This Renaissance Festival dress is a walking Maryland flag

One night, Natalie Hanrion got out a ruler and drew a grid line on a mustard-yellow bedsheet. She began to paint each square, meticulously, slowly. One faulty brushstroke would set her back days. It had to look just like the yellow-and-black quadrants of the Maryland flag.

It took her over 100 hours to sketch, design and sew the Italian Renaissance-inspired dress. The skirt is black, red and white, with a pattern of vertical crosses around the gown. The top is black and yellow, matching the headwear Hanrion made herself.

She plans to wear it for this year’s Maryland Renaissance Festival, which opens for its 50th season this weekend in Crownsville.

This is the fourth flag-themed costume she has made and worn. She never thought she would outdo her first attempt, which went viral in 2023.

“I finally made something I felt may have possibly topped that first one,” she said in a social media post.

The grounds of Revel Grove, where the annual festival is held, are full of elaborate costumes. Renaissance festivals are spaces of creativity, said Norah Worthington, resident costumer at the Baltimore School for the Arts.

“You can take on a personality with the costume,” she said. “It gives you permission to play. And we have so few interactive live spaces where we get to do that anymore.”

Worthington added that costumes for the festival don’t necessarily need to be historically accurate. They just need to transport the character back in time.

“You could put costumes on stage that are absolutely historically accurate, and they might not help reinforce the storytelling because our modern context doesn’t always understand,” Worthington said.

Not her first Maryland dress

Hanrion, a costume designer and maker, has been sewing for almost as long as she has been alive. Her first project was clothes for her Barbie dolls as she played with sewing machines, needlepoint and crochet. She comes from a family of crafters, Hanrion said. Her grandmother taught Hanrion’s mother how to sew, and her mother then taught Hanrion when she was 5 years old.

Her love for sewing collided with Renaissance festivals after she went to her first one in Massachusetts. Before that, she thought people only dressed up for Halloween or comic conventions. Now, she has been to around eight festivals across different states.

People talked up the Maryland Renaissance Festival when she moved to Virginia for work.

“Maryland is definitely the very top,” she said.

For her first Maryland-themed dress in 2023, Hanrion wanted to evoke the aesthetic of the House of Tudor, the dynasty that ruled England from the late 15th century to the early 1600s. She thought the Maryland flag, with patterns that draw on English nobility from around the same period, would fit well.

The dress got mainly positive reactions, though some people pointed out Hanrion didn’t get the order of colors correct in parts of the dress. She incorporated feedback into her next Maryland-themed costumes, and even added crabs to her jester’s skirt in 2024.

Carolyn Spedden, the artistic director for the Maryland Renaissance Festival, said she looks forward to seeing Hanrion’s costume in person this year.

“Now, if she has Old Bay perfume, we are set!” she said.

For this year’s dress, Hanrion was inspired by her trip to Italy last winter to replicate the Italian Renaissance style, which tends to use natural, flowing fabric and vibrant colors like red and gold. She thrifted most of the materials, repurposing linen and silk fabrics from flea markets, estate sales and Goodwill. The mustard yellow was a hard color to find, Hanrion said, and she used bedsheets and duvets.

Hanrion goes to the festival a few weekends every year. She makes every one of her costumes and tries not to repeat an outfit, except for the Maryland-themed dresses. She usually saves them for the later months of the festival, when the air is crisp.

People at the festival often assume she lives in the state because she’s decked out in the Maryland flag, Hanrion said.

“I’m a Maryland flag admirer who lives in Virginia,” she confesses.