Tessa and Kacey:
Tessa: I think Mrs. C. started once she’d married Mr. Chapman. Up until that point, she was a housekeeper and quite poor. Because he’s quite wealthy, she has spent a little bit more on clothing. I think she had more awareness of being able to spend money on nicer hats, a suit, skirt, and top, without feeling guilty about it.
She changed her outer coat to this cream coat — which I love — after she married Jack, and she’s had it for about the last six years. It’s really smart and goes with everything, whether it’s summer, winter, church, or posh. That’s something I don’t think would’ve treated herself to when she was a housekeeper.
Hopefully going into our next season she will be more influenced by Cathy and what she brings into the shop. Her eyes are going to be opened a little bit, in terms of what clothing is out there. Not necessarily for her age group, but for the younger generation — she’ll take more interest in that, I think.
Kacey: We try to give a lot more range and not be stereotypical with our characters. We often see in period dramas these working class women, and they would always be very unfashionable, or just very dowdy. And my experience is, if you are poor, you don’t want everyone knowing you’re poor, so you try to dress up, and I think that’s where Cathy comes from. She comes from that [mentality of] “the clothes maketh the man.”
When she started working at Swinnertons, she tried to change Geordie’s suit because he’s had the same suit from the Season 1 to now.
Tessa: Love that suit.
Kacey: The fact of the matter is, we do feel comfortable in what we know. It doesn’t really matter that he’s wearing the same suit, it’s the fact that he feels comfortable in it. I feel like because they both probably grew up in a time of austerity in the world, coming through the War and rationing, that the ability to buy clothes off the peg and not make all of your own clothes, was a wonderful and liberating thing for both Cathy and Mrs. C.
I remember that whole matchy-matchy thing that you had with kids back then, because even in the ’70s, my mum used to make all of our own clothes. She used to dress me and my sister exactly the same until we were teenagers. But my mum was a really good seamstress, which is one of the reasons why I wanted Cathy to have a shop and be into fashion.