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After an agonizing wait, the object of all our desires is here: the final four episodes of Bridgerton Season 3.
With opulent costumes, a friends-to-lovers trajectory and the steamiest carriage ride with a wild needle-drop to Pitbull’s “Give Me Everything,” it’s safe to say, part one had everything. Wallflower Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) blossomed into a leading lady, as she ditched her spinster life and set out to find herself a husband. Naturally, this pursuit came with a mesmerizing wardrobe transformation, as she ditched all the citrus shades she’d been bathed in for the first two seasons.
Even though Penelope is our diamond of the season, arguably, costume designer John Glaser’s masterpiece of the season — which he admits is his favorite look — was actually an outfit crafted for her rival on the marriage mart, Cressida Cowper.
In episode 6, Cowper arrives at the queen’s ball in a sensational blood red gown with ballooned sleeves paired with a rigid white neck collar, reminiscent of Bella Baxter’s larger-than-life wardrobe in Poor Things.
As a constant source of conflict with our heroine, this voluminous number embodies the pivotal role that she plays in the ecosystem this season. Penelope is the delicate blooming flower, Cressida the fully-formed rose, testing the pungent sting of her thorns. Yet, this time, Cressida is presented as the fragile creature, not the sought out, now ripe-for-picking flower like Penelope.
“We were trying to make Cressida a butterfly trapped in a cocoon in a conservatory. We wanted her to be camouflaging her hurt,” Glaser tells Teen Vogue. “She's supposed to wear that red dress, and it could have been much more period, much more accurate. But we thought, ‘Alright, if she’s going to walk in that room, let’s just go as far as we possibly can.'"
“It incorporates everything: it’s sheer, it’s a red flower, it shimmers, it’s ombre. It wasn’t a complicated dress, but it was a challenge as it was one of the few things that we weren’t sure would work until we saw it.”
These bold creative bounds are testament to the well-established aesthetic of the show. Now, three seasons in, Glaser and his team have pushed beyond the boundaries of Bridgerton-core with riskier costumes, all while still paying homage to Julia Quinn’s beloved book series.
Bridgerton has achieved the rare art of seamlessly merging modern-day beauty trends of acrylic nails and winged eye-liner with recognizable elements of conservative regency fashion to create a self-contained core entirely of its own. Washed in opulence, romance and soft pastel hues, it’s as fresh, floral and fragrant as an English garden in peak summer with costumes that blossom and wither in accordance to their character’s arc in the season.
