Peak Style

Peaky Blinders style laid bare

There is period drama, and then there is Peaky Blinders.

Since the BBC/Netflix story of the Shelby family smashed through our screens in 2013 — all stylish and stylised, slow-mo 1920s action played out against a 21st century rock soundtrack — it has grown into a worldwide cult among those in the know.

Not least for its sense of fashion and style. So if you haven’t already joined the Peaky Blinders party and want to wear a retro look with grace and glamour, let me be your guide to the signature fashion styles of four key Peaky Blinder women.

Polly Shelby

I have to start with Polly (played by Helen McCrory), or she might kill me. Literally kill me because she wears clothes like so many weapons. A purse dangling from her belt with a glinting steel frame hinting at Lady Macbeth’s dagger. A pistol in her breast pocket and a decorative hatpin stabbed through her coat lapel as a brooch. If there is one word that defines her, it’s dominance.

You sense it in her clothes, the royal purples, the imposing hat she wears like the headdress of a Byzantine Empress, let’s-get-down-to-business skirt suits, and blouses fastened by pussy bows like a power-dressing Margaret Thatcher. Her admirer Aberama Gold (played by Game of Thrones Aidan Gillen) is spot on when he says she looks like royalty and calls her Your Majesty.

Interestingly, Polly’s hard-as-Black-Country-nails surface melts when she has her portrait painted, arraying herself in a dress that is all about softness, femininity, and vulnerability: a fantastically soft and flowing shell pink silk off-the-shoulder floor-length dress, worn with long white gloves, transforming her into a devastating surprise.

Being Polly : smoky eyes, vintage necklace, structured jackets and skirts, imposing colours, crowned with a hat. And on occasion take people’s breath away by wearing something utterly unexpected.

Jessie Eden

While Polly exudes dominance, Jessie (Charlie Murphy) symbolises revolution.

Jessie is based on the fascinating real-life character of Jessie Eden, a 20th century Birmingham trades union leader, who in 1931 led 10,000 women workers out on strike due to working practices which were driving women to the point of collapse.

In Peaky Blinders she is the reason for an iconic scene when the Shelby women decide en masse to pack up their typewriters and business ledgers, and stride off arm-in-arm to the Birmingham Bull Ring to hear Jessie Eden address ‘all oppressed female workers’.

As a working woman, Jessie’s style is less flashy than Polly: to her clothes are the backdrop to more important things. Yet she achieves an understated, subversive classiness through cleverly cut clothes with textured surfaces adding interest and detail. We see her in an asymmetric brown leather coat, a red slub wool jacket with a cloche hat, knubbly-textured knits, pearl and pewter jewelry, blouses skilfully patterned in subtle colours that make the onlooker look and look again.

And of course never skimping on a great haircut — in her case jet black bobbed hair — because let’s face it, you wear a haircut every day of your life.

Being Jessie: Earthy, autumn fashion colours, with emphasis on skilful, intricate patterns, touchable textures, a hint of leather, and glossy, fantastically cut hair.

Ada Thorne

Ada is a Tommy Shelby’s sister, and when we first see her, she is ‘walking out’ with local Communist Freddie Thorne.

Superficially similar to Jessie in politics, the fact that Ada is a Shelby — with the Shelby ill-gotten money to protect her — allows her to be more free-spirited Bohemian and less working girl in her appearance, more about drama and less about subtlety.

The handkerchief hemlines of her loose silky dresses rise inline with 1920s flapper fashion, and she wears striking oranges, apricots, and silvery blues, the design of her clothes mimicking the angles and planes of mid-20th century Russian Constructivist art.

In some ways Ada is 50 years in advance of her time: with her copper eyelids, warm rich brown dress, and scarlet mouth, she could be a Biba girl of the 1970s.

Being Ada: loose dresses, art-inspired designs, eye-catching hues, overlaid with a fabulous wrap coat, faux fur deep revere collar enveloping the neck.

Esme Shelby

Esme was originally a gipsy girl, now married off to one of the Shelby brothers as a way of cementing relations between a powerful Romany clan and the Shelby family’s ‘business’ interests.

She still channels this gipsy vibe. In contrast to the others she wears folk-weave and ethnic patterns, peasant skirts, hoop earrings, a dusky red tunic. She’s a little bit Stevie Nicks, a little bit Kate Bush.

Instead of the classic Louise Brooks bobs or marcel wave hairstyles of the other PB women, she keeps her long dark tousled locks, which she interweaves with brightly coloured scarves.

No doubt about it, Esme has a gipsy heart. She ‘misses the travelling’ and feels ‘like a hen in a coop’ living in one place. Yet although an obvious outsider to begin with, Esme’s individual style is dramatically different from the other Peaky women, revealing a defiant individuality which helps her stand her ground at family councils. This restless wanderer has arrived.

Being Esme: peasant tops and skirts, folk embroidery, dangly earrings, colours like wild flowers and the fruits of the forest — wild rose, berry reds — hair worn long and free, or tucked up like a coronet to frame the face.