The Costumes of The Testaments Are as Powerful as Any Line of Dialogue

On Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel, costume designer Leslie Kavanagh built a color-coded world where

On Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel, costume designer Leslie Kavanagh built a color-coded world where what you wear determines your entire existence.

There are shows where costume design serves the story. And then there are shows where costume design is the story. The Testaments, Hulu’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, belongs firmly in the second category. Premiering in April 2026 to critical acclaim and an 88% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the series picks up where its Emmy-winning predecessor left off, this time entering the gilded, deeply sinister halls of Aunt Lydia’s elite preparatory school for future wives. And at the center of every frame, doing some of the heaviest narrative lifting on the show, is the work of costume designer Leslie Kavanagh.

The color system Kavanagh inherited from The Handmaid’s Tale was already one of television’s most recognizable visual languages. The red robes and white bonnets of the Handmaids had become cultural symbols far beyond the screen. The Testaments asked her to expand that language into new territory, building a wardrobe for a generation of young women whose entire social reality is encoded in what they wear.

At the school, the girls are divided by color. The younger girls wear pink. Those who have reached menarche, the Plums, transition into purple, a shade Kavanagh worked carefully to get exactly right, finding the precise tone that reads as privileged and aspirational within Gilead’s logic while carrying an unmistakable undercurrent of control. A green pin signals fertility and eligibility for marriage. Once married off to a Commander, a girl moves into teal blue, the color of the Wives, a hue that is beautiful on the surface and quietly suffocating in its implications. The Aunts, including Ann Dowd’s returning Aunt Lydia, wear long brown garments rendered in military-weight wool, a deliberate choice by Kavanagh to communicate authority without glamour. The Marthas, the household servants, are dressed in dull green.

Then there are the Pearl Girls, perhaps the most complex costuming challenge of the series. These are young women recruited from outside Gilead, converts who arrive at the school as outsiders and are viewed with suspicion by the other students. For their look, Kavanagh leaned into warmer tones of white, moving between off-white, winter white, and vanilla to offset the cooler visual environment of the show. “Having a little bit of that range helped balance it,” she explained in an interview with Variety. “The Pearls are supposed to get your attention. They are almost like the Handmaid of The Testaments.” The Pearl Girls’ look was rebuilt entirely under significant pressure, with Kavanagh left with just 36 hours at one point to reconstruct the look from scratch.

The show’s lead character Daisy, played by Lucy Halliday, offered Kavanagh perhaps her richest challenge. Daisy enters Gilead as a spy recruited by June, and her wardrobe tells that double life in visual terms. In Toronto, she moves in vibrant colors and layered, expressive clothing, the physical freedom of the outside world made literal through fabric and silhouette. Inside Gilead, she is stripped of all of it. The Pearl Girl uniform wipes her clean of any exterior identity, which is, of course, entirely the point. Halliday herself has spoken about how much the costumes informed her performance, noting that the physical restriction of the Gilead garments, the inability to lift her arms fully, the enforced uprightness of her posture, gave her direct access to what her character was experiencing rather than requiring her to imagine it.

The Testaments has submitted Kavanagh’s work for Emmy consideration in the Outstanding Contemporary Costumes category, specifically for the episode titled Ball. It is a nomination that feels inevitable. In a world built on control, what you wear is the most precise instrument of power available. Kavanagh understood that from the first stitch.

The Testaments is streaming now on Hulu.