I think that a balance can be struck. Maybe not always 100% accuracy, but at least not aiming for "current fashion!". I'm sure that the 1995 Pride and Prejudice hairstyles weren't absolutely accurate, but they were the idea of what was accurate, and they didn't give Elizabeth a pony tail. Whereas Natasha's hair in this looked like a 2015 high school pupil's. It under-estimates the audience; weknow people in the past looked different, let them at least a bit!
I thought that the recent Wolf Hall handled the fashion issue very well, not least in that pretty much everyone was wearing a hat/cap/headgear all of the time. I'm sure that they picked some of the ones that look more attractive to modern eyes, but the sheer sigh of relief at "Thank God, they're wearing hats, not all going round bare-headed" gave a big sense of verisimilitude. And though the 1980s Wimsey adaptations suffer make-up fail, I do think they do a good job with making Harriet's clothes. We see her wear the same things repeatedly through the whole series, and we can see she has less money than Wimsey - he wears his nice leather gloves at the beach, but she wears knitted ones.
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I thought that the recent Wolf Hall handled the fashion issue very well, not least in that pretty much everyone was wearing a hat/cap/headgear all of the time. I'm sure that they picked some of the ones that look more attractive to modern eyes, but the sheer sigh of relief at "Thank God, they're wearing hats, not all going round bare-headed" gave a big sense of verisimilitude. And though the 1980s Wimsey adaptations suffer make-up fail, I do think they do a good job with making Harriet's clothes. We see her wear the same things repeatedly through the whole series, and we can see she has less money than Wimsey - he wears his nice leather gloves at the beach, but she wears knitted ones.