Margaret Atwood explains the real-world sources behind Handmaid’s Tale costumes

While examining archival material at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Margaret Atwood revealed that a newspaper story about state-mandated pregnancies in Romania sparked the novel’s core premise, reflecting her commitment to factual grounding. She traced the inciting moment to the early 1980s, when the election of Ronald Reagan coincided with the political mobilization of the religious right and a surge of women entering the labor market, prompting her to imagine a reversal of that trend.

Orwell’s 1984 left a lasting impression on the young Atwood, further shaping the dystopian vision. The iconic red cloaks and white bonnets were partly inspired by a 1940s Old Dutch cleaning-product box that haunted her as a child, while the blue for the Wives evoked the Virgin Mary and the red for Handmaids recalled Mary Magdalene and the Scarlet Letter. She also noted that many details were borrowed from various historical regimes, and she dedicated the book to Mary Webster, a woman falsely accused of witchcraft in 17th-century New England.