‘Bridgerton’ Costume Designers on Making Sophie’s Silver Gown

For four seasons, “Bridgerton” fans have obsessed over every costume detail, like Daphne’s debutante whites, Penelope’s emerald transformation and the Queen’s increasingly outrageous wigs. The show’s costume designers have built their reputation on creating unforgettable looks that viewers screenshot, analyze and admire.

So when it came to Sophie Baek’s (Yerin Ha) silver masquerade gown in Season 4 — arguably the most narratively important costume in the show’s history — the team made a counterintuitive choice, intentionally keeping the design understated. Arguably, forgettable.

When Sophie appears at the masquerade ball, she’s wearing a borrowed silver gown that matches the chandeliers in the Bridgertons’ ball room. It’s the dress that launches the season’s central romance, haunting Benedict Bridgerton’s (Luke Thompson) dreams and sketches. But according to costume designers John Glaser, George Sayer and Dougie Hawkes, the memory was always more important than the dress itself.

“What’s interesting is that when you think about the silver dress, we see it when she puts it on, we see it at the ball, but then it’s no longer an important costume,” Glaser explains. “What is important is the image of it, because he draws it. It’s the memory of the shoe clip, the memory of the glove. We no longer see that costume. It’s all just the memory.”

Rather than create something sharp and penetrating, Glaser and co-designers Sayer and Hawkes built what they described as an illusion. The team deliberately avoided anything that would create a clear memory in Benedict’s mind. “If it was a red dress with a hard red mask, and a hard dress that had a shape, his memory would have been much sharper,” Glaser says of the alternative. “But because it was an illusion, like a ghost.”

The fabric itself was chosen to remain unfocused. Sayer describes layering silver lace, sequins and crystals onto a light silver base, all done subtly so the dress would only reveal itself when Sophie moved. “You just see when she moves, you get this kind of shift, and you might get a shimmer of pattern,” she says.

The mask, too, was kept deliberately fuzzy. “You don’t really know where it started or stopped,” Glaser adds.

While Sophie drifted through in silver uncertainty, other characters arrived in bold, unmistakable costumes — Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) as Zeus, Eloise Bridgerton (Claudia Jessie) as Joan of Arc with a distinctive bob. “Those are straightforward looks,” Glaser says. “You remember Cleopatra’s mask. You remember Joan of Arc. But can you describe what Sophie’s silver dress looked like? Not really. Silver. And that’s the idea — she is a little blurrier. You’re not really sure what it is over there.”

Showrunner Jess Brownell acknowledged the challenge of making Benedict’s failure to recognize Sophie believable — a plot point that has baffled viewers who wonder how he doesn’t see through such a minimal disguise. It requires, she admits, a willing suspension of disbelief.

“We definitely talked about putting Sophie in a full face mask, a wig, etc., and at the end of the day, the meeting between the masked woman and Benedict is so important that she needed to be able to emote,” Brownell tells Variety. “But I think what we’re really relying on is the fact that class was such a major divide in that time period that even for someone like Benedict, who is fairly progressive, he just would never expect that the lady that he’s been looking for who he met at a ball would be a housemaid. The staff were essentially invisible during that period.”

That ambiguity carried through to the ball, which had no set theme or unified color palette beyond a single rule: avoid silver. Guests arrived as historical, fantasy or literary figures in a cacophony of color and character. The designers had ensured each bold costume harmonized with the others while standing in deliberate contrast to Sophie’s silver simplicity. “We wanted her to be the center of attention,” Sayer says, “but in the most subtle way possible.” 

Beyond the grand spectacle of the masquerade, the costume team also embedded quieter details that, surprisingly, even the show’s most devoted fans haven’t caught. Among them: Benedict’s leather bracelet, a signature accessory he wears throughout the season that many fans may have overlooked.

“It’s the first time any man in ‘Bridgerton’ has worn a bracelet or anything on their wrist, and no one’s picked up on it,” Glaser says. “I find it amazing that no one’s like, ‘Oh my God, he’s got a bracelet. What does it mean?’”

The Bridgerton maid uniforms changed, too, with the team subtly altering the neckline to make them slightly sexier for Sophie’s storyline. The adjustment was delicate, Sayer explains, since viewers have seen these uniforms for three seasons. “It could only be a really slight change to the neckline in order to change it up a bit and make it look a little bit sexier.”

For the Cavender household scenes, Sayer made sure the neckline was open for practical reasons. When Benedict sees Sophie’s clothes in the rain, the water needed to soak through the sheer fabric against her skin. “To me it’s a major thing, but no one else has noticed it,” Glaser says of the uniform changes overall.

It’s clear that a well-oiled machine is essential for creating costumes this detailed. From research to fabric sourcing to sketches to embellishment, a single dress takes four to six weeks with four to five people working on it simultaneously. The Queen’s dresses, with their elaborate embellishment and grander nature, can be in production for months.

With only a handful of days to complete it the silver dress required an all hands-on approach, needing an army of people sat around the gown applying crystals, sequins and lace by hand. “There were about five or seven people all sitting around the dress doing the embellishment,” Sayer recalls. The timeline prompts Glaser to joke: “Let’s change that number to four to six years.”

Yet what makes Sophie’s gown particularly poignant is its origin. Unlike the other masquerade guests in deliberate costumes, Sophie isn’t wearing a fancy dress at all. “She wasn’t in fancy dress. She was just in a borrowed evening dress,” Sayer emphasizes. Her stepsister Rosamund’s maid Alfie found it in an attic. “I thought that was charming,” Hawkes says of the narrative choice. “The color was dictated by the fact it’s a borrowed dress, and that gave a lovely, soft story there.”

Season 4 gives us a Cinderella story stripped to its bones: a borrowed dress, a masquerade ball and a woman out of her depth. The gown looks stunning on screen, but try to describe it later and the details slip away just like Sophie when the clock strikes 12. It persists in Benedict’s perception, and by extension the audience’s, not as a catalogable object but as an impression: silver-toned, luminous, elusive.

“It’s a little fuzzy,” Glaser says. “You’re not really sure. It’s not sharp enough.”

Exactly as designed.