Econowife (thing)

Designing a costume that needs to be a folk pattern or uniform has a trade-off: skimping on fabric (as Atwood suggests) means that you need to spend more manpower on tailoring. If you skimp on manpower, you sacrifice saving fabric by allowing more ease. This is going to be worn by women, who aren't all the same shape and size.

In a society such as Gilead, "modesty" is a given. In other societies of its ilk, such as Gor, saving fabric is no object. If Free Women wear five veils, they wear five veils, no question. Slave women wear almost nothing, which led to my cartoon of the two meeting and claiming that the other has "life so easy". 

With the world of the Gilead video series... My version of the Econowife is utilitarian: nothing floaty, nothing immodest. I've allowed myself the liberty of using such things as long sleeve T-shirts and leggings, since they can be made in factories (also I don't have a serger). The fabric is by design dull, and not "pretty": these aren't the kind of woman that you'd ever aspire to being, they're just everyday women who's someone's wife, who has to bear the kids, clean the house, teach the young 'uns, and perhaps become a Widow, at which point, all bets are off.  

So, what I'm going to do is start with the fabric. In one artist's conception, it's red-green-blue with white, which looks Central European enough, but with white, it's too cheerful, more like a kid's book illustration. (C'mon, if you're gonna torture women, let's do it right!) So the ground color is going to be grey, with dull red, dull blue, and dull green...though, we're kind of wondering why they made it so busy...Why not just plain gray?