Exclusive: Barbie Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran On Vintage Chanel, Ken’s Pants And Styling The Film Of The Summer (2024)

“Barbie really is interlinked with fashion, because how you play with her is by dressing her,” says costume designer Jacqueline Durran. “Clothes are her form of expression.” After winning an Oscar for her work on 2019’s Little Women, director Greta Gerwig asked Durran back for her next project: kitting out an entire Barbie world. Durran (who hails from London) noticed the process was different to that of her other projects: “You don’t treat Barbie like you treat a regular character because the motivation for what she’s wearing isn’t from within.”

Barbie is practical, really. “The defining characteristic of what she wears is where she’s going and what she’s doing,” Durran explains. “It’s about being completely dressed for your job or task.” Every doll is sold with a fashion pack, so to go to the beach, Barbie needs a coordinating dress, playsuit, bag, hat, suitable shoes, and accessories. These clothing sets change and morph depending on what is happening in Barbie Land.

The beach is a crucial setting for Gerwig’s film, “so Malibu Barbie is key.” But instead of a direct copy of an original doll, Durran also drew from the 1950s and 1960s for a retro twist inspired by Brigitte Bardot as a beach-babe idéale. All of the costumes in Barbie Land fit into one of roughly fifteen colour combinations “that riffed off the idea of a French Riviera beach in the early 1960s.” Think vibrant trios of perfect summertime pastels: “lavender, bright blue, light blue; green, orange, beige; orange, blue, pink; two pinks and a yellow…”

“I had buyers going out every day looking for clothes in specific colours in every shop in London,” says Durran.

Durran explains that the team had a rigorous chart of colour combinations to refer to throughout the process. “We wanted the world to be a really controlled environment,” she says. It gave structure to a dizzying task. “Greta writes at 100 miles an hour, often four scenes in a page of script… There’s a lot of costume changes,” she says with a laugh, of the hundreds of looks her team created. From Barbie refuse collectors to Barbie postal workers, there were dozens of jobs to dress, leaving Durran’s team trawling through shops for the perfect pink boilersuit or Barbified toolkit. For one costume – a doctor – the team pulled up pictures of every doctor Mattel had created in the past 60 years as inspiration.

With only eleven weeks to make everything, the team were still creating costumes as they filmed. That had one perk: the flexibility to keep adding new ideas. In one late fitting, actor Ryan Gosling came up with the idea for Ken-branded underwear for his character, a detail that went viral when the film’s marketing dropped. “We just rushed to make it,” she says.

His primary job being “beach”, Durran reveals colourful ’80s sportswear is a key Ken look, along with a few stretchy, disco boilersuits and some hyper-masculine cowboy looks. “Retro sportswear is one area where we did a lot of shopping for Ken,” she says. “He is sporty. That’s his main thing. We hadbuyers in America that went to dealers and imported it for us because we needed so much of it.”

Otherwise, as in life, Ken was more of an afterthought. “No one cares about Ken, everybody just wants to play with Barbie,” Durran says. “He matches Barbie and changes too but he has very, very, many less options.”

This, she thinks, links to a previously under-explored side of Barbie dolls – one that Gerwig is leaning into with her film. “I never thought of Barbie as having a feminist aspect – because of the body shape, you tend to think that she’s anti-feminist,” Durran says. “Before I started working on the film, I hadn’t realised Greta’s point that Barbie was revolutionary because it was the first time that girls started playing with somebody who had agency and did things, rather than a baby.