Costumes: Major Characters

WORK IN PROGRESS

See overview article, "Costumes".

The costumes of most major characters in the Game of Thrones TV series are covered in the main region-by-region sections. A few characters, however, go through such extensive or unique costume changes during the course of the series that they defy simple categorization - and also have such lengthy notes that it is more convenient to treat them separately.

Daenerys Targaryen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_iFAjvYFo4 Daenerys starts as this very innocent, beautiful young girl, and I just wanted a real elegance of cut, and a simplicity. Certainly not medieval, it's almost slightly Grecian, but it's her own particular style. I think it's from when she takes the initiative with Drogo, she then becomes Dothraki. “For the first time she’s her own person, so she begins to develop her own style, with some reference to what we’ve seen before,” Clapton told us. “She has control of herself and control of her look. It’s very different, quite a strong look. [There are] references to dragons in the texture [of some of the looks].” And if you think you’ve noticed that Daenerys favors blue, it’s not your imagination. “I like to put blues on her because they’re a reference back to Khal Drogo [her dead husband] and the Dothraki, because blue was their special color. We decided [in season one] that it was a rare natural pigment available to them in their region, so it’s sort of her weird tribute to him,” Clapton said. “So yes, blue is a very important color for her, and I think she’ll carry that through for a while.” http://fashionista.com/2013/03/game-of-thrones-costumer-designer-gives-us-the-dirt-on-season-3/2/

One piece is even made out of fish skin that Clapton thought looked like dragon scales. After the journey across the desert to Qarth, out of courtesy Daenerys accepts some Qarth-style dresses. As she gets stronger and more sure of herself, she adopts the men’s Qarthian coat style over a gold corset and her Dothraki leather pants, completing her style evolution. “She needs to have a strength to her but also vulnerability,” Clapton said. “We’ll take her [look] even further as she finds herself.” http://fashionista.com/2012/06/game-of-thrones-hair-and-wardrobe-secrets-revealed/4/

Clapton said of the look, “The trousers are practical. The Dothraki are nomadic so they ride every day. The dress is based on the Quarth shape–it’s the only other shape of dress she has seen so she has interpreted into her individual look.” http://fashionista.com/2013/04/game-of-thrones-fashion-recap-we-are-not-men/4/

Daenerys’s slave-style simple gown was actually a Vionnet gown with a few neckline alterations: they didn’t have time to invent a new dress from scratch, but Clapton saw it in a store window and Dubrovnik and loved it; it was very similar to some concepts they’d been discussing, and feels it was “meant to be”, to find it at the last minute. http://fashionista.com/2013/03/game-of-thrones-costumer-designer-gives-us-the-dirt-on-season-3/5/

Daenerys wears Queen Rhaella Targaryen's ring: Emilia Clarke:  "This ring is, fundamentally, the only thing that Dany's had from day one, Season 1.  It's her mother's ring." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSDYLAFwLKI

Michele Carragher on embroidery: On creating the dragon-scale pattern for Daenerys: "I started to be involved in embellishing her costumes in season three. The decoration on her costume develops from a subtle texture, and as she increases in power and strength, this texture becomes more defined to map out her journey in the story. ... As Dany grows in strength with her dragons, the texture becomes more embellished and grows down the costume." http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2014/04/04/36776/game-of-thrones-the-woman-behind-the-costumes-intr/ Page 158 – “Costuming Daenerys” – At the start of the series, Dany has lived most of her life being told how to dress, initially by her brother. She has two key dresses in the first episode: her “viewing” dress and her wedding dress. The “viewing” dress is essentially designed to make her look naked, as Drogo’s come to see the goods, basically. It’s accented by these dragon-head brooches, which also hold it up. As for the wedding dress, it was meant to unwrap, as if Drogo is opening a present. And, of course, at the end of the first season, she burns in it, which is rather poignant – the end of her story with Drogo. Dany steps into Dothraki society and grows within it. Her costume throughout the season reflects that. She starts off with a basic Dothraki outfit, but as she evolves, she ends up having a bit more ornamentation. When she goes to the market in Vaes Dothrak, she buys what looks like a dragon-skin top and starts to create her own look, within the Dothraki style. Dany takes what’s presented to her, adapts it, and evolves with it. In season two, she arrives in Qarth, completely broken, and she is initially won over by the Qartheen style – this beautiful, revealing, turquoise dress…but then realizes it’s not quite right. It’s not her. So she starts wearing this gold corset over her Dothraki costume, then eventually a leather corset over a Qartheen man’s top, blending the two cultures and creating her own style.

Clapton: "The inspiration for Dany's costumes and their evolution is very much her story.  The color choice was dictated by the fact that the Dothraki precious color is blue, so that's really been the basis of her palette.  The change in her clothing style is partly about her journey of becoming a woman and a leader, but also the practicality of it.  She has been leading a nomadic life and with the riding she has to wear boots and she has to wear leather trousers.  The fact that they lend such strength to her look is great, but I wanted the shape to create a sense of her femininity.  We looked at so many elements, and we played with dragon scaling embroidery and the sleeves seem almost like the hood on a snake.  I wanted to draw in the dragons, but also create a sense of armor, something protective about the choices she makes.

After Qarth, where it was designed so that it felt like she had made a mistake in style choice, Dany starts to take on more elements from the male style of dress - because that's where she feels the power is - and then make them her own.

It's a very organic process, so when she gets to Meereen, you start to see similarities between Missandei and Dany. [Missandei] is still a young woman and she would want to dress like the woman she perceives as her friend, someone who has proved herself as they traveled together. Dany wants to erase the idea of slave and the separation it causes and that is part of it as well."

Daenerys's long white (platinum blonde) hair is a wig, as actress Emilia Clarke has naturally black hair. It is by far the most difficult wig to care for. As hair designer Kevin Alexander said, it is particularly difficult in any scene involving smoke: apart from being white, the wig is very porous, so it very easily gets dirty and turns grey. The team has to rotate between three different wigs during filming, depending on which is the cleanest that day. Daenerys started out with plain hair but after entering Dothraki society started braiding it in their fashion. She briefly stopped doing this in Season 2 when she was experimenting with Qartheen clothing styles, but from Season 3 onwards she abandoned Qartheen fashion and returned to developing her own unique style, including a return of her Dothraki braids - reminding her of where she first learned her own sense of power and selfhood. Alexander explained there are also practical considerations for this: unlike Cersei or Margaery (who are mostly at court), Daenerys is frequently riding around from place to the next in outdoor, on-location filming - if she wore her hair loose and unbraided, it would fly about wildly in the wind (see this tutorial on how to braid your hair like Daenerys).

It takes about two hours to apply Emilia Clarke's wig:  http://fashionista.com/2012/06/game-of-thrones-hair-and-wardrobe-secrets-revealed

Daenerys's wedding dress in the first episode is supposed to be pale like the color of the moon, because of how Drogo later calls her the "moon of my life" (and he is her "sun and stars". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z_c_hV8nEg

"And Dany, once she's there [in Meereen] and has her own penthouse, you actually start seeing her dressing for certain occasions. So she's very formal when she's in the main hall, she wears really soft wraps and wafty things when she's in her private apartment.  We see Missandei sort of growing closer to her and adapting a similar style.

She's developing a wardrobe and a taste now. We're still keeping it to blues and silvers. But there's more dragony-skin inspired embroidery....I think it's nice, it gives such a different look to her."

Brienne of Tarth
Brienne of Tarth

With Brienne (Gwendoline Christie), for instance, she is a woman but we want to mistake her for a man; however, no matter what you do, women have hips. We just started making the lines on the armor go away from her waist and slowly she began to look more masculine — at the same time, the armor also had to be functional. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2012/03/creative-minds-game-of-thrones-costume-designer-michele-clapton.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ottevaCcAw "Brienne's new armor: Jaime I don't think has a great deal of imagination, so we didn't think he would come up with anything particularly fanciful. It's based on the shape of her original armor, but it's just made by better armorers, being King's Landing." Brienne's original armor was from mismatched sets because they weren't made for a woman's body shape, while the new one she gets is a complete suit intended for her female proportions (wider hips).

http://fashionista.com/2013/03/game-of-thrones-costumer-designer-gives-us-the-dirt-on-season-3 "[Brienne] has this pretty epic journey. She obvioulsy keeps her armored look, but there’s one scene where she actually dresses quite differently," Clapton said. "The interesting thing is she has to dress in a way that she dislikes intensely and therefore feels stupid in, but actually it was very important that she actually doesn’t look stupid--she looks fab." So we'll assume it's a dress then? "Yeah, she's in a gown and very feminine," Clapton continued. "It’s just that she doesn’t like to look that way. Although it’s referred to as her looking 'ridiculous,' she doesn’t!"

Putting Brienne in a dress in Season 3 to show her discomfort http://fashionista.com/2013/05/game-of-thrones-fashion-recap-many-betrothals-and-one-pink-dress/2/ "Yes, Brienne does wear a dress, and it is given to her," Clapton told us over email. "So we imagined that it was an old dress left behind by someone else, probably stored in a trunk, so it was important that it looked a bit dusty and aged and faded. Velvet is great for this and we trimmed it with moth-eaten fur. It had to not fit properly, but actually we also wanted to make Brienne look good, not because she wanted to but actually in spite of herself!"

Cersei Lannister
Queen Cersei Lannister is paranoid and tries to armor herself against the threats she feels are around her, so her dresses are layered like armor, often including (symbolic) metal plating, in addition to expensive jewelry. To give this "layered" effect, Cersei's dresses wrap around her, like a Japanese kimono. Cersei's dresses also tend to have long billowing sleeves, which she can hold out in front of her like another layer separating her from other people. Other Westerlands noblewomen imitate Cersei's styles. To correspond to the asymmetric look of Cersei's kimono-like dresses, Westerlands men wear leather tunics with asymmetric collars (seen on Jaime, Lancel, and Tywin). This kimono-like asymmetrically overlapped look, in turn, seems to have inspired the Japanese design influence for Lannister soldiers' armor.

At the beginning of the TV series, Cersei is making at least some attempt to appear friendly, wearing blue or gold colors and bird motifs in her clothing, but as her hostility increases she starts dressing in progressively more overt Lannister colors, gold and red. By the end of Season 1 (such as when she dismisses Ser Barristan Selmy) she is wearing pink and gold, and by the beginning of Season 2 she is wearing her true colors: bold Lannister red, with gold highlights. During Season 2, Cersei fears she is losing control due to both external pressures (the Starks, Renly and Stannis) and internal pressures (Tyrion and the other Small Council members). Therefore as Season 2 progresses, Cersei gradually shifts to dresses which increasingly display her signature "layered", wrap-around look, as if to mentally shield herself in armor from all of the threats she sees around her. By the end of Season 2 during the Battle of the Blackwater, she has even incorporated symbolic plate armor into her dresses.

Cersei wears her hair differently in public and in private. Cersei is all about appearances, nothing more, so on formal public occasions she makes it a point to have her hair elaborately styled, but in private she wears her hair down, because she doesn't really care. Basically, Cersei will have her hair styled for a ceremony in the throneroom but has reached the point where she doesn't care how the Small Council or Sansa Stark see her hair. This signifies that Cersei’s public face and private persona are polar opposites, i.e. she is two-faced, and her polite public appearances are just an act. In contrast, Margaery Tyrell always has her hair maintained and braided to a certain degree – not as formally as for full-scale court ceremonies, but she still cares about her appearance even if only in private. This reflects how unlike Cersei, Margaery and the Tyrells are much more honest and well-meaning (particularly towards Sansa Stark), and their private appearances are not drastically different from their public appearances.


 * Lena Headey wears a wig to portray Cersei, instead of her own (dyed) hair. The wigs in the TV series are made of real human hair, and can cost as much as $7,000.  Cersei's wig does not undergo any chemical processing at all (which is used on some of the other wigs to make them the exact color they need to be).  Rather, the wig maker sourced individual colors and strands of hair, which were then individually knotted onto a lace cap one strand at a time to achieve the perfect golden blonde blend.

Quotes
Page 81 – “Costuming Cersei” – “When we first meet Cersei, she’s in a deeply unhappy marriage but is set in her ways and her style. Then Robert dies and Joffrey takes power, and slowly she gets harder. The bird embroidered on her clothes gives way to more and more lions. I wanted to increase her shell, I guess. Everything’s more ornate, grander, until we finally see her in Episode 209 in a sort of armored corset. I don’t know how strong she really is, but she wants to project that image. I’ve always wanted to do this with her costume, from the start, back when we were doing the pilot.”

Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister): "Margaery's appeared in King's Landing, and [Cersei]'s a bit threatened, because she's younger and more beautiful.  So she's a little bit insecure around Margaery, and so she started to kind of build her clothes up, with armor; and that kind of stuff keeps growing [Headey motions to the thick metal collar she's wearing] as she gets more paranoid and more desperate.  The lion is the Lannister sigil, so she's kind of stacking up the lions [Headey motions to the increasingly large and prominent lion sigils engraved in the metal pieces of her costume]."

Cersei in Season 3 inexplicably starts wearing plunging funnel neck dresses like Margaery used to wear in Renly’s camp (before she came to King’s Landing). What’s the in-universe explanation? http://fashionista.com/2013/03/game-of-thrones-costumer-designer-gives-us-the-dirt-on-season-3/4/

By the Purple Wedding, "Cersei is pulling back a little bit. She's not the sort of powerhouse that she was, and it was just, I wanted her to be slightly quieter.  Very beautiful, just not rocking the red so much.  It's just a sort of slightly muted look to her."

Margaery Tyrell
Margaery's costumes go through an in-universe growth process. Clapton explained that in Season 2, Margaery is still Renly's young queen, so she's still figuring out what her official "signature look" will be. This leads her to experiment between different dress styles. The first dress she is introduced in, beside Renly in his camp, has few of her later signature features other than a plunging neckline. Afterwards she moves on to a the flower-shaped "funnel" dress, which many critics commented on as somewhat bizarre: this was entirely intentional on Clapton's part. The funnel dress was supposed to represent a blind alley that Margaery went down with her style, an early experiment which Margaery later realized wasn't working so she abandoned it. The third and final dress that Margaery wears in Season 2 is beginning to show signs of her later signature look: smooth lines, a plunging neckline, and now the tops of her shoulders are exposed.

By Season 3, Margaery has moved in to King's Landing as Joffrey's new betrothed, and she has also settled into what becomes her signature fashion style: entirely sleeve-less, back-less, and with a plunging neckline. There are still variations within this theme: Margaery actually has three different primary dresses in Season 3. They are not a continued evolution or progression of her style, as she actually alternates back and forth between them throughout the season (it's not as if she just wears the same outfit two days in a row). These include:


 * A - The dress which is not only backless, but which has side cutouts. It has shoulder cuffs, and a floral print pattern across the entire top (made by alternating green with darker green).  The upper and lower halves of the dress only connect in the middle of the front.  The dress isn't entirely backless, only over the small of the back.  Margaery wears this in 3.1 (when Cersei insults her that it is so revealing she must be cold) and in 3.7 when she consoles Sansa in the gardens about being forced to marry Tyrion.
 * B - A dress with prominent gold tracery on the front, in the shape of a vest. It has shoulder cuffs but they do not have tracery on them.  It is also entirely backless (except for the collar piece holding up the front) with a plunging neckline.  Margaery wears this in 3.2 (when she introduces Sansa to Olenna) and in 3.8 (at Sansa and Tyrion's wedding).
 * C - A dress with free-floating shoulder pads which only attach to the rest of the dress by strings. It has a light embroidery pattern, which doesn't extend to the shoulder pieces.  It also has a plunging neckline.  This dress isn't entirely backless, though the back only consists of an X-shaped cross of material wrapping over her back from the front of it.  Margaery wears this in 3.4 (when she visits the Great Sept along with Joffrey, Cersei, and Olenna), 3.5 (when she and Sansa are watching Loras sparring), and 4.1 (when with Olenna looking over jewelry for her wedding).

This doesn't include the traveling gown with a long train that Margaery briefly wears when she visits the orphanage in 3.1, and ruins by walking through a muddy street - in fact, it appears probable that this is actually the same "intermediate stage" dress that Margaery was wearing in the Season 2 finale, and she has simply removed the sleeves by this point (given that they weren't actually attached to the rest of the dress, leaving her shoulders exposed).

The last step in Margaery's stylistic evolution is in the middle of episode 3.4 "And Now His Watch is Ended", when she starts wearing her hair up, whereas she used to let it fall down her front side (thus contrasting even more with Cersei, who wears her hair down). Initially in 3.4, when Margaery is at the Great Sept she wears her dress with free-floating shoulder pieces, and with her hair down. In the scene with Sansa at the end of 3.4, however, she switches back to wearing her dress with gold embroidery, and for the first time is wearing her hair up. Perhaps this was no mere coincidence, as Margaery was meeting with Sansa to offer that she marry her brother Loras to steal her away from Joffrey's control - making this Margaery's first major attempt at going behind Cersei's back. Therefore, this is the first time that Margaery starts wearing her hair in a significantly different way than Cersei's hairstyle.

By episode 4.2, "The Lion and the Rose", Margaery of course switches to her royal wedding dress. After Joffrey's death at the wedding, she switches to dark mourning clothes for the rest of Season 4.

One of the reasons for Margaery's upswept hairstyle is that it simply reveals more of her skin, fitting with her revealing clothing style. This contrasts with how Cersei wears her hair down, again linked with her clothing style: Cersei wears her hair down as another layer of symbolic armor to shield herself with.

Quotes
Clapton: "Margaery Tyrell sweeps into King’s Landing and takes it by storm. As such, her wardrobe is very unique and very much at odds with everything else in King’s Landing [i.e. the Westerlands style, because Cersei used to be the trendsetter]. It’s a very structured look – the new style coming in after the war. For the first time in a long time, Cersei won’t be the trendsetter in the capital. It’s a fun way to reflect their future rivalry."

Clapton on Margaery's funnel-neck dress: "Margaery’s funnel dress was obviously an homage to the wonderful Alexander McQueen’s costume for Bjork. It just felt right that this young ambitious girl would be experimenting with shapes, honing her style skills which we now see her employing to great effect. It was a risk and divided the audience."

Clapton on Margaery's wedding dress: "I'm pretty pleased with Margaery's dress...it took weeks...months even, with all the roses and embroidery, and the bias cut was hard to achieve with the cutaway elements that are essential for her style...I wanted it to be pretty, but on closer inspection, strong and to tell the story of her ambition...the crowns particularly tell this."

The best costumes are complementary, reflecting the personality of the person wearing the garb. There's no better example in Game of Thrones than Margaery Tyrell, a young and beautiful queen-to-be who uses daring fashion to gain more power. "From the very beginning she is brave and experimental in her look, which I wanted. She was a young girl who wanted to be the queen," Clapton explained. Margaery is often spotted in revealing or outré outfits. One episode she wore a funnel dress that Clapton told Vogue was an homage to an Alexander McQueen dress made for Bjork. "It was ridiculous. She's a teenage girl trying things out." But over the seasons she has refined her look as she has learned how to wield her body to her benefit, explains Clapton. "She honed this look that was girlishly sexy because she could see that it was exactly what Cersei couldn't do. The more armor and more regal Cersei got, the more girlish and simple Margaery became--very knowing." http://www.fastcompany.com/3028226/most-creative-people/deciphering-the-hidden-messages-in-game-of-thrones-costumes

http://fashionista.com/2014/04/game-of-thrones-purple-wedding-fashion-recap#awesm=~oCJmZqhmEiSqxA

Sansa Stark
Sansa Stark has one of the most intricate costuming progressions of any character in the series. Sansa and Daenerys are the two characters who shift through the most different clothing styles from different regions. Sansa also knows how to sew well herself, so she can easily make alterations to her own clothing based on her current whims. Sansa shifts in stages from Northern style, to Cersei's Westerlands/King's Landing style, to copying elements from Margaery's Reach-style, to finally making a drastic shift to her own unique but Vale-inspired look at the end of Season 4.

Sansa starts out wearing Northern-style Stark dresses, but then gradually shifts to dress more and more like Cersei, because she is enamored of what she sees as the refinement of the sourthern courts and the royal capital. She even starts wearing her hair up in an elaborate fan-shaped braiding, the way that Cersei does (as well as all of the other women at the royal court, because Cersei sets the styles at court).

After her father is executed at the end of Season 1, Sansa spends some time simply in shock, just putting on the same clothes again day after day without thinking about her appearance, up to the point that Joffrey has her dress roughly stripped off in front of the entire court. For the rest of Season 2, Sansa switches make to more neutral mauve-tones, verging on the warm blues that her mother Catelyn wears, as well as simply wearing her hair down again - indicating that she is no longer actively trying to imitate Cersei's Westerland/King's Landing style.

After Margaery Tyrell shows up at court, Sansa gradually starts emulating several elements from her Reach-style of fashion. Sansa doesn't add cutouts or plunging necklines to her dress the way that Margaery does, but in Season 3 Littlefinger notes in dialogue that Sansa has started to wear her hair up and back, copying Margaery's style.

Sansa switches to inconspicuous traveling clothes after fleeing King's Landing to the Eyrie in Season 4. Finally, at the end of Season 4, she develops her own "Dark Sansa" look by modifying and combining elements from Vale-style, Northern-style, and her own unique additions.

Quotes
Sansa Stark

Sansa Stark has a strong dragonfly motif; she’s worn dragonfly necklaces even *before* she came to King’s Landing, so it isn’t something from Cersei’s look that she is imitating. It *may* be a subtle reference to Duncan Targaryen, “The Prince of Dragonflies”. Duncan was betrothed in a political marriage, but fell in love with Jenny of Oldstones (apparently a lowborn girl); despite being the oldest son and heir, he abdicated to marry Jenny for love. He later died in the Tragedy of Summerhall, alongside his father Aegon V, so his younger brother succeeded Aegon V afterwards. Why not Jonquil and Florian? Florian was a knight but he wasn’t rich, and if anything Jonquil may have been the fair maiden he won. Moreover they’re a legend, while the Prince of Dragonflies lived only forty years before (i.e. Barristan Selmy and Brynden Tully actually lived through this, fought in the War of the Ninepenny Kings right after Duncan’s younger brother succeeded). So Sansa fantasizes that she will be the next Jenny of Oldstones, whisked off by her handsome prince. When Sansa Stark, an aspiring queen, arrives at King's Landing from her more humble origins, for example, she attempts to dress like Cersei Lannister, the Queen Regent of the entire empire, whom she idolized at the time. Cersei embodied everything Sansa thought she wanted in life, so she attempted to copy her in the way she knew how, through clothing. But she didn't quite get it right, and looks like she's playing a child's game of dress-up, drowning in an ill-fitting gown. "A lot of people said her costume doesn't fit. Well, of course it doesn't! She's a young girl trying to copy someone," explained Clapton. "Not everyone wears things brilliantly or beautifully, or has the access to do that. I think it's really important that some things don't fit. Some things are slightly odd." http://www.fastcompany.com/3028226/most-creative-people/deciphering-the-hidden-messages-in-game-of-thrones-costumes

Where a character comes from is indicated through the color and cut of the costume. When we first see Sansa [Sophie Turner], she wears things in a Stark way — very well, but they are slightly clumsy and the cloth is rather homespun. As she comes to King’s Landing, her progression is influenced by Cersei [Lena Headey] and her costumes shift. After Cersei does the awful thing of sanctioning the death of Ned Stark [Sansa’s father], Sansa is stuck — you can see her frozen in time. She’s looking like someone who has just killed her father. And then we will see her progression as she slowly withdraws from the look. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2012/03/creative-minds-game-of-thrones-costume-designer-michele-clapton.html

Even on-screen, they point out that Sansa subtly dresses more like Margaery in Season 3, because she’s still young and impressionable and emulates people she wants to befriend.

On creating the details on Sansa's wedding gown: "Wedding days should be a joyous event for the bride, but, unfortunately, Sansa's being forced into a marriage that she doesn't want, into the Lannister family. For this dress, Michelle wanted it to be a confined, restricted bodice shape with bare, vulnerable arms. She wanted an embroidered band that would wrap around the bodice and tell Sansa's life story. "Obviously we imagined that the wedding dress has been commissioned by Cersei and the Lannisters for Sansa, and so the embroidery would have come from Cersei's mind. We guessed that it wouldn't be romantic or lovely and girly and pretty with dainty flowers, but a real strong message of dominance, saying that we own you now, Sansa. Michele Carragher on embroidery: "For the wedding band, I started at the back of the waist with some Stark direwolves and Tully fish entwined that represent Sansa's parentage. Then, as we move to the side, the Lannister lion is tangling with the direwolf and emerging on top, representing Sansa being seduced and then controlled by members of the house of Lannister. As it moves up the center, there's a central ascending lion that's got a Baratheon-like crown, a nod to Joffrey's parentage. At the back neck, the Lannister lion is stamped onto it, representing how the Lannisters now have total ownership over this girl who was once a Stark." http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2014/04/04/36776/game-of-thrones-the-woman-behind-the-costumes-intr/

It is also noted in dialogue when Sansa's hairstyle shifts. In Season 1, she starts imitating the heavily braided hairstyle that Cersei and her courtiers have at the time. In the middle of Season 3, Sansa starts gravitating to Margaery Tyrell, so she starts wearing her hair in Tyrell-style, swept back away from her face.

At the start of Season 4, Sansa goes back to mauves, a very plain dress. Also go go well with the pale blue necklace she wears at the wedding.

Dark Sansa

Clapton: "David and Dan came to me with the idea of a transformation for Sansa.  They wanted her to be her own woman rather than this victim.  I loved the idea, but I wasn't sure how to go about getting there.  I hate that fantasy thing where things magically appear.  The dress had to be something that could have been adapted from something she already owned, using materials she had access to.  So the shape is not radically different.  If she's dyeing her hair, she can dye some fabric.  It's meant to be as if she is somewhat reborn while mourning for all that she has lost.  We know that she has the skill because we have seen her doing needlework from Season 1, but I liked the idea that after this, she doesn't want to sew anymore.

The metal piece is really a miniature of Arya's sword, Needle, and the idea is that there's a ring that you stitch through and then that's her weapon. I like that she carries it when she descends the stairs; now she's armed and it's a link to her family.

It's so easy to make someone look strong, but if you don't think about the story, it's sort of a wasted gesture. She could have probably looked even more amazing if I had put the reasoned arguments of where it could have come from aside, but ultimately, it makes it a stronger look if it's a more believable transition."

Benioff: "We call it 'Dark Sansa', actually.  When you see her coming down the stairs with her hair dyed dark brown, wearing the black dress.  It was incredibly to see how she's evolved as an actress, and gone from being a kid to being this young, powerful woman.  It's one of the best performances of the season."

Clapton: "As usual in Game of Thrones, we try to make it so that she really could have made this costume herself.  She has this necklace, which in a way is her "Needle" [Arya's sword], and it's a black circle with a chain, and on the end is a very long point.  In my head again, I wanted something that's not just a necklace, something a bit stronger, but she's not the sort of person to have a sword.  It's a little play on what she's known for, and how it shifts into something stronger."