Traveling in a horse-drawn buggy, a group of schoolgirls dressed in white pass through a small Australian town and pull off their gloves, their expressions giddy and relieved. They are headed to a picnic — and a tragedy — in the Australian countryside, and their headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard, had instructed them to wear their gloves until they escape the townspeople’s watchful glares.
The scene is part of Amazon’s six-episode remake of “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” the story of the disappearance of three girls and a teacher during a school outing. It was famous first as a novel by Joan Lindsay and then as a 1975 film by Peter Weir that was so moody that it has served as inspiration for designers as diverse as Alexander McQueen, Erdem Moralioglu and Raf Simons.
They were all taken by the dark-edged innocence of the original designs, and now the remake is set to do the same for a new generation.
Starring Natalie Dormer as Mrs. Appleyard, a headmistress hiding a secret about her past, “the whole thing is about repression,” said Larysa Kondracki, one of the show’s directors and its showrunner. The costumes are not decoration, Ms. Kondracki said, but an extended symbol of the societal oppression women faced during the Victorian era.
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