24 'Outlander' Costume Secrets You Definitely Never Noticed

"They're characters we are so familiar with. At this point, we know they're not hiding, they're not disguising themselves. They're not in France pretending to be aristocrats. They are truly themselves in a world they're creating. That was key to me in all of their costumes this season."

"You could change out the fabrics and you'd be back in Scotland. We did want to hit the new world, so we started bringing in patterns and flowers. I remember Cait at one point said to me, 'This is feeling a little Holly Hobbie." I'm like, "Yes, that's the whole point!' She said she didn't feel like it was Claire. Then we found this fabric, which was a little more sophisticated, that we loved."

"This was a scrap of linen I had sitting on my desk for two years that was white with fuchsia and lime green patches woven into it. It was hideous. I would look at it and go, 'Why would you ever, ever do this? What could this possibly be?' When we started thinking about how people used fabric, how they reused things, darned things, repaired things, and why patchwork was such an important factor in the 18th century, I looked at it and went, 'This is patchwork.' We dyed it with this murky brown color, and it's remarkable. Instead of putting her in 'patchwork,' we put her in an impression of it. It evokes the feeling. It feels warm and grounding, and yet, it's not identifiable. I love when something creates a feeling but you can't necessarily lock in an identity."

"Ian arrives in Fraser's Ridge with three pairs of breeches and then ends up with two, because Claire takes one. She takes his shirt too."

"Clothing was treasured and it was worth a whole lot of money [back then]. This is the black linen suit Jamie wears at Versailles [in Season 2]. One of the things I read early on in my research was that every man in the 18th century who was middle class or wealthy would have had a black suit. But you can't find them; they're not in museums because people wore them out. This is the suit he would have held onto—the most practical garment he had. It makes sense that we keep seeing it moving through the show; he's not prancing around the print shop wearing some embroidered silk. You can see the repair work we've done on it. [For the later part of Season 3], I was like, 'Can we see some sailors carrying trunks onto the ship in the background of that scene?' This [suit] came on the ship—and then it washed up on shore [after the shipwreck]."

"If you look really carefully [in Episode 4], you will see a large blanket on their bed in the lean-to, which we then cut up and made into scarves. They weren't prepared for the winter, and they had to figure out how the hell to keep warm, so a blanket was up for grabs. And that's when we start seeing the fur appear, because obviously they're hunting. You're not going to throw that fur out. You're going to use it to be warm."

"For Brianna, I've always dressed her in my clothes. It said to myself, 'You don't need to do anything other than just remember everything you wore.' I had this jacket; I remember when I got it, I was salivating, I could feel it in my stomach: 'I have to have that jacket.' I went insane with her wardrobe. She has about 50 of the most unbelievable 1970s looks, and we see two outfits on the show. I was screaming at Ron, 'No, you have to write more scenes in the '70s! I have all these great clothes for her!'"

"I found the Guatemalan bag on Etsy and I almost had a heart attack. This is such a key signature piece, and I wanted that to travel back into the 18th century. She wears it all the way through the show, and the idea behind it is you carry pieces of yourself [wherever you go]. The Guatemalan bag was a moment in fashion, when fashion moved out of the mod, London influence. Things started getting more political. It was like anti-fashion, which of course was just as fashion as any other fashion."

"[In Book 3] Claire was written wearing the Jessica McClintock Gunne Sax [a mid-20th century clothing line inspired by the Medieval and Renaissance periods]. Well, why would she do that? She knew what she was in for. Why in her right mind would she put on some kind of cotton pseudo-peasant medieval gown? She wouldn't—she knows that she would die. She would freeze to death or be thrown in prison again. I couldn't do it on her, but I know that in the book, it's a moment, like the red dress [in Season 2], and people are furious that they're not seeing it. [So] Brianna does it. She doesn't know better, she just goes to her closet and goes, 'This looks like it's period,' whatever that means when you're 19 and an idiot. 'This could be Renaissance, isn't the 18th century the Renaissance? This looks like something people wore in the past'—the past meaning a few hundred thousand years of history. So she wears the dress with her Frye boots, her Guatemalan bag, and a cape because hooded capes were huge in 1970. It was around the same time that this period-wear had become fashionable. Brianna had one in her closet. [In the book] she wears boys clothes, but I had to fight tooth and nail on that one, because [she would've been] murdered, thrown in prison! A girl walking down the street in the 18th century wearing men's clothes? No! This can almost pass."

"Jocasta is the old world. She could be in Scotland. She could be in Paris. She could be in London. She could be in Edinburgh. She represents the wealthy plantation owners who never saw themselves as Americans, but as transplanted Europeans who just happen to live somewhere else. It's colonialism. I don't think we ever used a fabric this traditional when we were in Europe [on the show]. It's a silk wool brocade, it's very British and very solid. It's the dress of a matriarch. This is not a woman to be taken lightly. "

"With Claire and Brianna and Geillis, we tried to find ways they would hold onto their identity through their clothing—our research showed that's what any people do. It was no different for the slaves. You could draw direct lines in the research to what they did in Africa and then what they [did in the States]. It was a fine line they had to dance, because one of the key points about genocide is it's cultural genocide too—[the oppressors] remove anything that connects [the oppressed group] to the old place because that might represent too much independence. It was important for us to honor and respect each person's story and each costume story. We brought in the indigos and the little bits of batik, just a little bit of pattern, and how the clothes are worn."

"Murtagh we kept as Scottish as we possibly could. You're leaving Europe, you're forging your way through the wilderness, you don't have to pay attention to the restraints and the restrictions in the same way you did [in the past]. There had to be a certain freedom of shrugging off all those traditions."

"This is the outfit he had made to go out into the frontier; a wealthy man is going to make his costume to go out. But he's also a soldier. He's nobody's pushover. [For the suit] this is another fabric I had lying around for a long time. It's a waxed linen but it looks and feels like denim. He's very European in all of this, but the idea that he's wearing a denim suit felt like a precursor to American denim. [And] we bought a lot of vintage fur coats. That's a vintage beaver coat that we cut up and lined."