Embroidering “Game of Thrones”

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Michele Carragher incorporates lace, cording, ribbon, beads, sequins, and even diamonds in her work for “Game of Thrones.” Its texture is so high and varied that it registers onscreen.Photograph by Helen Sloan courtesy of HBO

As lurid, blood-soaked fantasies go, HBO’s “Game of Thrones” is surprisingly stylish. Its pre-modern, tribal protagonists inhabit a world with a fully realized aesthetic, created, in part, by their clothing. Last season, when Cersei seized power, she traded her red-and-gold gowns with impossible sleeves for a fitted black carapace with silver-beaded shoulder sigils. Daenerys Targaryen began the series as a pawn in transparent slips—but later, as her dragons grew, she put on scaly tunics, and her clothes now feature the deep earth tones of well-crisped flesh, puckered by carbon-black stitches. The extreme specificity of these exquisite costumes grounds the otherwise fantastical show.

Michele Carragher, the principal embroiderer for “Game of Thrones,” embellished both Cersei’s and Daenerys’s costumes; her work has also been worn by the characters Sansa Stark, Margaery Tyrell, Ellaria Sand, Tywin Lannister, and Tommen Baratheon, among others. Carragher grew up on in a landscape worthy of the show—the great chalk downs of the Isle of Wight. At an old stone stable in Godshill, she learned to jump and trained in dressage. In a picture taken in the mid-eighties, when she was eighteen, she sits on a sturdy-faced chestnut in a fenced-in pasture. Her posture is easy and her smile wry, but her hands are taut, their fingers flexed against the reins. When she embroiders, Carragher has a preternatural control of her materials’ tension; unlike most embroiderers, she can work directly on a finished garment. Her work incorporates lace, cording, ribbon, beads, sequins, and even diamonds, and has a texture so high and varied that it registers onscreen. Up close, it resembles jewelry.

Carragher isn’t a habitual reader or watcher of fantasy. She follows “Game of Thrones” mostly for work. Yet her intricate designs evoke the world of the show at a level of detail most viewers will never notice. The heavily beaded bands that crossed the chest of Sansa Stark’s first wedding dress, for example, told the story of Houses Tully and Stark joining with House Lannister. Carragher used ribbon embroidery to decorate the Dornish ladies’ bright organza dresses with gardens of blossoms and buds; to the beautiful but deadly Sand Snakes—Oberyn Martell’s crack team of assassin daughters—she added poisonous blooms, including hemlock and angel’s trumpet.

Carragher resembles a benevolent descendent of the show’s red witch, Melisandre: she is tall, with flame-colored, nearly waist-length hair and blue-green eyes. When I met her this spring, in London, she was dressed in jeans, plain flats, and a patterned indigo cardigan; she is quiet and contained, with the careful and deliberate movements common to people who spend time around large and unpredictable animals. She trained as a fashion designer and has worked in costuming since college—she tagged along to a set with a friend and stayed to help out; she also works as a textile conservator, which has given her an appreciation for the old and imperfect. “When there’s a bad darn in the wrong-color thread, I actually quite like it—it’s like someone’s added to it over the years,” she said, over avocado toast and cardamom buns at a café in Victoria Park. Carragher had worked with Michelle Clapton, the head costume designer for “Game of Thrones,” on several smaller TV projects; her embroidery fit right in on a show set in a medieval world. For the pilot, Carragher made prominent embroidered collars for the Stark women. (When the show got picked up, she had to make three for Catelyn, since one had to be dipped in blood.) “They had to reflect their personalities and abilities, because in the script they made the collars themselves,” Carragher said. At the word “made,” she mimed the action of sewing, her long hands and arms adopting the knit-together quality of a dancer’s.

Embroidery is an ancient art: in his “Natural History,” Pliny reports Homeric references to “pictae vestes,” or “clothing with pictures.” The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidery; in medieval England and France, kings and queens gave embroidered art works as expensive diplomatic gifts. In 1366, Edward III paid the equivalent of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a set of twenty matching embroidered pieces to clothe a priest and decorate a chapel. Embroidery was a professional art that could make its practitioners rich and famous. It became a hobby only in the seventeenth century, with the invention of steel needles, which didn’t need to be constantly straightened and sharpened; this democratized embroidery, turning it into a household craft and a ladies’ “accomplishment.”

Textiles have always been a largely female art form, and fabric degrades quickly; as a result, much or even most of the art that women have ever produced has been lost. Today, we can talk about Giotto’s early style and Palladio’s later villas, but we know almost nothing about the banner created by Mabel of Bury St. Edmonds, a thirteenth-century English embroiderer whom King Henry honored with the gift of a fur robe. Like drawing, embroidery is inseparable from its maker’s hand, and embroiderers have recognizable styles: Carragher’s lines tend to be flowing and organic, with a loose, gestural vitality, and she is fascinated by plants and insects. “Growing up on the Isle of Wight, I was always collecting dead butterflies and things off the ground,” she told me. “With Cersei over the years, with her various lion embroideries, I’ve thought, Right, I’m going to pick a sculpture and copy it exactly—but when I start to stitch it winds up drifting back into my world.” The embroidery she creates for her independent art projects and for other films and television shows—“The Crown,” “Assassin’s Creed,” “Peaky Blinders,” Werner Herzog’s “Queen of the Desert”—is similarly three-dimensional and naturalistic.

For “Game of Thrones,” Carragher often spends as long thinking about a piece as she does making it. First, she confers with Clapton about each character’s narrative arc and the costumes Clapton has designed for them. Then Carragher does historical research in museums near her home, in East London. After a month of planning, she ships her materials to the show’s Belfast production studios, where she works six days a week, twelve hours a day, embellishing a season’s worth of costumes. Carragher spent two weeks covering Cersei’s blue kimono in flying birds. Testing materials and stitches for Daenerys’s signature smocking, which she calls “dragonscale,” took a week.

In a loud sandwich shop in Marylebone, Carragher walked me through a sample she had made for one of Sansa’s Season 6 costumes. She handed me a piece of fabric attached to a board, perhaps a foot long, on which a snarling wolf’s embroidered profile dissolved into a lyrical floral bower. Sansa wears the piece in the middle of her chest, as a kind of seal, after she rejoins her brother Jon at the Wall. “It’s, ‘I’m a Stark, taking control,’ ” Carragher said, holding an open hand in front of her chest. The direwolf is the Stark sigil, but Carragher’s design also refers to Sansa’s mother, a Tully of Riverrun. The tufts of the wolf’s fur fall in a scale-like pattern that is outlined in silver thread, evoking House Tully’s fish sigil; its neck terminates in a mass of dark-gray mother-of-pearl beads. “We always try to use shells and pearls within her embroidery, because it references the water,” Carragher said. Minute, reflective cut-steel beads, used to make purses in the early twentieth century, pick out the wolf’s glinting teeth. (The beads are no longer made, but Carragher found a supplier on Etsy.)

Near Stansted airport, just outside London, Carragher takes a weekly dressage lesson. The arena is surrounded by radiant green fields and white clapboard farmhouses which are often used as wedding venues. One afternoon earlier this summer, I watched as she gently goaded her mount to switch gaits, prance diagonally, and tuck his chin up. Dressage is a delicate dance, and Carragher has a hard time keeping her hands quiet; the sensitive horse responded to even the tiniest shifts of her wrist.

Later, in her car, Carragher showed me some sculptural bugs like the ones she had made for the show’s people of Qarth. About two inches long, they had layered, beaded bodies and wings of silk ribbon, and their iridescent, wire-wrapped legs quivered when they moved. With their feather antennae and veins of golden thread, the bugs had each taken about five hours to make. “I put the ribbon over the top because the beading was a bit too bright,” Carragher explained, smiling. “They are sort of quite fun things to do—sort of the essence of being a bug.” The beetle I held evoked “Game of Thrones,” and the show’s fantasy world felt suddenly present in the tiny car. But it was also, obviously, a Carragher: at home in Qarth, but born on the Isle of Wight.