(light piano music) - My work is research based, I am a research nerd.
I will go immediately to paintings and, on a job like this, there's a lot of art around.
This is almost an untouched period, it hasn't been touched in terms of television for at least 30 years.
With Dutch art, what is an absolute godsend and what makes it very different to European art, is the Dutch painted what we call, "interior domestic scenes".
So we have paintings that cover the classes, so we're able to find costumes, or find reference for costumes, let's say, for everyone from Cornelia and Otto, servant class, right the way through to Nella, who's a lovely country girl at the beginning, through to a merchant's wife, and through to the guilds.
They're all depicted clearly in paintings.
And here's Nella's first outfit, and so, within this, we'll have a reference to the art, we'll decide who's our inspiration.
This gives us a clear understanding of how the outfit goes together.
Here is the finished outfit, really nice details there.
- I'm Nella, short for Petronella.
- The costumes are amazing, as you can see.
What's so awesome about Johannes is that he's extremely rich but very, very worldly and kind of doesn't care about being really rich.
He has flashes of this kind very expensive stuff, but it's almost private.
He would look very different to everyone else in Amsterdam, everyone else, they look very austere, they're in black, they're very well pressed, and very, kind of held, and he's this sort of dangerous character because he's carving his own path.
- Often you see them in sober black, the Dutch.
Black, as a dye, was the most expensive.
But not only that, they were lining their dresses and their bodices with squirrel fur.
So they looked very pious and modest, but they were actually quite epicurean in their tastes.
- Marin only has one costume, essentially, until a very late stage of the story.
This is her costume.
It's typical of the Puritan values of the period which were supposed to reject anything that smacked of luxury.
- I mean, the costumes, they are astounding.
I love Joanna's work, she did "Wolf Hall" and I thought it was stunning.
And they're just sumptuous, really.
