Andrea Galer

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Andrea Galer is a British costume designer for film and television who has worked since 1973. She started on the thriller Don’t Look Now and, after a ten-year break to raise children, returned to design in the mid-1980s. She is best known for period costumes, including many Jane Austen adaptations and other 19th‑century stories such as Firelight, The Way We Live Now, and Eroica.

Galer won a BAFTA for Best Costume Design for Bleak House in 2005 and an Emmy in 2006 for Jane Eyre. She is famous for using tweed fabrics, notably a Harris Tweed coat in Withnail and I. The coat became iconic and inspired charity auctions and replicas sold on her site.

Her design process involves thorough research—reading, visiting galleries, and making mood boards. In Mansfield Park, she dressed Fanny Price in practical, darker outfits to contrast with her cousins, while for Jane Eyre she studied portraits of Charlotte Brontë to guide a grey silk dress and a red tie for the heroine. She also works as a fashion designer, with a style rooted in corsetry and traditional tailoring.

In 2005 she founded the Power of Hands Foundation to support lace workers in Sri Lanka after the tsunami, using lace in productions like Jane Eyre and Miss Austen Regrets. She has spoken out about budget cuts in costume design. In the early 2010s she helped design a wax figure of Jane Austen with the Jane Austen Centre, which went on display in Bath in 2014.