Season 2 of Outlander sees our time-traveling heroes—Claire and Jamie Fraser (Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan)—leave the muddy fields of Scotland for the court of King Louis XV (Lionel Lingelser) in the mirrored halls of Versailles. Louis makes quite the splashy entrance in Episode 2, with mistress Madame Nesle de la Tourelle (Kimberly Smart) on his arm. Loyal as ever to the hugely popular Diana Gabaldon books, the Starz series dressed Nesle in a daring, breast-baring gown with ornate “diamond-encrusted swans” piercing her nipples. On the page, the dress sends the bold and heroic Claire “red-faced and coughing” from the room, “hacking politely into a handkerchief” as she goes. The effect is no less staggering on-screen. Vanityfair.com spoke with Outlander costume designer Terry Dresbach about the bold creation that goes where even Game of Thrones wouldn’t.

VF.com: So you’re calling this “the swan dress.” Do you—

Terry Dresbach: No, we call it “the nipple dress.” That’s what we call it in-house.

So how did you settle on the safe-for-work name of swan dress?

Because in the book it’s described as her nipples are pierced with swan jewelry. So that’s what that’s about.

When Diana Gabaldon included this look in the novel, did she draw on historical precedent?

She did. I want to kill her for it. It’s all wonderful on the written page, but when you have to try to figure out how you’re going to pull that off, it’s a whole different ball game. Body piercing goes back to the Egyptians, it’s nothing new. We think we’re bold, we think we push the envelope, but we have nothing on history. There’s a lot of exposure of body parts throughout fashion since the beginning of time.

It was hard to find reference material for it, and we weren’t able to locate a lot of paintings where women at that time had pierced nipples, so we sort of leapt and went with the books and tried to get as close to it as we could creating it ourselves. It was difficult. There’s no jewelry store that sells it. Those nipple rings were created on my kitchen table out of Fimo clay. There were many, many attempts to make swans that would completely do what they needed to do. It’s one of the most interesting jobs I’ve had in my career.

Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton told me years ago that she “designed a whole range of dresses that revealed one breast” for Season 2, based on the ones described in the Daenerys section of the books. They decided not to use them. How do you feel about going where Game of Thrones didn’t dare to?

I didn’t know that about them! It’s very tricky—I understand that completely. They also dealt with that very recently on Wolf Hall, with the codpieces. It’s one of those things where the audience stops listening to the words coming out of the actor’s mouth. They are now staring at whatever that accurate costume piece has done. At the end of the day as costume designers, our job is to serve the script. You can’t have things that make the audience stop paying attention. So a bared breast, or two bared breasts, or if everyone on the show had pierced nipples, no one would ever know what happens from season to season.

What does it say that this character is the only one in the room to sport this look?

There was a lot of discussion about how many dresses we were going to have in the scene that would have pierced nipples and I actually argued against having a lot of them. It took away from this particular gown—she’s the king’s mistress. He is able to push the boundaries and is celebrating the fact that they have a sexual relationship, and I wanted to hold that as one singular piece. And I didn’t want the audience to stop paying attention to the dialogue because they were looking at all the pierced nipples everywhere.

Claire has on a daring dress of her own when she meets the king—that plunging Sang-du-Christ gown—which almost looked like it might spill open. Was that an intentional comparison?

In Claire’s costume, the most daring thing we did is we took her out of a corset. That was more of a scandal. She is held in that dress purely with good architecture and good sewing. There’s no tape, there’s no nothing. What’s fascinating about the nipple dress is that is one of the most intricate costumes in Season 2. When people get over looking at the nipples—our fans watch each episode three or four times—they’ll see that gown is very ornate, very couture, as would be appropriate for the king’s mistress. That dress would have cost a fortune to make and the detailing on it is really quite exquisite. [Editor’s note: Dresbach estimates that between materials and labor, the dress would retail now for $10-$20,000.]

Such as?

We designed the dress to play off what he was wearing, so they both came in cloaked in gold. That is an incredibly expensive gold brocade and the furbelows—the pillows that are attached on the dress—are very, very of that time. The amount of time it takes to make those in the various sizes and attach them, and the jewels and the pearls were very painstaking details that we thought were essential to the dress. It couldn’t be just about the pierced nipples. She’s not a whore, she’s his mistress, which means she would have been a lady of the court and very wealthy in her own right. So we needed to establish that wealth and status in the detailing of the dress.

And in the jewelry she’s wearing as well.

We made that. We wanted a piece that looked like something a king would give his mistress—enormously jewel-encrusted, and at the neck so it would frame her, well, nipples.

How did Kimberly Smart react when she saw the costume design?

She was game. She knew that this was the point. She was an amazingly good sport because, trust me, fitting nipple rings is not the most delicate of tasks. I took photos throughout the process and I have one of this poor woman with three pairs of hands on her breasts as we tried to figure out the best placement of the swans. I took the clay and molded it to her to figure out the best part for the piercing to go through and I just kept checking in with her going, “Are you all right with this? Are you good?” And she was fine.

And how did the dress go over on set?

When she walked into the room like that, everyone’s head turned, not just on camera but behind the camera. Everybody was like, “Oh my God, what is that?” Because a lot of the on-set crew is not reading the books. The fourth grip is not necessarily attuned to the ins and outs of what the story is requiring, so pierced nipples are a bit distracting.

Was there ever a conversation about not doing the dress?

There are always conversations about whether or not to do things. We are a television show trying to make a giant, giant period movie every episode. Things have to get cut, things have to get pared down, there’s just no way we can do everything, so it all comes under scrutiny. So there was a question of are we going to do it, how many are we going to do? I was the one really advocating that we had to do this dress, even though I had no idea how we were going to pull this off. Because I knew the fans were so locked into this and so invested in it. We’re always having discussions. I constantly lobby to hit someone over any given costume.

Is there anything from the books that you wanted to have in this season, costume-wise, that didn’t make it in?

No, because the two things in the book that were so essential—the red dress and the nipples—we got. Beyond that, [show-runner] Ron [Moore] gave us the mandate to go ahead and make it as over the top a fashion show as we could manage. And we did. The goal was to make each costume more spectacular than the one before.

Were you rubbing your hands together with glee knowing you got to get out of the muddy tartans of Season 1 and into 18th-century Parisian fashion?

No, absolutely not! My whole life I’ve wanted to design 18th-century France. But there are realities in television that I knew nobody was in any way prepared for or that anybody but me had any idea what this was going to take. Every 18th-century costume you see—from the extras to the king—we had to make. We had to make the shoes, the hats, the buttons, we had to make everything. In Season 1 I was in night sweats about how I was going to be able to warn everybody about how big of an endeavor it was. It was an enormous task that was overtaking the joy of the design. But at the same time, you can’t help but have fun.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the actress who plays Madame Nesle de la Tourelle. It is Kimberly Smart.