Hevva’s distinctive costume is based on the traditional working clothes worn by people in the Penzance and Newlyn area of west Cornwall in the late 19th century.
The evidence for this costume comes from contemporary paintings from the Newlyn School art colony, where painters such as Stanhope Forbes and Walter Langley painted the ordinary, working folk around them.
One of the most striking features of the costume is the ladies’ headwear, known as gooks. These have been extensively researched and authentically replicated by Josephine Stewart, who has incorporated over a dozen different designs, each from a particular Cornish town or village. Gooks were worn to protect the women from sun, wind and dust while working on the shoreline, at the mine surface or in the fields.