Down the front of her dress is a copy of a Chinese silk panel that we had fabulous craftspeople making all the embroidery. “The veil and the train have Chinese motifs of birds and flowers. So her headdress is a Chinese wedding headdress,” Hawkes said. “I knew I wanted to have all of the Chinese symbols because her family made their money from the opium trade. But for Hawkes and her team to have the canvas to play with how the wedding dress degrades, they needed to start by creating a lavish statement piece, one that alludes to the casual harm with which the character grew up. “Great Expectations” isn’t the only recent series to have found an eerie, tragic beauty in the bruise-colored patterns of mold, of course. So was researching mold and the beauty of mold.” And I’ve always been slightly fascinated by them, how she made mold beautiful. “And there’s this artist, Kathleen Ryan, who recreates mold with semi-precious stones and makes these sculptures of fruit and things. “I knew that I didn’t want to have a dusty wedding dress,” Hawkes said. While the rest of the cast wears (relatively) more modern Georgian styles, but Miss Havisham wanders the dusty, empty rooms clad in the Regency styles of the original novel’s setting, holding her that much further back in the past. “I wanted to push it slightly and not do museum pieces,” Hawkes told IndieWire of the show’s costumes, particularly Olivia Colman’s Miss Havisham. The solution that the BBC and FX’s new limited series’ costume designer Verity Hawkes found was to zag where most adaptations zig. That poses a fresh challenge for each new iteration of the story: How do you make your version of “Great Expectations” visually distinct, particularly given that Dickens’ prose never turns more purple than when describing the jilted bride that time forgot? That’s a new Miss Havisham hoarding dusty wedding gifts and inflicting emotional trauma on children every six years for over a century. Filmmakers have been adapting Charles Dickens for decades - his “ Great Expectations” alone has had almost 20 screen adaptations since 1917.

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