women’s stuff, you tend to find plenty of nice dresses, which have
had very little wear because they’re worn in scenes where they’re probably not
going to be damaged. But you wouldn’t find work wear, or you just find limited
work wear. It has to be made, really. But Helen’s got two overalls and they
were easy to find, so that was lucky. And that’s just the look you want:
wellingtons, big socks, jackets.
Mrs.
Hall’s thing is definitely her old faded cardigan. The actor herself [Anna
Madeley] is wedded to this cardigan. She doesn’t wear it as much in Series 3,
but as long as it’s there…She feels that really typifies her.
With Sam
[West, who plays Siegfried], when we first talked about this series, he said,
“I don’t want to be too smart. I should be a bit shabby.” I said, “Well, good.
Because you would be,” because I’d spoken to people like older vets I’d made
contact with. And one—he’s an elderly but well-known vet—was at pains to tell
me that when he was a boy in the ’30s, the vet came on a bicycle. Even a car
was beyond the means of a vet, really. You think of a vet as a quite well paid
role now, but it wasn’t particularly then, and you see the character Siegfried
Farnon scrimping together and forgetting
to send the bills. They are relatively well off, compared to a lot of the
villagers, but their clothes would be limited.
His thing
is the ties. We have some nice silk ties that we’ve used, but we’ve used them
so much that eventually I started getting messages last year saying, “Can we do
anything about Sam’s ties? He’d like some new ones.” I’m like, I thought we
loved these ties. But he’d love them so much that because they were silk, they
actually completely started to shred. I’d thought they were exaggerating—they
were worn on the edges before—but we used them so much that when I saw them,
there was just the lining left, really, where the knot would be. I had to find
some other ones. Because he likes particular colors, we tend to try and add
with him—the suits are fairly plain and sensible, lovely tweeds, and then we
add quite a flamboyant handkerchief and a rich colored tie, and occasionally
slightly eccentric things, bits of knitwear, just because he’d like his
character wearing an old cardigan or something like that in his downtime, maybe
playing Scrabble at home.
Tristan,
he’s quite dapper. He’s just been dapper the whole time, really. He likes
wearing the suits. I had some trousers made for him because he spends quite a
lot of time now in the surgery, so it’s the white coat, shirt and tie. You
don’t really see the trousers, to be honest, or the jumpers, but you might do
when he is taking off the white coat and putting on his jacket and going to the
pub. We’ve always had quite bold jumpers for him.
…At the
beginning, I fitted Tristan [in some] Fair Isles, and [the producers] were
like, “Oh, yes, all this knitwear, it’s great.” It looks good, and it looks
good against the backgrounds. There’s been a lot of very positive feedback
about all the colors, the rich palette, not just in the costumes but in the
set, and in the locations that are chosen.
The whole
feeling is rich in a real way without it being flashy in any way. It’s just
rich colors have been used by Jackie Smith, the production designer. And we
worked closely together before we ever chose anything—I knew the colors that
she would be using. It’s difficult, actually, because it’s quite dark in the
set. Mrs. Hall’s pinnies are quite cheerful, and light colors, even though
she’s wearing a drab skirt and dreary old shoes and often her cardigan. A
cheerful pinny was a cheap thing that would be bought in a market stall, or
maybe she made them. Everybody wore them. So that’s how we enliven her and try
to make things help offset her against the set.
Anna
Madeley in All Creatures Great and Small as seen on MASTERPIECE on PBS
Things
like the maroon dress. We got Mrs. Hall in a lovely rich colored dress I had
made for her for Helen’s wedding. Actually, it’s a copy of an original dress
that looked really nice on her. It was green, but I had found a company who do
reproduction fabrics, and they can do them in all sorts of colors. They could
show me all the prints they could do, then I could choose what color I wanted.
But you can also choose the scale, so this might have been bigger, but we
scaled it down to this size. It’s just a simple, elegant dress. I didn’t know
if it would work for the wedding, but it could be worn again because there’s
quite a lot of these reds and things in the house.
Costume
designer Ros Little's drawing of Mrs. Hall in All Creatures Great and Small as
seen on MASTERPIECE on PBS
James,
well, he has a really simple tweed jacket, kind of greenish gray, and that is
him, kind of like Mrs. Hall [and her cardigan]. He has another jacket that I
had made for him, which looks more sort of grown up, something a bit darker as
he’s become more mature, but I’ve tended to keep that for good. When he has to
go to the Ministry of Agriculture, I think wears his good tweed jacket at the
time. Personally, I prefer, and I think he prefers, the first jacket.
Nicholas
Ralph as James Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small as seen on MASTERPIECE
on PBS
Masterpiece:
The
corduroys, the tweeds, the knitwear—they all seem so timeless. Can you clue us
in to any details that would signal to a viewer that this is 1930s in men’s
wear?
Ros
Little:
I suppose
they have quite long collars, and the cut of the trousers—they’ve got high
waisted double pleats. The problem is that some of these things have come [in
and out of fashion], so these clothes could have been worn somewhere between
the ’20s and the ’50s, really. Not so much the suits—and they don’t wear so
many suits—but certainly these tweed jackets, the waist coats and so on. One of
the reasons their clothes won’t change much is because you could still buy a
jacket like the ones that we’ve had made or hired. They wouldn’t be quite the
same cut, they might be a bit shorter or a bit more boxy or have different
types of vents, but they’d still give the overall look.
For men,
their clothes are limited. With knitwear, it tends to be v-necks, and we can
see the tie and so on. Not so much crew necks, but polo necks [turtlenecks]
could be worn, but that would be more of a naval thing at the time. I’ve had
farmers and people wearing polo necks, that might come in a bit more. I thought
having a polo neck knitted for a James, but then I thought, no, he has really
got to be professional with a tie on, properly turned out. Ties are going out
now, but back then, a professional man would always be in a tie. It’s small
things—cuff links instead of buttons, for example—that hopefully people are
convinced it’s the ’30s.
Masterpiece:
Can you
tell us about Helen’s wedding dress?
Ros
Little:
I knew
that they were wanting this to be something that they would love. Helen had had
another almost wedding before [to Hugh Hulton], and I already knew that
eventually she’d marry James, so for the first wedding, we found a very
typically 1930s wedding dress to hire from Cosprop. It was along the lines of
the sort of fashions that Wallis Simpson would wear, a slim sort of thing, and
that was very nice. So then the one for James had to be almost the opposite.
But the main thing was that it would suit Rachel, because she is very petite,
so she can’t be festooned in too much fabric.
Rachel
Shenton in All Creatures Great and Small as seen on MASTERPIECE on PBS
We found
this absolutely gorgeous, fabulous Italian lace. Luckily Melissa Gallant, the
executive producer, said, “I wonder what it might be in the way of lace?” and I
was like, “Well there’s this…because I’ve already found it.” So we looked at a
few laces, this was of course the most expensive lace in the shop, but it’s
bound to be. We dyed the silk [of the dress] a little bit darker than the lace
so that the pattern would definitely show—it would be no good putting it
against white and then it would just disappear. It’d be a terrible waste.
Costume
designer Ros Little's drawing of Helen's wedding dress on All Creatures Great
and Small as seen on MASTERPIECE on PBS
I’d found
something that was sort of along the lines of what I thought might work in
terms of a fashion plate. It was this idea of a nice, fitted bodice, and a
skirt that would be full but not from the waist—it would be bias cut. And then
we tried things. We’d think, “Well, we love that neckline”—we hadn’t actually
expected to go with the original neckline of the dress, but we did. “But we
don’t want a sleeve like that, we want this.” We needed long sleeves, because
was filming in March. Plus, I think it’s more modest for a bride to have long
sleeves anyway.
So we
worked with looking for shapes that flatter [Rachel]. It doesn’t particularly
matter about the period per se, with a wedding dress—it could be anything. It
had to work with her figure, and she had to feel very happy in it, because
apart from the scenes, it was going to attract more attention than her ordinary
clothes, which people are interested in anyway…Then I showed the producers
[because] obviously they knew the wedding dress would be the big thing. We
couldn’t take the risk that further down the line they’d say, “Oh wish it
wasn’t lace,” so we showed them this lace draped over a mannequin to give them
the idea of how it would move and everything, and Brian [Percival, executive
producer and director] signed up to that idea, and Melissa and everybody who
needed to know.
We try to
make it so we believe everything they wear, rather than just liking a thing.
It’s more about trying to make [the actor] feel right for whatever they’re
doing in their character. And for them to feel right. I need to like it, but
they need to like it, and if they don’t like it, there’s no point in ever
having it. We don’t show any directors anything that the actor’s not sure
about, because there wouldn’t be any point.
And
that’s why we wouldn’t normally start with a drawing. I’d be much more likely
to show them an original pattern and an original fabric, rather than a drawing.
…It’s fine when it’s stylized for the theater, or certain types of
productions—I’ve done The Last Kingdom, where we’re starting from scratch and
we don’t know what people wore in the ninth century. Then you need to do
drawings, because you have to make everything. Whereas this is more about real
clothes. It’s not so far away that people wouldn’t produce pictures of their
granny or something. The ’30s is not that far away, and there’s plenty of films
and photographs and lots of iconic characters—the Prince of Wales and Mrs.
Simpson, people like that—who somehow are constantly appearing, so people are
familiar with these things. We’re just trying to make it look believable,
really.
Masterpiece:
Last of
all, if you could design a costume for Tricki, what would it be?
Ros
Little:
I could
imagine him having a lovely tailored tartan coat. At the time dogs didn’t have
much, so I think he should have a traditional coat, properly appointed with
nice leather buckles and everything. I think he might like that.
Ros Little is the costume designer for the 2020s
television series All Creatures Great and Small, responsible for creating the
authentic 1930s and 1940s wardrobe seen on screen. Her designs feature
practical, hard-wearing clothes for rural life, including hand-knitted sweaters
and iconic looks for characters like Helen and Mrs. Hall, with a focus on
historical accuracy and practicality.
Ros Little's approach to the wardrobe
Historical accuracy: Little researched 1930s and
1940s fashion, using original dresses and patterns to inform the construction
and style of the costumes.
Focus on practicality: The clothing reflects the
realities of the time and place, including practical garments for women
involved in farming and wartime labor.
Key wardrobe items:
Knitwear: The show features many hand-knitted
items, like cabled vests and Fair Isle sweaters, reflecting the importance of
knitting in the Yorkshire Dales.
Overalls and dresses: Women's clothing includes
practical overalls, often paired with blouses or headscarves, as well as floral
day dresses for special occasions.
Character-specific styles: Little designed
specific looks for characters, such as Helen's outfits that balance a feminine,
fashionable style with a practical, country feel, and Mrs. Hall's iconic
uniform.
Sourcing: Some pieces were sourced from costume
houses, while others were hand-knit or created from original patterns to ensure
authenticity.
Helen's wedding dress: For Helen's wedding dress,
Little used a specific, expensive Italian lace to create a gown that was
distinctly of the period but also suited the actress.
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