Bridgerton season 3 arrives with plenty of juicy emotional backstory, focusing on the will-they/won't-they friendship between Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) and Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan). After a summer of traveling around Europe, Colin returns to England as a mature, eligible bachelor. Meanwhile Penelope is determined to find a husband and break free from her controlling mother, the gold-digging Lady Featherington.

As ever, the show's bold visual style plays a key role. Remixing the iconic fashions of Regency England, Bridgerton combines Jane Austen-style 1810s silhouettes with a bolder color palette and extravagant accessories. These costumes are packed with meaning, from the Featherington family’s intentionally garish color scheme, to the Parisian trends popularized by the local modiste (aka dressmaker), signaling which debutantes are following cutting-edge fashion.

So while we do see plenty of young women in those classic Empire-line white gowns with flowing skirts and modest gloves… they also wear a full Sephora’s worth of 21st century cheekbone shimmer and eyeshadow, with Queen Charlotte critiquing their eligibility in a foot-tall, jewel-encrusted wig.

In the midst of all this, our protagonists Penelope and Colin must find a way to stand out. This presents a particular challenge for Penelope, who spent the past two seasons as a nervous wallflower, standing on the sidelines of other people’s grand romances. Now she’s a major player in the marriage market, vying for attention alongside her former bestie Eloise Bridgerton, mean girl Cressida Cowper, and Colin’s shy younger sister Francesca.

Speaking to costume designer John Glaser, we discussed some of the key fashion choices from the first half of season 3, including Penelope’s glamorous new wardrobe, and the surprising Australian inspiration behind Colin’s signature outfit.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Popverse: I thought I’d start by asking about the two leads, who both get a glow-up this season. Previously Penelope had less control over her wardrobe, but this season she gives herself a makeover. Could you tell me a bit about her new look?

John Glaser: The first time we see her at the modiste, she says she doesn’t want to wear yellow any more. It’s her first time doing something on her own, so the modiste has helped her with what she calls the new French look. It’s a new silhouette, more towards 1820. The color is green, darker than she’s ever worn, and there’s copper in the dress because it helps to blend in with her hair color. Colors that she’s never worn, but still reflecting a little bit of the Featherington.

After that we have taken most of the color away, and it’s all soft blues, soft greens, soft pinks. We’ve done that for several reasons. One is to put her in the same playing field as Eloise and Cressida, to keep them a little more together. Not to reveal any Easter Eggs as to where she’s going, because people will say if she’s wearing blue it’s because of Bridgerton. They’ll read things into it. So we’ve kind of neutralized her.

We’ve also done that because we don't want to take away from her character. We want to see a new, empowered woman. This is not a fashion show moment. She should be beautiful, she should be sexy, because she’s looking for her husband. But we don't want the costume to drive the situation. It’s also to allow her during scenes to fall back a little bit if she wants to be the wallflower again, because she’s still writing.

For Colin, he was always a pretty-boy, and he always wore light colors, pretty colors. We put him on the road and he’s matured. He was a boy and now he’s a man, really.

He has a wonderful, very distinctive coat that I think people are going to be talking about.

That’s based on an Australian outback coat, and the Marlboro Man. The guy that rides a horse in the Westerns, to give him that swagger. It’s because he himself is older, and he has more confidence because of traveling. Season 1, he couldn't have pulled it off, but now he can. And we wanted to give him a glow-up that wasn't a pretty glow-up like Penelope. It’s a masculine, “I’m back” glow-up.

What was the collaborative process like with Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton? Did they have much input into their costumes, ideas that they wanted to include?

They were both very receptive to a drastic change. I do have to say that before we went forward, we did one outfit for each of them, so we could see how it worked, how it moved, how they looked in it. We checked colors very carefully. So the conversation happened there.

The one major thing with Penelope is that in this period they always wore the long gloves and the short gloves, and I never liked them on her because they were too distracting. So we gave her a sheer glove. We made transparent gloves, so she’s kind of wearing a glove but not wearing a glove. That was something that she was very pleased with and kind of adamant about, because we wanted to see her skin, her body.

With Luke, we had to try that long coat on, and we had to have… not lessons, but we practiced how that coat could work before we went forward. Otherwise we would have found something else to give that same effect. But once he put those clothes on, he fell right into that new character style and off he went.

You mentioned the 1820s silhouette and the outback inspiration. Obviously Bridgerton has this kind of fairytale setting, but it’s also historical. Were there any particular pieces of historical research you put into this season that people should look out for?

We still maintain the basic look as Empire, 1813-1815, Napoleonic. We moved it up to 1820 because time has passed, and it was also a nice silhouette for Penelope. Historical references? No, because we follow it but we don’t adhere to it, and we veer off from it constantly.

The one thing people may notice is that because the war is over, we’ve added more military. Like, the guys from the military may be on the market now, not off at war. It also seemed like at the balls, if we had a Marlboro Man, we needed some more guys in uniforms.

We meet another potential love interest for Penelope this season, Lord Debling. What were your thoughts on crafting his look? He’s this quite serious-minded character compared to some of the others.

The men’s clothes of this period are pretty uniform as far as the jacket and their basic pieces. But because he is a vegetarian, we went right to natural fabrics for his shirts, for his ascots, for his vests. Less brocades, less silk, more natural things from the woods basically. And his color palette also - they were all warm tones, more natural tones. I hate to say it, in this period you can't do much more of a diversion than that because men wore just, you know, a suit basically.

This season I noticed there’s a lot of ruffles going on. Eloise has a line about it earlier in the season, and Cressida has these incredibly bold, fashionable outfits. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on Eloise and Cressida and the other girls who are following these trends in the ensemble cast.

Those trends really come from the modiste saying about Parisian fashion. We just assume that Cressida would be at the forefront of getting the latest fashion. Even though Eloise says that line, and she has to have bows because that’s part of the look, we’ve kept her still in a tailored look. Cressida was the one character that, because the audience doesn't know what her storyline is or where she’s going, we were able to take her to the extreme. The large sleeves and things we are considering armor to protect herself.

Are there any particular favorite costuming details this season that you'd like to highlight for viewers?

There’s actually quite a lot, but on Lady Featherington, if you look at her closely, it’s the first time that she’s ever worn a Spencer, the first season that she’s ever worn a jacket with her dresses.

Truly, we’ve actually talked about paintings and flower gardens. Even though she’s in dark colors, we’ve really tried to make her look like a painting. Her Spencers and her dresses are sometimes painted, sometimes embellished to look like paintings. There's one dress that is actually a white fabric but painted with roses on it. We’ve made 3D roses that match. Because she’s not part of the younger group, we were able to take that idea pretty far.