'The Buccaneers' costume designer used daring fashion to reflect a clash between new and old money in the Gilded Age

• Apple TV+'s newest period drama "The Buccaneers" premiered on Wednesday.
• The series follows a group of young American women making a splash in London society in the 1870s.
• Insider spoke to the costume designer about the differences between US and UK fashion in the show.

Move aside "Bridgerton," there's a new period drama on the block.

"The Buccaneers," a series about a group of young American women who infiltrate high society in London during the 1870s, premiered on Apple TV+ on Wednesday. As the girls make their mark, a US versus UK culture clash ensues.

Giovanni Lipari, who designed costumes featured in the first episodes of the series, told Insider his main task was figuring out how to echo the cultural differences through the styles worn by aristocratic characters from the US, who are considered new money, and those from the UK, whose historic wealth identifies them as old money.

Using color to differentiate between new and old money

Unlike the British, Americans during the late part of the 19th century showed off their wealth through displays of opulence, Lipari said. So one of the subtle ways he highlighted that on-screen was by dressing their British counterparts in conservative looks with a very different color palette.

"The first thing I felt I had to do was to put the two worlds, the UK worlds and the US, in a color palette," he said. "So there could have been a very easy-to-understand range of who belongs to what."

The British characters, or old-money characters, wear more conservative looks in darker, autumnal colors like "blue" and "eggplant," he said.

By contrast, the American characters, or new-money characters, are generally dressed in outfits that are considered bolder and more daring. This is especially true of the parents, Lipari said, who "wanted to show they made money."

The US characters are also often seen dressed in an array of "summer watercolors," like "peach" and "mint," that symbolize their modernity, Lipari said, adding that "the UK was a little bit more ancient."

Lipari told Insider that he saw the new-money and old-money characters and the fashion they wore as watercolor and oil paintings.

He said Americans are like watercolors, which can be changed and added to easily. Meanwhile, the British characters are more like oil paint, which is "dense" and "no one is going to remove it."

However, Lipari did say there are some British characters in the show that slowly start to experiment with American fashion.

Honoria Marable, a character played by Kate Winslet's daughter Mia Threapleton, is a prime example.

During the season, he said Honoria gradually starts to wear costumes with slightly more daring necklines and eye-catching colors.

"Not with bad intentions," he said, but as if she is slowly learning to push the boundaries of tradition. "Almost trying to see, 'How does this feel like? OK, I'm allowed to do this. Oh, let's do this.'"

Lipari added that the older generations were less inclined to accept changing trends in fashion at the time, which is what he hoped they captured in the show.

"The older women, the older men, would not move because it was like betraying their own culture," Lipari said.