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Season 2 of Outlander sees our time-traveling heroes—Claire and Jamie Fraser (Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan)—leave the muddy fields of Scotland for the court of King Louis XV (Lionel Lingelser) in the mirrored halls of Versailles. Louis makes quite the splashy entrance in Episode 2, with mistress Madame Nesle de la Tourelle (Kimberly Smart) on his arm. Loyal as ever to the hugely popular Diana Gabaldon books, the Starz series dressed Nesle in a daring, breast-baring gown with ornate “diamond-encrusted swans” piercing her nipples. On the page, the dress sends the bold and heroic Claire “red-faced and coughing” from the room, “hacking politely into a handkerchief” as she goes. The effect is no less staggering on-screen. Vanityfair.com spoke with Outlander costume designer Terry Dresbach about the bold creation that goes where even Game of Thrones wouldn’t.

VF.com: So you’re calling this “the swan dress.” Do you—

Terry Dresbach: No, we call it “the nipple dress.” That’s what we call it in-house.

So how did you settle on the safe-for-work name of swan dress?

Because in the book it’s described as her nipples are pierced with swan jewelry. So that’s what that’s about.

When Diana Gabaldon included this look in the novel, did she draw on historical precedent?

She did. I want to kill her for it. It’s all wonderful on the written page, but when you have to try to figure out how you’re going to pull that off, it’s a whole different ball game. Body piercing goes back to the Egyptians, it’s nothing new. We think we’re bold, we think we push the envelope, but we have nothing on history. There’s a lot of exposure of body parts throughout fashion since the beginning of time.

It was hard to find reference material for it, and we weren’t able to locate a lot of paintings where women at that time had pierced nipples, so we sort of leapt and went with the books and tried to get as close to it as we could creating it ourselves. It was difficult. There’s no jewelry store that sells it. Those nipple rings were created on my kitchen table out of Fimo clay. There were many, many attempts to make swans that would completely do what they needed to do. It’s one of the most interesting jobs I’ve had in my career.

Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton told me years ago that she “designed a whole range of dresses that revealed one breast” for Season 2, based on the ones described in the Daenerys section of the books. They decided not to use them. How do you feel about going where Game of Thrones didn’t dare to?

I didn’t know that about them! It’s very tricky—I understand that completely. They also dealt with that very recently on Wolf Hall, with the codpieces. It’s one of those things where the audience stops listening to the words coming out of the actor’s mouth. They are now staring at whatever that accurate costume piece has done. At the end of the day as costume designers, our job is to serve the script. You can’t have things that make the audience stop paying attention. So a bared breast, or two bared breasts, or if everyone on the show had pierced nipples, no one would ever know what happens from season to season.

What does it say that this character is the only one in the room to sport this look?