Bustling With ‘Bridgerton’: The Best of Season 4's Other Half
Bustling with 'Bridgerton' is back for Season 4, and we've got your rundown of Part 2's best looks.
Bridgerton! We wait – with varying degrees of (im)patience – for a new season of your episodes, a new couple to fall in love with as they’re falling for each other, and new ways to be astonished at John Glaser’s wildest flights of costume design fancy. As we’re unlikely to see a fifth season appear before 2028, let’s relish and honor another batch of those costumes while they’re still fresh in our minds.
As much as I love and admire my fellow Sophie, Miss Baek (that is, Miss Gun) doesn’t vary her wardrobe much until the final scenes of the season finale, and while her costumes for the ball and her mid-credits wedding to Benedict were lovely, they weren’t terribly memorable in comparison with the season’s biggest highlights.
I’ll be focusing instead on Queen Charlotte, Hyacinth Bridgerton, and my favorite reformed villainess, Lady Penwood (née Cressida Cowper, whose very remarkable costumes for Season 3 I covered at some length). Queen Charlotte is always such a standout in Bridgerton that I dithered for a bit about her inclusion here. After all, she has to be costumed in a grander and more elevated (or over the top, if you prefer) style to signal her rank and station. Obviously, there will be something remarkable to notice and discuss with every ensemble.
Long Live The Queen
It really does seem like something even more special than usual is going on for Queen Charlotte this season. We throw the word “queen” around a lot here in the 2020s, so much so that maybe we, right along with the ton, need to be reminded of what exactly that means. Queenliness, as practiced by Charlotte, encompasses a host of quirks such as maintaining a coterie of ladies-in-waiting dressed in immaculate white-on-white-on-white while standing ramrod straight for hours on end, while holding various toy breeds of dog.
Living in a gilded cage while wielding great power seems to amplify the queen’s most extreme habits and tastes. Which is how we end up with gowns, wigs, and headpieces like those in Episode 1, where she sports a gown of maroon flocked velvet layered over black fabric covered by iridescent jet beading, topped with a cascading, asymmetrical wig of silver ringlets. The shape is nearly contemporary, while the height and use of ringlets make it work in Bridgerton’s alternate 19th century.
The other massive standout wig/headdress is a radiating crown of shades of white, silver, faint lavender, and palest possible gold. At its peak, the headdress extends at least a foot above her head, and I took it as an admiring nod to a similar headdress Angela Bassett wears as Wakanda’s Queen Ramonda in the Black Panther films.
Best of the Royal Couture
The season finale finds Queen Charlotte in her most majestic ensembles of the season. My two favorites bookend the episode, and both are showcases for large, oval portraits centered on the gown. First is the gown in subdued shades of gray-blue and teal, with a massive medallion portrait of a zebra at the center of the skirt. The center panel of the queen’s bodice is moiré silk, cleverly rendered to mimic a zebra’s striped coat (and, perhaps, a slight nod to works like Georgia O’Keeffe’s Grey Line With Black, Blue and Yellow).
I was prepared for her final look of the season to be turned up to 18 (when you are the queen, 11 is nothing, no disrespect meant to Nigel Tufnel), but still gasped aloud when faced with a medallion-style inset of her husband George III on her bodice and a full-color recreation of Fragonard’s racy-for-the-late-1700s painting The Swing at the center of her skirt.
I regret to say that I don’t know if incorporating oversized fabric reproductions of the miniatures painted on porcelain that people bestowed upon each other as love tokens was common in dressmaking at the time, but it knocked me right out to see both that and a famous oil painting as design elements on her deep emerald-and-gold gown.
Hyacinth’s Not-Baby Pink Exuberance
I feel for Hyacinth Bridgerton. She’s the youngest daughter of a family famous for her parents’ love story and for her siblings’ excellent love matches. Her eldest sister Daphne was the diamond of her own season, her sister-in-law Penelope is the now-retired Lady Whistledown, and her extremely eligible bachelor brother Benedict is about to pull a fast one on the Queen of England so he can marry Cinderella, er, Sophie Gun (née Baek) for goodness’ sake! She’s got a lot to live up to!
She is more than up to the job, though, taking up a rigorous curriculum to prepare for her coming-out season, and then organizing the Regency Period’s analog of a middle school dance for her fellow eventual marriage mart aspirants. If Hyacinth were a young lady of the 21st century, she would be a color-coded spreadsheet wiz and an absolute demon with Canva, and might already be cruising full steam towards a career as an in-demand wedding planner. In fact, I would like someone to write some fan fiction about just that.
Back where we belong (narratively) in the early 1800s, though, Hyacinth pulls out all the stops for her soirée, not least with her gown for the occasion. It’s a very sweet and youthful shade of pink that I would call baby pink, were it not for what I think Hyacinth is doing with this gown; asserting that she’s launching a new era in her life. In terms of color palette, this not-baby pink confection is of a piece with the gowns the other female guests are wearing. They all strongly resemble ambulatory macarons, an age-appropriate and menu-coordinating choice. Hyacinth’s gown is by far the most ornate of the bunch, featuring little puff sleeves covered in tulle rosettes and a skirt whose neat parallel lines of alternating rosettes and bows marching down to the hem reinforce my impression of Hyacinth as a person who delights in precision as well as exuberant festooning.
The Prodigal Cressida Returns!
As awful as Cressida Cowper was to Penelope and the Bridgertons as a whole last season, by the end of the season, it was easy to sympathize with her. Banished by her abusive father and trapped mother to live with an aunt in rural Wales? Her actions were the desperate flailings of a young, powerless woman making every attempt possible to escape life under her father’s roof and boot, and while she made it very difficult to like her, I grew to admire her moxie*. Would we ever see Cressida and her daring fashion sense again?
Thank goodness the answer is yes! As the new Lady Penwood, Cressida’s wildest visions of pink and bows are a daily reality, in both her fashion and in her home decor.
(*Cressida’s arc over the last two seasons gives me reason to hope for redemption for the Dowager Lady Penwood. Araminta Gun does some monstrous things this season, and I also understand why she makes her cruel choices. A not-unreasonable scarcity mindset, combined with the late Lord Penwood having done nothing to prepare Araminta for Sophie’s existence, led her to a vicious sort of selfishness. Sophie need not forgive her stepmother, ever, but among viewers, the stakes are far lower. Almost ruining someone is not the same as actually ruining someone, so maybe there can be a way back to something approaching friendships within the ton for her. Maybe.)
Cressida's entrance look is dominated by increasingly large hot-pink bows in the outfit she sports in her big reveal moment. Looking at the placement, graduated sizes, and direction of the bows, they begin to look like oversized lapels. Is this Cressida’s power suit?
I love a big swing, and we get exactly that in the gown Cressida wears to receive Eloise when she and Sophie sneak into Penwood house in search of the late Lord Penwood’s will. This look makes me think that Cressida’s modiste completed the power suit and then immediately challenged herself to experiment with scale in an even grander (and more grandiose) way. The result is a bow that threatens to swallow Cressida whole, punctuated by a massive, bow-shaped, diamond-encrusted pave brooch at the center of the fabric bow. “You simply can never have too many bows” is what ought to be engraved on the Penwood family crest, perhaps with “especially pink bows” also engraved in tiny script below.
There’s a playfulness to these statement gowns that takes last season’s clothes-as-armor and transforms that maximalism into something wittier than I previously would have expected from Cressida. She’s found her color, and now that she has a free hand to decorate and clothe herself exactly to her own preferences and taste, she’s going to do that, and only that.
Extra Notions:
- Shout out to Queen Charlotte's wig in Episode 5
- Also from that episode, Rosamund’s gown & short jacket with MASSIVELY poufy sleeves!
- And finally, future lead heroine Miss Michaela Stirling and her incredible maroon sparkly frock.
Bridgerton Seasons 1 through 4 are available to stream on Netflix. The series is officially renewed through Season 6.
