The starting point of every job for costume designer Nina Ayres is exhaustive research, which includes collecting key details from websites, museums and experts on the given era. But securing fashion authenticity was unexpectedly challenging on the MGM+ and BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.
“It was such a volatile time — especially in France, where a lot was destroyed,” Ayres says of the setting for the literary classic, which unfolds in Paris and London in the late 18th century. “The information you’re getting — it’s difficult to know whether it’s true or not. We’re looking at a very deprived time in France; people are starving. So, I can look at fashion [illustrations] until I’m blue in the face, but that’s not the reality of what was happening on the streets of Paris.”
Her imagination took flight after she pored over Dickens’s novel and Daniel West’s scripts, then dove headfirst into the silhouettes, fabrics and colors worn by the rich and especially the very poor. “Garments would be remodeled,” she says. “There was a lot of patchworking together of old fabrics, so a tiny scrap of a ballgown worn in Versailles would end its life patched into a bag.”
She started displaying personal style at age 8 in her native England, when her grandmother sat her down in front of a sewing machine and Ayres began making her own school outfits. “I’m sure I was more of an oddity than a fashion plate,” says Ayres, whose design career segued from theater to television 18 years ago. The Emmy on the shelf in her East Sussex front room is for Game of Thrones. She accepted the award in 2014 in a bright pink dress and an old pair of shoes bought on Portobello Road when she was 17.
“[The win] was a big surprise,” says Ayres, who flew to the ceremony from Thrones’s Croatia set, where she was an assistant costume designer. “It was fabulous.” Besides Two Cities, the department-head entries on her résumé now include The Last Kingdom and Carnival Row and co-costume designer on Outlander.
Ayres has filled the four-part limited series with her distinctive attention to detail, including such notes as how neckwear telegraphs personality. Sydney Carton, star Kit Harington’s brainy sot of a barrister, for example, always wears his scarf askew. “This was a time when society expected your neck to be covered,” Ayres explains. “The fact that he constantly wears it undone is saying that he doesn’t follow societal norms.” But it’s the elegant ensembles worn by Lucie Manette (Mirren Mack), the story’s beating heart, that showcase Ayres’s gift for aesthetics.
“Mirren wanted to take all of her costumes home,” Ayres says. “She’d be walking around the streets of East London right now in them if she had her way.”
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, issue #11, 2026, under the title "Revolutionary Design."
