When this project came to me and I sat down with Rafe and our producers,
it was so massive, it wasn't one script, it was several scripts and a bible.
What excited me was the fact that I'm going to get to design
many cultures, many characters.
There are so many layers to designing it.
How I approach a project this large is getting a grasp on not just season one.
Season one is what we're shooting this year, but I know there's book 13.
Therefore, I had to know more than I could get from my scripts
so that I could back into what I have.
I wanted to get as much from the book as we can.
Without having that knowledge, I couldn't even begin to design this project.
Gypsy Taylor, my assistant costume designer,
and I were in Los Angeles for two weeks prior to coming to Prague,
and we sat with Sarah Nakamura, who is our all things
Wheel of Time expert and Rafe Judkins our fabulous showrunner and top creative.
We went over, what is this story?
Who are these people?
from these sessions that we had,
we started to build a map.
What does this land look like?
Because it's a land of many cultures and it's a land of a journey from Two Rivers
all the way into the Eye of the World. And in inventing worlds,
I need to invent the rules of the world because without rules of the world,
you don't have a real world and we need to make Wheel of Time real.
We find our map and in our map,
we have our lands and in each land is a different culture.
Each culture, each land encompassed
textile, color, pattern, motif, cultural references
of the male and female characters in each of these seven lands.
And that's how we started.
Robert Jordan, he was a traveler,
he was in the Vietnam War, which opened up his world,
obviously, when he came back, he was very interested
in lots of different cultures from all over the world.
So when we spoke with Sarah, she consistently would give us one or two,
sometimes even three cultural references for a land.
So we would take, let's say, Cairhien, which is where Moiraine is from.
She said the women have this very upper crust, French influence.
The men had this Chinese influence of a more middle class Chinese.
And these were these two cultures that he put together and created Cairhien.
So how can we somehow elevate and bring into this world,
not period French, but maybe the silhouette.
I looked at French runway
I looked at French paintings and then look at French costume.
The beauty of fantasy, it can be anything it doesn't matter as long as it
makes sense, as long as it helps further the story and tell the story.
I have a brilliant leather worker, Rob Goodwin out of London, and his eye
and his sensibility and his esthetic has a certain sophistication to it.
Whatever he does feels like it's from the same world.
This was my initial mood board.
Some footwear references, some contemporary, some tribal references.
The level of detail is huge.
I mean, it wants to be so you can make everything individual.
You can specify it
for the cultures involved because there's so many of them in the production.
I mean, every culture has had incredible craftspeople going back all of human
history where people bring immense detail and technique to their work.
And so that's what we're getting to do here.
I have been blessed with a really incredible
international and domestic crew on this.
We have my sensibility,
but in addition to that, if I can go back to my makers,
their craft in their hand will give it unification.
I'm just I'm in awe of the craft and the makers that I have.