Exquisite Costumes Elevate ‘A Thousand Blows,’ Hulu’s Latest Hit Series

In its opening scene, A Thousand Blows, Steven Knight’s latest historic series, promises its audience that the costumes will be excellent. The first character we meet is Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), and within the first minute of the six-episode season we see her wearing the most beautiful lace gloves and an impression is instantly conveyed. This woman is a lady. Of course, we soon learn that this is what Carr wanted passersby to believe. In fact she is the Queen of The Forty Elephants, a real all-woman gang which terrorized London’s high street at the height of the Victorian era.

“I love the glove because it makes her look so regal,” costume designer Maja Meschede told me. We met earlier this week to talk about her most recently released project. “Mary is the queen of the Elephants and regal, delicate, but still empowered and in charge, very regal, like a queen.” The gloves were crocheted, an original piece made for the series. “I found those gloves,” the designer said, “and you know, wearing a glove, it’s very delicate, you see the hand through it, but it also creates a distance and it sets her apart.”

“Mary Carr has her work wear,” Meschede went on to explain, “which is, of course, stolen items from a place like Harrods. Now she couldn’t afford these luxury items given where she comes from. She has a closet full of beautiful dresses, beautiful gloves, hats, umbrellas, parasols, jewelry, all of which help her to pretend she’s Lady Farnley, she has all these different personas. A job like this, it’s such a privilege for a costume designer because it’s so much fun.”

It is obvious that the cast and crew of A Thousand Blows love their work, there are signs and signals throughout the season which make that point very clear. The series is inspired by more than a few historical figures, mixed with fictional characters, but the conflicts and challenges we see on screen are very real. Issues with class, race, identity, the economic struggles and societal problems are those that British culture was facing as the Industrial Revolution came to an end and the fin de siècle era was about to begin.

“I always start off by doing intense research about the characters,” Meschede told me. “Where they come from, what they’ve endured, childhood, youth, what’s their background, their psychology basically. Then I go out and meet lots of wonderful antique dealers in the UK, Paris, and in Italy, who have impeccable dresses, corsets, bodices, skirts, and these gloves. I collect items like that, because I just enjoy looking at how they have been made. It says so much, and the history of it all is fascinating.”

Underworld London, deep within the East End, where much of this story takes place, is a filthy place where crime and tragedy are common, expected even. Into this world arrives out main character, Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) and his best friend Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall), who have just arrived from Jamaica and who are both based on real people. Though we cannot help but know it is coming, the racism and xenophobia the two men immediately encounter hurts to watch. This is a good thing, and it is important. This world would not feel real if such important facts were ignored.

Hezekiah and Alec are here to make their fortunes, to start their lives. Tragedy is behind them and threatens constantly to make additional appearances. Especially since the general population seems to be, at best, suspicious of two foreign Black men. From the beginning we know they will have to fight, literally and figuratively, to be treated fairly or even reasonably.

Costumes are one way that information about characters can be conveyed to an audience without being overly didactic. Audiences are more sophisticated now than we ever have been before, and it is very easy to alienate viewers. If dialogue and exposition are the sole conveyors of crucial details, it can come across as patronizing. But when costumes are the responsibility of a designer of the caliber of Maja Meschede, anything can be parceled out, exactly when the showrunner wants them known. What we wear tells the world an awful lot about who we are, how we wear it even more so. What people love, what they hate, what they aspire to and what they fear; well-designed costumes like these can communicate much more effectively than people seem to be able to with actual words.

Attentive viewers will notice that from his first appearance, Hezekiah, our beautiful leading man, always wears a strip of leather at the nape of his neck with a circular pendant that hangs from exactly center front. Once I saw it twice I could not stop watching for hints of the necklace, something personal, something important to a character who traveled across the globe with not much more than the clothing on his back and his life-long best friend. Obviously, I had to ask Meschede about it.

“In Jamaica,” the designer told me, “there was a Hakka Chinese community and Hezekiah’s grandmother was Hakka Chinese. The English colonialists, they slaughtered most of the people from Hezekiah’s village when they were rebelling against, or trying to rebel against, their oppressors. They were starving and it was horrific. I read all about the history and it is heartbreaking.”

It was crucial to Meschede that there be some physical connection between Hezekiah and his family, his grandmother specifically.

“Because she’s so dear to him,” she explained. “He was raised by his grandmother when his mom and dad were killed during the uprising. She taught him the Chinese language, how to make a certain dumpling soup. I wanted something really close to his skin, close to his heart. And then Malachi and I were thinking, why not a coin, like an old coin that she had maybe that she had taken with her, you know, escaping to Jamaica. I thought, let’s give you a coin, a tiny piece of home, of where you come from. A lot is also subconscious, you know.”

As the narrative unfurls we learn that Alec and Hezekiah are gifted fighters, a skillset that is both helpful for survival and which may offer them a hand up and out of squalor and destitution. Soon we meet Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham), the contender who owns The Blue Coat Boy pub and runs illegal matches behind his bar. Named after an actual bare-knuckle boxer from this era in London. In real life, Sugar was one of some 14 siblings, and his younger brother Treacle Goodson (James Nelson-Joyce) could easily represent one of them or some amalgamation.

It would be too easy to label Sugar as the antagonist, and this show is written and produced much better than that. Poor illiterate Sugar, soft of heart and gentle with children, he is damaged and broken. He is fundamentally self destructive in his doomed efforts to force his world to make sense. Perhaps most skilled at getting in his own way, Sugar immediately recognizes what is similar between Hezekiah and himself. Sadly, once incensed, the older Goodson brother is incapable of reason and cannot hear or contemplate a sensible argument.

“When I was designing Stephen’s costume,” Meschede explained, “we agreed that Sugar should be presented as very down to earth, not pompous. Because he runs a really successful pub and runs underground boxing, people revolve around him and we wanted him to be very grounded. He did everything he could to protect his brother, Treacle.”

As much as A Thousand Blows is about London’s criminal underbelly, this show is also about the history of competitive boxing and how amateurs became professionals as bare knuckle matches between the poor at their neighborhood pubs are replaced by professionally staged events with safety gear (sort of?) and promotional materials.

The Marquess of Queensberry rules for boxing, 12 dictum which (among other changes) separated fighters by weight class and mandated the use of padded gloves, were promulgated in 1867. The new system was at least partly intended to bring about the end of the London Prize Fighting Rules which dictated the structure of bare-knuckle contests in earlier decades. A Thousand Blows is a show that assumes its audience is intelligent, that we can infer the economic motivation, that middle and upper class Londoners will gain by taming pugilism, removing as much perceived barbarism from a sport that could be infinitely monetized should it become a little less wild and gorey. By 1880, when this story begins, the Amateur Boxing Association had formed and the eventuality of regulating the sport was becoming increasingly inevitable.

As much as I know about historical clothing, watching this series made me understand how little I knew about what boxers actually wore in this era. What I did know was that the first synthetic fiber, nylon, was first extruded by American chemist Wallace Carothers, and his team, at multinational chemical company DuPont in 1935, some 50 years before the events in this show. So any stretch in fabric, something today’s athletes absolutely require, would likely come from knitting a textile instead of weaving.

“There were a few companies,” Meschede said, “Jaeger is one of the most famous, that are still around these days and do more the top end of high street fashion. They started off with jersey fabric. You know, underwear, long johns, tank tops, long sleeve shirts. People started off boxing in a pair of trousers, years before our time in A Thousand Blows. But that’s really uncomfortable, and it restricts you. Therefore, this kind of underwear, the long johns style, evolved very naturally into boxing gear. And because it was knitted, it just really had the movement.”

“Honestly,” Meschede continued, “lots of thought went into all these different kinds of long johns. On the West End, I wanted everyone to look more chic, more elegant, I went more for the off white. And it is all much more chic and custom made. Then, for the people in the East End, and mainly women at the time were then sewing, you know, I think they were more making boxing gear with any jersey fabrics that were available, any knitwear. That’s why I made the conscious decision of giving anybody who was fighting in The Blue Coat Boy pub more darkly colored or darker toned pieces. You know, something older, something very secondhand.”

Boxers and Elephants alike, most of who we see on screen is connected to the most isolated figure in this story. Lao, owner of the hotel where Mary Carr and Hezekiah live in London, is one of the best characters in a show filled with outstanding performances by talented actors. It would have been easy to exoticise the character, or to turn him into a caricature, but do not expect this. Such low, cheap tricks would be far beneath this show, it holds itself to a much higher standard.

“It was implied a bit in the first season that basically, he’s ran away from something,” Meschede explained when I asked about designing Lau’s deceptively simple black suit. “It will be explored further, and his is a very interesting and amazing story. Like Sugar, he is a meeting point, people are drawn to him. Because he’s a wise man, he has a history, he’s escaped from somewhere. He wears traditional Chinese clothing. I managed to find very old Chinese woven blankets, like up to six layers of cotton stitched together. And yeah, I’m so glad and I, you know, we took them apart and made his jacket from it, for example, and a waistcoat, you know, he just has a waistcoat, a jacket, a shirt, and two pairs of trousers and two pairs of shoes. He’s a very simple man in his appearance, however, in his mind there’s a lot going on. I wanted him to really be this column, one of the columns, like Sugar is one, though he’s madness.”

In A Thousand Blows, cultural shifts and economic changes connect characters or pit them against each other, sometimes resulting in triumph, and other times ending in catastrophe, exactly the same way they do in life.

My readers know I do not do spoilers, and don’t worry, I will not tell you how or when any resolution might arrive. What I will do is tell you that it is a joy to watch Hezekiah verbally spar with landed gentry, dancing with words the same way he does with punches in the ring. In his fine clothing, trappings these fancy folk need to see in order to be assured of whom they are speaking with, before they’re willing to treat newcomers as fellow humans; he stands tall and does not back down. A gifted athlete and good man, his verbal jabs sometimes sting more than would an actual physical blow. I love this show, if that is not clear, and I very much hope you do too.

The entire first season of A Thousand Blows is now available to stream on Hulu. A second season has been announced and has approved by the streaming service, though a release date for the next installment has not yet been confirmed.

MORE FROM FORBES:

ForbesVanessa Porter Costumes Humans And Robots In Drew Hancock’s ‘Companion’By Rachel Elspeth GrossForbesCostumes Make Lurid Power Games In Zoë Kravitz’s ‘Blink Twice’ ScarierBy Rachel Elspeth GrossForbesCelebrating Five Decades Of Award-Winning Costumes By Jenny BeavanBy Rachel Elspeth Gross