Designing the Doctor
The first series of the revived Doctor Who featured the Ninth Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston, and the Costume Designer for that year was Lucinda Wright.
When it came to planning the second series of the revival, however, it was all change across the board.
Christopher Eccleston left the programme at the end of the thirteenth episode, The Parting of the Ways, and Wright bowed out with him.
With David Tennant swiftly cast as the Tenth Doctor, the search was on for a new costume designer to tackle the challenge of dressing all of time and space.
Enter Louise Page, who would go on to serve as costume designer for the entirety of Tennant’s time on the show.
‘I did this kind of book,’ she explained in Doctor Who: The Inside Story. ‘This kind of school project the night before the interview. It was full of fabric samples, textures, images, and words- words like ‘sexy’ and ‘eccentric’.’
As part of this ‘school project’, Page included a cover sheet, outlining what she thought was important about the costume for the new Doctor;
There have been 9 Dr. Who’s.
All have a look unique and identifiable only to them based around one outfit, usually with an accessory of some sort which identifies him, be it a scarf, tie, hat, etc.
Most had a costume which had a period element to them. Ie; Because the Doctor is the Time Lord, it seems almost that each one was influenced in their choice of clothing by another period in time, from Victorian to 1920's.
Dr №9 (Christopher Eccleston) has a timeless contemporary, tough look which could be placed anytime in the last 30 years, with his leather jacket etc.
The new 10th Doctor I believe needs to have a younger funkier slightly more flamboyant look to his clothes with an injection of colour, as opposed to black, however subtle to bring the change.
David Tennant is younger than previous Doctors. It would be great to achieve a look that showed a bit of eccentricity & character, that would appeal to girls as someone sexy & quirky & to boys as someone funky/edgy/street but with a twist. He still needs to fit into Rose’s world but with definite unique style all of his own and show his character.
It is vital that the outfit is “part of him”. It should look lived in, & belong to him. His clothes are an extension of him.
‘I didn’t know how far to go. I knew it was going to be David Tennant, and that I thought he should be sexy and funky and contemporary. Quirky and slightly eccentric. I’d seen David doing Casanova, and I felt that perhaps that would be the way to go.’
The school project did the trick, and Page was brought into the team to begin work on the 2005 Christmas Special, and the complete second series of the programme to follow. Suddenly, dressing the Tenth Doctor wasn’t just a theory, but a pressing reality.
When Page met with Tennant a few weeks later, she discovered that he already had his own thoughts about the kind of costume he wanted to wear. ‘It would be wrong to go back to the frock coats and Victoriana of the classic series,’ Tennant recalled in 2007. ‘Chris had done something almost aggressively modern, which I think worked brilliantly to bring the show back. It still had to be something of now, but different from the leather jacket and jeans because that had been done.’
‘We also had to think about what I’d actually like to wear every day, and the practical considerations; it’s got to be comfortable, and it’s got to be reasonable to look at. I don’t think you want an audience asking “what on earth is he wearing?” So we wanted something… fashionable would be the wrong word, but at least stylish, and we just tried to balance all those elements and also look for something that’s a bit special, without being self-consciously quirky or gimmicky.’
Tennant had already started to consider that a suit might be the way to go, and let Louise Page know that shades of brown suited his complection. ‘We went to Angels, a big costume supply house,’ Page explains, ‘and we had about three hours of trying on 1930s-style suits and coats, just to find the right silhouette.’ Eventually, through a combination of trying on the vintage suits alongside more modern ones from high street shops, it was decided that the narrower, slim-fitting style suited Tennant best.
‘In the end, the brown suit was made from a pair of trousers,’ Page told Doctor Who Magazine in 2010. ‘I’d only bought these trousers to see if David liked the shape, but when he put them on, he said “Why can’t we make the whole suit out of this?” I said “well, it’s thin cotton, not suit fabric. Besides, I can’t get hold of it!” I looked everywhere to find something similar — a brown with a blue stripe — but drew a blank.’
‘Purely as an experiment, I thought I’d see if I could make the jacket out of his trousers. They were on sale, so I bought a load, we opened up the seams, took them apart, and made a suit. Everybody thought I was mad! David is skinny, but I was buying size 36", 38" trousers to get enough fabric. We needed something like five pairs of trousers for each jacket.’
It was quite an undertaking to create enough jackets to be used in the rigours of televison production. ‘I just bought every pair I could find and unstitched them. Just over thirty pairs, all unstitched by hand. We also had to save some of the trousers for David to wear, plus we needed pairs for the stuntmen, and a couple of pairs that were up a size, for David to wear with padding.’
Even early on, Page admitted that this system wouldn’t last forever. Speaking in mid-2006, she explained ‘We may need to come up with some alternative idea for Series Three because David has worn them all out — it didn’t take a lot to wreck them, because they’re only thin cotton.’
One of the other key aspects of the costume was the coat, and this was something that Tennant had been keen on from the very begining. Indeed, he later joked that his response to be offered the part in Doctor Who was to ask ‘Can I wear a long coat?’
Page’s original design for the coat was far more theatrical than the finished piece, featuring large cuffs and wider lapels, but the feedback from above was that it should be stripped right back and simplified. ‘I was worried that [David] would look like something out of Duran Duran if we carried on trimming the bulk out of the coat. The way they were going, David was going to end up looking like a long pencil. Then Russell said, “I love that idea! A long pencil sounds marvellous!”
At around the same stage, producer Phil Collinson suggested that the coat was too long, and Page removed five inches from the bottom, but it was decided that the original length looked better after all, so the finished version returned to the longer appearance.
One thing that Davies was keen to keep an eye on was how often Tennant wore the coat. ‘I try to make them take the coat off as much as I can,’ he told Doctor Who: The Inside Story in 2006, ‘because we want to treat it as a real coat. When you go indoors, you take your coat off, so should the Doctor. I started putting that in scripts: “He takes his coat off.” No one wears an overcoat that much.’
The original plan, part of Tennant’s desire to look a little scruffy in his suit, was to eschew the traditional shirt and tie that would usually be worn and instead work on building up layers underneath with various t-shirts. This intention lasted right the way through to the final costume fitting, when Tennant asked to try a tie with the outfit, and loved the look. ‘David put this tie on, and leapt up and down in the fitting room and said “Oh my God, I’m the Doctor!” and that was it. Costume decided in five seconds.’
Perhaps the easiest part of the costume to lock down was the Doctor’s shoes. While Page had been envisioning something based on the style of ornate Japanese army boots, Tennant had requested that he be allowed to wear his own shoes — a pair of battered cream Converse Hi-Tops.
‘We did use his own shoes for The Christmas Invasion, and then I bought another five identical pairs. We used his own initially because they were already very broken down, very distressed, ripped and torn. David liked the idea that the Doctor’s shoes were worn in. He didn’t want him being this neat perfect character.’
There was one final aspect of the costume which Tennant was keen to have as a regular fixture. ‘The glasses were one of those things that just kind of arose. I was thinking about having them on all the time, but that got a bit of resistance from some people, and maybe they were right; I don’t know. I quite like the idea of there being a speccy hero; I mean it certainly hasn’t done Harry Potter any harm!’
‘The producers weren’t that keen, but David wanted to try them. We tried a load of vintage glasses that happened to be available on the day [of Tennant’s final fitting],’ Page explained in a question and answer session for Steve Ricks’ YouTube channel. ‘There was a pair that he quite liked the look of, and we agreed to take them with us and see what happened. I think everyone was a bit ambivalent to say the least.’
In the end it was agreed that the glasses would become an occasional part of the costume, which the Doctor would put on for certain scenes but not wear as a regular item. The glasses chosen by Tennant for the Doctor’s costume were a handmade vintage pair designed by French fashion house Alain Mikli International.
‘There’s only one pair of them, which caused a bit of a problem because later on — when you start using these glasses a lot — it becomes a worry that they’re either going to get broken or smashed. I would never normally not have a double of a principal accessory.’
Indeed, Page was so concerned about the fragility of the glasses that she contacted Alain Mikli in an attempt to source replacements, but this search proved fruitless.
‘I finally one day, just by chance, happened to be in an opticians and I found a pair of frames that were fairly similar. They were Alain Mikli, and I bought them, and those were our “back-up pair”, which actually if you put the two together would not match. But they were there in case we ever had disaster.’
This ‘back-up pair’ only made a single appearance on screen. The script for Planet of the Dead featured the Doctor using the Sonic Screwdriver to turn his regular glasses into sunglasses, and rather than risk damaging the original accessory, Page purchased a duplicate of the back-up and fitted it with shades. To ensure the pairs matched, the regular back-ups stood in as the Doctor’s glasses early in the episode.
After weeks of planning, creating and refining, the Tenth Doctor’s costume was finalised, and ready for the world. ‘I was worried about a suit,’ admitted Davies in 2006. ‘I thought it might look a bit “posh”. But it’s beautiful. So creased, and how thin is it? I love it when David takes the overcoat off and reveals he’s a little streak of nothing. That’s brilliant. That’s such a different image, and it gives him such an energy.’
‘It’s a bit looser, a bit freer. It’s a little bit punk, a bit scruffy, a bit student-y, even a bit schoolboy-ish, and yet with the smartness of a suit thrown in.’
Introducing the Tenth Dr Who
The first time Tennant was able to see the finished costume all put together was Monday July 25th 2005 — the day he began filming on The Christmas Invasion. A photoshoot was arranged featuring Tennant and companion Billie Piper alongside the TARDIS prop, to reveal the Tenth Doctor’s costume to the press before it was used for filming later in the week.
During this photoshoot, Tennant was also presented with the Sonic Screwdriver for the first time, although this didn’t end up being used in the photographs. Tennant recorded his happiness with the finished costume as part of his video diary for the day.
A number of pictures from the photoshoot were released to the press that afternoon, and several newspapers featured articles on Tuesday 26th showcasing the Doctor’s new costume. The Times led with ‘Who’s Wearing Geek Chic?’, while The Daily Star went simply with ‘Doctor New’. A few days later, The Sun followed up with the headline ‘I want to be Doctor Nude!’, in which Tennant joked about not having a new costume at all.
All of these articles featured the same quote from Tennant discussing his new outfit; ‘I think we’ve come up with something distinctive that’s both timeless and modern, with a bit of geek chic and of course a dash of Time Lord. Most importantly, Billie tells me she likes it. And after all, she’s the one who has to see me in it for the next nine months!’
While the majority of new outlets had images featuring the complete costume, Doctor Who Magazine were given some exclusives, as editor Clayton Hickman explained in his editorial to Issue 360; ‘Hands up who loves Doctor Who’s new costume! Yep, just as I thought. Lovely, isn’t it? And thanks to the gorgeous people at BBC Picture Publicity, you can examine the pinstripe more fully with our exclusive coatless shots of the Tenth Doctor and Rose! Yes, nobody else has these! It’s like being The Sun!’
The reaction to the costume in Doctor Who Magazine’s letters pages was largely positive. ‘That costume is soooo Doctor Who — the best since Tom Baker!’, ‘The geek-chic costume is brilliant!’, and ‘Now I’ve seen it, I couldn’t imagine him wearing any other outfit’ being among the comments from readers.
Expanding the Wardrobe
Tennant wore his brown suit in every episode of the 2006 Doctor Who series, and by the end of production in late spring, the costumes were causing something of a headache for Louise Page.
‘I bought a load more trousers, thinking I’d have enough spare,’ she recalled for Doctor Who Magazine in 2010. ‘But I hadn’t realised quite what a bashing they’d take. David dashed about, slid on the floor, knelt in them… and he went through so many pairs. They went through rain, and snow, and the drycleaners. They were so easy to wreck.’
Elements of the costume were patched-up or retired where necessary, but all the same, thoughts turned towards the future, and how much longer the costume would remain viable.
‘It got to a point, after his first series, where we were getting quite worried. We thought “these suits won’t hold out forever”. David liked the idea of having another suit — he’d got bored of wearing a brown suit the whole time — and he said “could it be the same, but different?”’
‘I found a fabric — a light blue shirting, with a bright red stripe through it — which I dyed into all these different shades, these inky blues, and I sent off some samples to David. I thought “it’s the same but different”. It was almost a reverse of the brown suit.’
In putting together this blog, I spoke to Louise Page about the brown suit, and she told me that they tried ‘about ten different colour variations of the shade before picking the final one’.
‘I liked it, and Russell liked it, and Julie [Gardner] liked it, but David didn’t. He said “I think it’s trying to be too clever.” Luckily, he came round.
‘Weirdly, women tend to prefer the blue suit to the brown. But a lot of kids have come up to me very angry that I’d done a blue suit. I had one kid who shouted at me! He said he hated the blue suit, and it wasn’t the Doctor.’
‘I think David looks dashing in both.’
David tried on the completed blue costume for the first time on August 2nd 2006, during production of The Runaway Bride, and later that day spoke to Doctor Who Magazine about his new look. ‘I was always quite keen that, if I did a second year, I’d have a different suit. We’re not dumping the old one; we’re just adding a new one to the mix.’
‘I’ve always had a bit of a thing that whatever the Doctor wears should give him a distinctive look, and a silhouette that’s recognisable, but should be clothes rather than a costume. Just so that it doesn’t look like he puts the same clothes on every day!’
‘My initial thought,’ he admitted, ‘was that the new suit should be really different. Louise Page was sent off to find something, none of us really knowing what we were asking her to find, and she came back with a material that’s almost a negative of the brown suit. At first, I was a bit “Oh, no, that’s not the point! It’s got to be different, but still the same”… which is, of course, a pointless and useless note!’
‘Russell was on my side, but we were both wrong and Louise was right. She talked us all round. The blue suit is different — there’s something fresh about it — but it’s still the same basic image.’
From the start of Doctor Who’s third series, the brown and blue suits were used interchangeably through until The Waters of Mars, when the blue suit made it’s final — to date — appearance.
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