Gentleman Jack costume designer Tom Pye says Suranne Jones is a joy to dress as the flamboyant 19th century lesbian Anne Lister

But when costume designer Tom Pye first read the script for Gentleman Jack, he worried that a modern audience might not understand how someone who wears corsets and skirts could be mistaken for a man (we see Anne Lister questioned about her gender in series one).

“That was the challenge I gave myself, to make that understandable,” he says. “We ended up going with this very masculine top half, and I wanted to make the skirts as boring as possible, so you didn’t notice them.

“There are a lot of mentions of how she walked around the place, so I wanted coats that looked great, with movement, that swish around, and a silhouette that’s really strong, and looks like a man from a distance.”

Tom researched men’s costumes of the period (the 1830s), while also bearing in mind that the real Anne, as she tells us in her diaries, did wear skirts, petticoats and corsets.

“It came from the diary, a lot of it, but then I exaggerated it,” he says. “I don’t think the real Anne Lister looked quite like that. It’s an exaggeration, and I wanted her to look cool. I wanted gay women to have an icon. It’s so rare that we see that kind of character on TV.”

Credit is also due to Suranne Jones, of course, who wears it so well.

“I love having fittings with Suranne,” Tom says. “She has opinions and is really collaborative and easy to work with. All her fittings involved her striding up and down the corridor to see how things moved. She has got an amazing figure and is such a joy to dress and tailor.”

This week, following last Sunday’s finale, a world-exclusive exhibition of costumes from Gentleman Jack series two launched at Bankfield Museum in Halifax. There are more than 30 costumes created by Tom and his team of four makers, displaying outfits worn by Jones, Sophie Rundle (Ann Walker), Gemma Whelan (Marian Lister) and others, with the famous top hat taking pride of place.

Originally from Lincoln, Tom went to Lincoln College of Art, before studying Theatre Design at Wimbledon College of Arts. His list of working credits is astonishing. He has worked around the world in theatre, TV, film, opera and dance, on Broadway productions including Cyrano de Bergerac with Kevin Kline and West End shows including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Imelda Staunton.

“I feel humbled to see my work in a museum,” he says of the Bankfield exhibition. “It’s slightly embarrassing, but also I feel incredibly proud for the team, because they have done such amazing work. It makes me delighted that people get to see their work up close.

“The relationship with Bankfield has been lovely, and key to the research and development of the whole project. They have amazing archives of original clothing, so I looked at all their 1830s clothes for construction and fabric ideas.

“For the second season we also looked through their textile archive. They have got fabric swatches from all the local mills, which are so beautiful and surprising. We actually scanned a few of the swatches and had them printed. One of the dresses that Ann Walker wears (her Paris day dress) is a fabric design from the local area, but we changed the colours and tweaked it a bit. That was a lovely thing to do, to know this design was around in that year, in that area.

“That’s one of the lovely things about filming in the area, that you have got that continuity. There are several fabric mills, like Denholme Velvets and Moons and Hainsworth and Whaleys, still in Yorkshire and making amazing fabrics that we used on the series. Back then, there would have been thousands of mills, and the fabric choices would have been extraordinary, because it was the centre of fabric production.”

For season one, Tom says he used “bold brush strokes” to allow the audience to easily identify characters and work out their status. For the second season, he felt he could introduce more nuance and subtlety. And he enjoyed playing with the characters’ changing roles, as, for example, when Ann moves in with Anne.

“I felt that that would really have changed the way that Ann Walker dressed,” he says. “In season one she was very pink and fluffy and pale blue, and quite clearly very feminine and girly.”

For series two, he gave her eucalyptus colours and darker pinks, while Anne Lister also gets better clothes. “I imagine a person like Ann Walker moving into the house might have an effect on everyone who lives there,” he says.

Tom and the team make the costumes in much the same way that they would have been made in the 1830s. “The structure and construction of what is underneath those dresses is exactly the same,” he says. “They had these little feather pillows that tied on to the corset straps at the top of the arm to support the big sleeves, and we did that exactly the same way.”

He enjoyed working with Joanna Scanlan, who plays Anne’s friend Tib. “It was challenging because I had always read her as an outdoorsy, country woman who liked shooting pheasants, so I imagined her in tweed. When I read that we meet her in a Paris dining room, I was, oh my God, how are we going to get across who Tib is in that location? So we did a theme of hunting and birds – that is why the bird in the hair.

“I also enjoyed making the looks for Anne and Ann going mountaineering. There were lovely descriptions in the diary of her hoicking up her skirts.”

Now Tom is working on another Sally Wainwright project called The Ballad of Renegade Nell, also by Lookout Point, commissioned by Disney.

It’s a swashbuckling 18th century adventure series about a woman on the run and forced into a life of highway robbery. It is, he says, as amazing as it sounds.

As for a third series of Gentleman Jack, he certainly hopes so. Will Ann Walker’s sleeves get even bigger? We just have to wait and see.

* The Gentleman Jack costume exhibition is at Bankfield Museum in Halifax until December 24. It is free, and open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am-4pm. Visit museums.calderdale.gov.uk/visit/bankfield-museum

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