Gentleman Jack

The most interesting aspect of the fashion in the BBC series Gentleman Jack, which just aired its second season on HBO, is the style choices made by costume designer Tom Pye for actress Suranne Jones, playing 19th-century lesbian landowner Anne Lister, master of Shibden Hall in Halifax, West Yorkshire. Pye, who has also designed costumes for a TV movie also created by Sally Wainwright, To Walk Invisible (2016) about the Brontë sisters, has been inventive in showing class, power and trends of the times.

Gentleman Jack, the British series created by Sally Wainwright, is about the true-life story of Anne Lister (Suranne Jones), born in 1791, a landowner and entrepreneur in Halifax, West Yorkshire. Her historic home, Shibden Hall, is still standing and her extensive diaries, deciphered by her relative John Lister decades after her death, but kept hidden, because a portion of them, written in a secret code, described intimate details of her numerous lesbian relationships, were finally published in two volumes in 1988 and 1992.