PRAIRIE POWER DRESSING: How The Abandons Makes Frontier Fashion a Weapon
Forget everything you thought you knew about westerns. The Abandons, Kurt Sutter’s audacious eight-episode venture, gallops onto screens with a revolutionary proposition: what happens when the gunfighters wearing the metaphorical pants are actually wearing corsets? Set in Angel’s Ridge, Washington Territory, 1854, this isn’t your grandfather’s frontier tale—though it certainly borrows his sepia-toned Instagram filter.
Enter Gillian Anderson, channeling full ice-queen magnificence despite the omnipresent dust, as Constance Van Ness, owner of the local silver mine and purveyor of calculated menace. Anderson’s sartorial presence alone—imagine bustles meeting business mogul energy—transforms the traditional western aesthetic into something deliciously subversive. This is a woman who rides into town like she owns it, because darling, she literally does.
Opposing her in this high-stakes territorial chess match is Lena Headey’s Fiona Nolan, a devout Irish Catholic matriarch presiding over Jasper Hollow with her assembled patchwork family of misfit orphans. The costume implications alone are extraordinary: think prairie-modest meets protective-armor dressing, where every layer of fabric represents another barrier against Van Ness’s tyrannical ambitions. Headey brings that signature intensity—honed through years of Game of Thrones‘ power costuming—to a role that demands both maternal softness and steely resolve.
The conflict? Constance’s land contains silver, and she wants Jasper Hollow’s territory to satisfy her investors. After her latest town visit, masked men attempt to drive Fiona’s cattle off a cliff—because apparently, nineteenth-century corporate takeovers involved significantly more livestock endangerment than today’s boardroom battles. “Her tyranny’s getting worse!” declares orphan Elias (Nick Robinson), in dialogue that occasionally veers from A Fistful of Dollars territory into The Gilded Age Goes Back 50 Years and Takes a Hike West.
The stakes escalate dramatically when Constance’s dissolute son Willem (Toby Hemingway) attempts to assault Elias’s sister Dahlia (Diana Silvers), resulting in his pitchfork-related demise. Nothing says frontier justice quite like improvised agricultural weaponry. Constance, described magnificently as sniffing out guilt “like a mongoose in a bustle”—possibly the greatest fashion-animal hybrid metaphor ever written—intensifies her campaign against the Nolan clan.
Additional players include outlaw Roache (Michiel Huisman), who bonds with Constance’s daughter over Schubert because apparently classical music appreciation transcends lawlessness, and Timothy V Murphy as Father Duffy, Fiona’s lifelong support system. In true western fashion, trust remains perpetually questionable.
Does repositioning matriarchs as warring protagonists revolutionize the genre? Somewhat. The novelty of watching women navigate power dynamics traditionally reserved for men adds contemporary resonance, yet their concerns—protecting family legacy, rallying the powerless against privilege—remain classically western. The series wrestles with binary conflicts: power versus powerlessness, faith versus godlessness, blood family versus chosen family, legal justice versus moral justice.
The Abandons suffers from western genre’s traditional self-seriousness, that distinctly American inability to inject levity into origin mythology. Yet watching Anderson and Headey transform period costume drama into a battlefield of feminine will? That’s worth the dust in your eyes.
