Costumes: Beyond the Wall

Night's Watch
The Night's Watch are the sworn all-male order who defend the Wall, located at the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms, from whatever dangers lie beyond. Due to the very cold and snowy climate at the Wall, they wear thick furs and heavy wool padding.

Members of the Night's Watch wear all-black clothing, the rejection of Heraldry and all prior allegiances. Due to the decline of the Watch in recent centuries, they cannot afford standardized gear, so new recruits have to simply dye black what clothes they brought with them. Some like Jon Snow or Samwell Tarly came from noble families and thus brought fairly high-quality winter clothing with them. Most new recruits, however, were taken from the prisons of the Seven Kingdoms, and simply came to the Wall with the clothes on their backs - which often were not intended to protect against cold weather.

The Night's Watch doesn't wear a lot of metal armor. Apart from the simple fact that they cannot afford it due to the decline of the Watch, even the highest ranking officers don't wear much metal, because metal armor is impractical in very cold weather (it doesn't retain heat well, and at freezing temperatures it harms the skin).

Quotes
Clapton: "These men couldn't all wear the same color, the same shade of black. The Night's Watch is deteriorating, their numbers are dwindling, they have no money, so the clothes needed to reflect those circumstances. We worked with the idea that they've dyed their clothes black, which gives you different shades. And, of course, they have furs to keep warm, but everything always has to be drawn from what they can get nearby. It's all very dirty, very raw.

We also decided we'd keep the recruits in their own clothing, aside from crude standard-issue sparring armor. They don't don their black garb until they've passed muster and taken their Night's Watch vows. Many of the new recruits are plucked from prisons, so they don't have a cape or cloak. So within the recruits, there's a mixture of colors and fabrics, depending on where they came from. Sam, for instance, coming from a noble background, has a much higher standard of clothing.

Jon Snow's look initially came from Winterfell, but because he's the bastard, his clothes aren't quite of the same quality as his brothers and sisters. When he goes to the Wall, he keeps the same costume but introduces some new dark elements. Then of course, he goes fully black once he takes his vows. He retains his original black cape throughout the series; it's a piece of home, which makes sense for his character, I think."

Clapton: "They were mostly padding, fur, not really metal armor.  Because you can't wear that in cold, it's impractical.  But it's not a 'uniform', because they're not funded enough to do that anymore.  But as long as it's black, it's enough for them to wear.

They sort of live, eat, sleep in the same clothing, so [the costume has to look like] they almost smell. Pyp always looks cold, he's got very thin clothing, he wasn't planning on coming to the Wall. Wealthy people will bring clothes with them that are probably more suitable, the others actually often arrive in a thin jacket. That's all they have. Jon Snow is planning [on going], is really excited about it, so he's dressed warm, because he has an understanding of where he's going."

Clapton also pointed out just how bizarre it is that the Night's Watch members (generally) do not wear hats, even in such cold weather - which is purely due to filming concerns, rather than strict realism: "Another issue is [the] principal [actor's] hat-wearing north of the wall. Of course they should wear them but, as it is explained to me often, we would not see who was who.  In contrast, the wildlings at least have the excuse that their costumes have built-in hoods, and they're usually seen wearing the hoods while traveling, but could plausibly pull them down if they wanted a better look around.

Wildlings
"Wildlings" is what the people living in the Seven Kingdoms south of the Wall call the semi-nomadic tribes who live in the lands beyond the Wall. These people, who call themselves the "Free Folk", are actually descended from the First Men, just like the Northmen (such as the Starks) and to a lesser extent many other people living in southern Westeros. The Free Folk are just the descendants of people who were unlucky enough to be living north of the Wall when it was built. The lands north of the Wall are harsh, including vast taiga forests, mountain ranges, and eventually sub-arctic tundra, to which the wildlings have adapted as best they could.

The wildlings have a very hardscrabble existence, so their clothing is made from heavy furs and skins from animals, to protect against the cold and snow. They are focused on pure functionality moreso than any display of fashion. The wildlings are not sophisticated enough to forge iron, so as a rule, their costumes do not contain any metal - save for weapons which they have scavenged from dead Night's Watch rangers. Occasionally, some wildlings also trade with smugglers along the coasts, exchanging furs and other resources for iron weapons. Otherwise, most wildlings wield weapons made of wood or animal bone, or decorate their clothing with wood and bone.

Wildling society recognizes no class of hereditary nobility, unlike in the Seven Kingdoms south of the Wall, so their clan leaders don't tend to dress very differently from their regular warriors. Obviously, a successful war leader will have access to better weapons (ripped from the dead hands of fallen enemies) and somewhat better quality furs, but overall, there is little difference. For example when Jon Snow first entered King-Beyond-the-Wall Mance Rayder's tent, he did not recognize Mance by his attire, and assumed that one of his lieutenants (Tormund) was actually the king.

The wildlings are actually fairly diverse, split into about 90 or so different clans at the time when Mance Rayder united them. Most come from the Haunted Forest immediately north of the Wall and therefore look similar, but those from the coasts use more pieces of shell and other items from the sea in their clothing. Wildlings from up in the mountains also dress differently. Other more isolated subgroups dress much more differently, though all include adaptations to the extremely cold weather.

While as a rule wildlings do not possess metal weapons (except for what they have scavenged or traded for), the Thenn people are a major exception: while the Thenns are not sophisticated enough to forge iron, they are capable of forging bronze. Thenn warriors thus wear basic bronze armor shirts, not actual plate, but discs of bronze strung together as a vest. While this is not as effective as steel plate produced in King's Landing, it is much better protection than most other wildlings possess. They also possess their own distinctive bronze axes, all of the same style because they produce them themselves, instead of the haphazard, scavenged metal weapons the other wildlings use.


 * The Thenn people in the TV series are basically a condensation of two separate wildling groups from the novels into one group: the Thenn, and the Ice-river clans.  The Thenn are the most sophisticated of the wildlings, knowing how to forge their own bronze armor and weapons, and organized under lords with established laws.  They are dangerous because they are the best equipped and most well-disciplined of the wildlings.  In complete contrast, the ice-river clans are savage cannibals, considered half-feral by the other wildlings.  The TV series anachronistically combined the two - or at least, elements of them.  The TV-Thenns retain the costuming that the Thenns have in the novels, sophisticated enough to forge their own armor of interwoven bronze disks and bronze axes, but the show version also made them cannibals.  Though the difference is that the ice-river clans live in the harsh polar fringes of human habitation, so they eat other wildlings for food in order to survive, while the TV-Thenns apparently do this as a terror tactic against their enemies.  The TV series also invented the detail that the Thenns decorate their bodies with ritual scarification patterns.  The scarification pattern that the Thenns use matches the pattern etched into the bronze disks that make up their armor.

Female wildlings sometimes wear skirts, but spearwives (female warriors) such as Ygritte do not, for added mobility in combat. It is common for wildling women to fight beside men in raiding parties. Skirts are seen being worn by mothers and old women in Mance Rayder's camp looking after young children, but female wildling warriors dress the same as male warriors.


 * Clapton explained that she gave the non-combat female wildlings skirts, the mothers taking care of young children in Mance's camp, because otherwise with their heavy winter furs it would be difficult to discern that they were women - and a major point they wanted to get across is that Mance's army camp consists of the entire remaining wildling population, including family groups, because their entire society is trying to force its way south of the Wall to flee the White Walkers.

Clapton explained that the wildlings wear their furs the same way as Inuit tribes, fur side in and skin side out, to retain the most heat.

There are basically six separate groups or subdivisions of wildlings that the costumers defined by their dress. The Thenns are one group, but the others haven't been clearly enumerated. Clapton has mentioned in passing that groups meant to be from near the coasts decorate their clothing with shells, those from the main region of the Haunted Forest dress in heavy furs, and those from further in the interior decorate their clothing with bones (the Lord of Bones's group).

Quotes
Clapton: "We've all read the books and we look at it to a point, but sometimes a written description of a costume doesn't necessarily translate well to the screen. Since it’s such a complicated story, the looks had to enable the viewer to know where they are, who these people are and who they represent.  We made all the costumes for [characters from] the north [of the Wall] from skins. For research, we looked at the Inuits and at Tibetan tribes — we try and look at peoples in different times in history to see how they would have dressed in that environment...

...I also looked at Lascaux cave paintings in France — they have these wonderful animal paintings. We decided that every time they killed an animal, the hunters would have to paint an animal onto their costume. The better the hunter, the more covered in these drawings he would be, which I think visually is really strong. We’re always looking for ways to show who the leader is."

Tommy Dunne (armorer): "In five foot snowdrifts it would be impossible to have a thirty-two-inch blade.  As you drag it, it would just become an ice block and get heavier.  I also thought of the wildlings more as a guerrilla force, attacking and moving on quickly, so we didn't worry about the larger weapons used for sieges." -- Even wildlings equipped with steel swords scavenged from dead Night's Watch rangers had to adapt the blades by shortening them.

Clapton, on costuming female wildlings: "We made [animal] skin skirts, and some of its fabric that we've waxed, it's not, you know, "fashion".  I just wanted to show that they were all women; if they all dress the same [in heavy winter furs] you can't tell."

Rose Leslie (Ygritte): "While we were on location yesterday, I saw one of the other wildling women, she had a skirt, and I got really envious, I was like, 'I want to be feminine! Where's my long skirt?'..."

"We have weavers, embroiderers and printers so a lot of costumes are created from scratch. Craster’s wives costumes for instance, were woven from raffia, rabbit skin, and feathers which were then aged in our breakdown rooms.

Giants
The non-human race of giants live in the far north of the lands Beyond the Wall, in the tundras north of the Haunted Forest where most of the human wildlings live. Mammoths also dwell in these tundras, and the giants have learned to tame them as beasts of burden and war mounts. The giants allied with the human wildlings under King-Beyond-the-Wall Mance Rayder, and now form part of his wildling army.

Giants simply swaddle themselves with whatever skins or pieces of cloth they can find, giving them an almost mummified appearance, though they leave their heads and hands exposed.


 * In the novels, giants have a drastically different, more ape-like appearance. They tend to be about twice as large as a very tall human, about 12 to 14 feet in height, but not monstrously huge. A single giant is as strong as a dozen humans. They generally resemble descriptions of the Sasquatch (Bigfoot) or Yeti.  They are not as intelligent as the average human, though they are capable of speech.


 * The giants in the novels wear no clothing, but instead are covered in shaggy fur pelts, which are thicker below the waist. The fur of older giants becomes grey and streaked with white. They do not generally possess technology more advanced than simply grabbing a large tree log and wielding it as a club. Some of them, however, are smart enough to tie large stone boulders to the end of the tree logs to make crude mauls. On a few occasions these are even sharpened to form basic stone axes.  Otherwise, they do not produce any clothing or tools.


 * The TV series (possibly due to budgetary restrictions) depicts the giants as much more human-like, though with blocky facial features (created with make-up prosthetics). The giant "costumes" are actually full body prosthetics which have to be assembled around the actors.  By the end of Season 4, only two of these expensive suits have been produced:  for the giants Mag Mar Tun Doh Weg and Dongo.

Quotes
Clapton: "I always think giants in costume look really corny. I wanted their upbringing to be different, as if as children, they were swaddled and wrapped in anything. And so on when they get bigger, they just keep wrapping and wrapping and wrapping. By the time they get to this age, they're just massively wrapped in fabrics and antlers and bones and grass. So the wrapping isn't clothes as we know them, it's protection. For me, that's what differentiates them from the wildling humans."

Quotes
Clapton: "I always thought the Children of the Forest should be really old children.  Personally I took my lead from Jojen and Meera,  their costumes have always been on the verge of being quite organic.  And so the costumes that I've made are out of feathers and leaves.

Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Bran Stark): "It's all sort of greeny, huge, curls, all over the place [gestures to his head], but in a sort of very tree-like, root fashion.

Thomas Brodie-Sangster (Jojen Reed): "They look in some ways similar to wildlings, but they look more ancient, like more of an ancient race."

Clapton: "They don't have any way of fashioning clothes, how would they do that?  So it's almost like, it's supposed to look like they've rolled in it.  And this beautiful lichen, it's just sort of little bits of mold and lichen and things growing on them:  they're like little trees, trees with feathers on them."

Quotes
Clapton, on the White Walkers in Season 4: "David and Dan said that now that the White Walkers know they're in danger, that there is obviously something that can kill them, that they should be armored.

I went back to samurai a little bit, I looked at the way they tied things and put things together. I also looked at Egyptian.

It has these sort of very sharp, cut-out pieces. It's almost like a fender, like a car fender. It's quite unusual I think."

Benioff and Weiss, on the mysterious White Walker leader seen in Season 4's "Oathkeeper":

Weiss: "We wanted to kind of evolve the White Walker look.  He is of a group of almost ageless creatures."

Benioff: "It's an interesting mix between something frightening, obviously, but also regal, something aristocratic about Him.  We wanted a distinction from the other White Walkers that we've seen."

Weiss: "And we went back and forth for a long time, until we hit upon something that was, if anything, moving in a more human direction, while maintaining a generally horrific look."