‘House of Guinness’’ Costumes Are Dark and Creamy, Like the Stout

LONDON — Netflix’s latest series “House of Guinness” takes on family drama, succession plans and darky, rich costumes, the same shade as the dark, creamy stout.

In 1868, Sir Benjamin Guinness, the patriarch who propelled Guinness into a family business dies and leaves his children: Arthur (Anthony Boyle), Edward (Louis Partridge), Ben (Fionn O’Shea) and Anne (Emily Fairn) to continue the legacy of the family name with its own set of trials and tribulations.

It’s “Succession” meets “Peaky Blinders,” from Steven Knight, who created the latter historical drama set in Birmingham, England.

The costume designer Edward K. Gibbon was quick to take on the job. “It’s such an iconic family that goes through history and they always seem to be causing trouble or doing stuff,” he said in an interview.

Gibbon started his research by reading about the famous Irish family as there was slim pickings for visual references apart from a few paintings and photographs. Simultaneously, he had to think about the history of the world and what was happening in Ireland, a country fighting for independence and rebuilding itself post-potato famine, otherwise known as the Great Famine.

The show dives heavily into menswear with the three brothers.

“Edward, the second eldest, is the most sensible and most sort of grown up in a way of the bunch. His clothes are more restrained and a bit more stereotypical of the period and conventional,” Gibbon said.

He found a photo of Edward when he was 21 with the “most enormous top hat. He looks just like a little boy pretending to be a grown up.”

Gibbon played into the character trope and dressed him up in moody colors, printed cravats and expensive furs that added nuance to his power and ambitions.

Each brother is characteristically different. 

Arthur, the eldest, has a touch of richness and sophistication as he’s the only one that’s traveled to England and mingled with aristocracy. The character wears a pair of Saint Laurent cuban heels in many scenes, which was one of the items that put the actor into character.

“There’s a bit more of luxury and flamboyance to him,” Gibbon said, referring to his checked coats and waistcoat, as well as the way he wears a large bowtie that resembles a pussybow.

The youngest brother, Benjamin, a laudanum addict is the black sheep of the family and his costumes are equally dark and rugged.

“He has a devil-may-care attitude and again, he’s from a rich family, but it’s about how he treats the clothes when you’re in that position. He’s reckless and everything he wears ends up on the floor, in the bar or lost while gambling,” Gibbon explained.

The costume designer sourced the pieces for the Guinness brothers from all over Europe: France, Italy, Spain and Germany. He also acquired garments from British costume houses such as Cosprop and made a majority of the pieces in Manchester, where the filming of the series took place.

Gibbon accumulated more than 7,000 pieces of costume for the eight-episode series.

In some scenes, he dressed a whole brewery.

“There was a big pointer on this show that we weren’t making this a grim, everyone’s poor at the mill kind of thing. The brewery was cutting edge for its time and one of the biggest breweries in the world — it was this enormous technological thing and people that worked there loved it — it was a point of pride to work there,” Gibbon said.

The characters in the brewery wear more color than the Guinness family. The costume designer didn’t want everything to be brown and sepia as seen in old fashioned period dramas.

Gibbon toyed with the color black for the Guinness family as it was a family signature. He came to discover that the stout isn’t black, but myriad reds and greens.

He used these colors to build the world around the show and used them more on Anne, the only Guinness woman in the family.

As tragedy hits her life, she turns to religion and starts dressing in plain, regal clothing. Gibbon added a touch of drama by giving her a black coat with white stitching and red lining. “She almost looks like Virgin Mary,” he said.

“House of Guinness” is 1800s stealth wealth in all its glory.

Gibbon adapted the move toward slimmer and tighter silhouettes with elongated and lean cuts in the 1860s.

He nudged the sharp silhouette further by giving the characters a modern and more readable edge. He went as far as making Anthony’s trousers a bit slimmer than they should be.

Gibbon could get away with breaking the rules as the Guinness family was known not to follow routines in their days.

On set of the series, the director Tom Shankland would call them the “Irish Kennedys” for the tragedies that have tagged along each generation of the Guinnesses. 

“People are pleased to see they have as much trouble as them or more. Money doesn’t make you happy,” Gibbon said. 

The costume designer’s work has always gambled with class systems and history.

He served as a costume designer on “The Luminaries,” set during the 1860s gold rush; “Harlots,” set in 1760s London, and “War and Peace,” based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel which begins in the Russian Empire in 1805.

Gibbon’s first career break was with “Skins,” a teen drama that premiered in 2007 starring Nicholas Hoult, Dev Patel and Hannah Murray. The show had a similar reaction to “Euphoria” at the time with its portrayal of teenagers and drugs.

Like the Guinnesses and the characters in “Skins,” the costume designer admits that he’s also “slightly rebellious by nature.”