“I wanted to bridge past and present”: The Dreamer’s costume designer talks dressing Karen Blixen

700 – that's the total number of outfits that Belgian costume designer Catherine Marchand created for The Dreamer: Becoming Karen Blixen. The six-part series follows the life of one of Scandinavia’s most revered literary figures of the 20th century, portrayed by talented Danish actor Connie Nielsen. Set in the ’30s between east Kenya and north Copenhagen, it retraces Blixen’s life as she returns to her childhood home and rediscovers her passion for the arts in the prevailing years. “The biggest challenge was being as close as possible to the reality of the time,” explains Marchand, still on a high following the warm reception the series received when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. “There’s a lot of information you can’t trust, so the research phase is crucial.”

It took Marchand weeks to gather the necessary material to craft the hundreds of designs. First, she began by reading Blixen’s entire bibliography, going through books she could find at local bookshops. She closely studied the writer’s early paintings and sketches exhibited at the Karen Blixen Museum in north Copenhagen. As well as all this she also searched the internet far and wide, setting up online mood boards she shared with the production team, even taking multiple trips to the author’s home country of Denmark to get first-hand experience of the local approach to fashion.

“It was important to understand the spirit of the Danish people,” she says, admitting that the lengthy strolls around Copenhagen appreciating the simplicity and beauty of everyday wear were highlights of the process. “You might think that a regular shirt and a pair of jeans are too simple to be a costume, but they create a character. Especially when that character is Danish,” explains Marchand.

Far from being an industry newbie, Marchand has been involved in designing and tailoring outfits for television shows and popular films for well over three decades, and working for the Dreamer was not the first time she was involved in a Danish production. Just a few years back, she joined the Danish Oscar-winning director Thomas Vinterberg on his film Kursk where she was tasked with designing 2,300 different costumes. “That was something,” she laughs.

Marchand began her career in the late ’80s at an advertising firm in Brussels where she worked on pieces for fashion runways, events and television commercials, and counted Levi’s as one of her major clients. After twenty years in the job, she threw herself into the thrilling world of cinema and television, discovering her passion for fiction costume design. “There’s so much meaning in each costume. Even the smallest detail can change an entire movie and character,” she says.

Following a lengthy research phase to develop just the right costumes for the Dreamer, including Karen Blixen and the rest of the cast, Marchand adopted a specific approach to the task. “I wanted to bridge past and present,” she says, explaining that she designed each outfit with modern-day cuts and fits that — while referencing the period the series is set in — would still hold some contemporary appeal to a younger audience.

She mentions haute-couture designer Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel as a defining source of inspiration in her work, referencing Chanel’s unique ability to craft timeless designs whose appeal extended far beyond the years she herself operated in. Marchand’s technique when it came to the Dreamers’ costumes was identifying iconic elements from clothes of the time and choosing to exclude superfluous details and ornamentation that only dated the items. It was a careful balancing act, she says. “I always asked myself: would someone want to wear this today? If the answer was yes, my work was a success.”