Inside The Artful Dodger 2: How Costume Designer Marion Boyce Uses Colour, Craft and Symbolism to Tell Stories Without Words

How Costume Designer Marion Boyce Uses Colour in The Artful Dodger Season 2

Emmy-nominated costume designer Marion Boyce is no stranger to building worlds through clothing. Best known for her award-winning work on The Dressmaker starring Kate Winslet, Boyce returns to historical storytelling with season two of The Artful Dodger season 2, the Hulu/Disney drama starring Thomas Brodie-Sangster [Love Actually] and Maia Mitchell [The Last Summer].

Joining the series with just eight weeks to design every costume from scratch, Boyce approached the season with forensic precision—anchoring each look in period-correct silhouette while using colour, accessories, and fabric to quietly signal ambition, vanity, power, and social change.

From jewel-toned palettes shaped by Australia’s harsh light to symbolic shoes, hats, and masks that reveal character without dialogue, her costumes operate as a visual language. In this interview, Boyce unpacks how intentional design choices guide the viewer’s eye, differentiate class and climate, and create emotional resonance for a modern audience without ever breaking the rules of history.

With only eight weeks to design every costume from scratch, what was the first visual rule you set for season two of The Artful Dodger?

The first visual rule was a commitment to a colour palette and working out where everybody sat, the colours, and how it was all going to interact together. The light in Australia is really intense and we were shooting a lot outdoors within a parameter of a town which has these really beautiful sandstone walls and sandy streets and not a lot of greenery. I had to find a way that the colours lived within that and didn’t work against what we had visually. Enough colour for it to be punchy. It had to be lower than primary but still within the jewel colours.

Then I had to work out a way of depicting the new part of the township that was new to the show, which was Devil’s Elbow, the poor part of town, which is the work engine of the city. I worked out a way to drench the colours from what you have as the high end of town to the low end of town, drenching all of the life out of it but still having the same colour palette.

Accessories carry clear meaning this season how do details like shoes and hats help you signal character without dialogue?

Oh, it’s essential. The height of a shoe, the way it makes you walk, the swing of a shawl, the complexities of a handbag, all tell you about station in life. They give you a swagger or a flat-footedness. Every single piece is put together with a great deal of thought behind it because it can completely change character. Having the wrong heel can completely change character. The width of a petticoat, the sway of a crinoline, all of those details create the character or help the actors with the character.  

In a lot of pieces that are done, there’s chatter about modernity of a period and how to integrate that within a costume. Belle’s character was always in perpetual motion. She needed a surety of foot, a fleetness of foot. She needed to be able to wear her footwear and not to impede her actions in any way. That’s the only place I had this little bit of modernity that would pop out from underneath her crinoline and she’d have a modern Mary Jane that had studs on it or something similar. So every so often you see this interesting detail coming out from her voluminous skirts.

In large ensemble scenes, colour and silhouette guide the eye how do you decide who should visually stand out, and why?

Finding the intent of the scene is essential. Say for the ball this season, that was Fanny’s ball, so Fanny had to be queen of the ball and Belle had to allow her to be queen of the ball. That’s because Belle had her place in the world and Fanny was fighting more to find her place, she allowed her to shine. Fanny needed to be this shiny, bright, gold creature who was the belle of the ball. She had a ball dress that was lighter and moved in an incredibly elegant way showing her excitement throughout the ball. So that’s a really good example of how you let someone shine and Belle was less excited about the ball but decided to participate and so she was more subdued and more in the background.

How did fabric weight, construction, and practicality help distinguish newly arrived Englishmen from Australians shaped by the climate?

That’s a very good question. It’s slightly complex in some ways but when people arrived from the UK, the difference in temperature was enormous, it’s one extreme to the other. They used to arrive dressed for English winters which are very cold with really beautiful worsted wool and an enormous amount of layers and the Australian heat is quite intense and they didn’t make any consideration for the temperature at all.

The women’s hats had no brims, they were tiny little sort of frivolous pieces on their head with delicious sort of confectionery. The men’s hats weren’t that wide brimmed so there was no concession made for the climate whatsoever and unfortunately if you were of a certain class it had to remain that way. The first generation of Australians adapted to the temperature and they modernized the way they dressed to lifestyle with lighter fabrics, hats with wider brims.

When designing historical costumes, what ultimately takes priority for you: strict period accuracy or emotional impact on a modern audience?

Well I believe that  in order for you to sell a period piece you have to keep to the tenets of the time in that the silhouette and the structure has to be right. If you deviate from that the audience gets confused and it hits the wrong note. On the other hand, if you nail the silhouette and keep it then you can fly in lots of different ways to provide that emotional impact.

You have more ability to move outside using different textures and different fabrics than what would have been around. So if you stick to the silhouette it just gives you more ability to use other pieces and play around.

You can watch Season 2 of The Artful Dodger on February 10, 2026, exclusively on Hulu/Disney+

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