“Barbie” Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran Unpacks That Eye-Popping Wardrobe

British costume designer Jacqueline Durran, unlike Greta Gerwig, barely felt any attachment to Barbie dolls during her childhood. On the other hand, she’d enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Gerwig on Little Women, for which Durran won an Oscar. So when the writer-director invited Durran to design clothes for Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as life-sized dolls in her feminist comedy Barbie, Durran promptly pivoted 180 degrees from Little Women‘s subdued 19th-century aesthetic and conjured a candy-colored wardrobe inspired by Mattel’s line of plastic figurines. How to account for such radically different approaches? “That’s the genius of Greta Gerwig,” says Durran, who previously earned Academy Award nominations for Cyrano, Darkest Hour, Atonement, Pride and Prejudice, and Beauty and the Beast.

The filmmakers’ shift in tone struck a festive chord with audiences over the summer when Barbie strutted to an astonishing $1.4 billion haul at the worldwide box office. The movie also won over critics and now leads the pack as an Oscar front-runner in multiple categories.

Speaking from a Los Angeles hotel, Durran gets into Barbie’s Hot-Skatin’ phase, explains Sly Stallone’s importance as a style icon, and details the color-coded secrets behind Barbie‘s eye-popping outfits.

Greta Gerwig credits Barbie dolls with being a significant part of her childhood. What about you?

I was not particularly Barbie-oriented. I think I had one, but I don’t really remember because Barbie dolls didn’t figure much for me.

So how did you familiarize yourself with Barbie fashion?

I went through a lot of Mattel history and landed in the late seventies through the late eighties as being the soul of the movie because that was what Greta was thinking about when she wrote the script.

But you start the film with Barbie dressed in her very first outfit — the swimsuit.

From 1959, yes,

Margot Robbie first appears goddess-like in the 2001: A Space Odyssey-inspired sequence set to the thunderous music of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” It’s quite an entrance. Did you always envision the swimsuit for that opening shot?

That swimsuit was always going to be the starting point because it tied into the whole Kubrick monolith thing and, in a way, it gave me my route into the movie. We had archival Barbie from different periods that we re-produced as exactly as we could. Then we moved on to a more fluid approach, delving repeatedly into the late seventies and eighties until we get to the finale which is pretty much contemporary.

Barbie dresses almost entirely in pink, blue, or white until the finale. When she transforms from a doll to a person, Margot’s wearing yellow for the first time. Why?

For the contemporary section, I wanted to reproduce the most popular Barbie dress, which was yellow, so we made Barbie Margot’s dress yellow as an homage. But it’s not really a Barbie costume because the way it’s cut is different. This is much more a human costume. Everything we did [with the costumes] was kind of multi-faceted because I wanted to reference the Mattel experience, but I also wanted to tell the story of Barbie.

Movie costumes usually express the hero’s interior life, right?

In a regular film, when an actress plays someone, her character dictates what she wears, but in this instance, it’s not the same relationship to the character. Barbie, all the Barbies, wear things appropriate to what they’re doing. The reason for her costume comes from outside of the character.

And in Barbie Land, it’s one activity after another. She’s at the beach. She’s disco dancing. Now she’s camping. That must have been daunting.

When I realized that every scene had a costume change, I nearly had a nervous breakdown! And not just one character. All the Barbies, all the Kens!

Given all these multiple versions of Barbie and Ken, you wind up dealing with a big ensemble dressed in very bright colors. How did you organize the palette for these set pieces so the visuals felt cohesive?

I knew the color needed to be controlled, or we’d end up being a mess, so almost the very first thing we did was that we made this chart. I don’t remember how many colors, but the key thing is that they always had to be three color combinations. It was a strict rule. You couldn’t put a costume together if it wasn’t in that combination. It was hard because that meant that you couldn’t buy anything – – we basically had to print all the textiles, like all the fabrics for the beach costumes, in these color combinations. I felt this was the only way to keep a lid on having the film be bright while also tying it all together underneath.

Those pink and green outfits definitely pop.

It was a way to get pastels that were punchy into the movie but also a way of looking back to the fifties-sixties palette when much of fashion used color in a different way. There was this nostalgic element blended into the story I was trying to tell about the movement from 1959 through to modern while also using a color palette totally appropriate to Barbie Land.

Once Barbie and Ken enter real world Los Angeles, they spend a lot of time wearing cowgirl and cowboy outfits. Was that Western look based on one of the Mattel packages?

No. Funnily enough, someone later found a Ken Doll dressed in something very similar, but I hadn’t seen that at the time. This was Barbie’s idea of what would make people in Ametria like her, and also, the cowgirl fits into that eighties Barbie aesthetic

Like an Urban Cowboy type thing?

Yeah, it had the feeling of being a little bit retro.

And, of course, Barbie dolls always come with a complete set of accessories, right?

One hundred percent. With the cowgirl, it was the Stetson and the neckerchief and cowboy boots. It’s always a complete look.

Head to toe… or head to high heels.

That’s what makes Barbie.

Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie look every bit the perfect couple in some ways, but it’s also funny to see them not fitting in at all in contemporary L.A. Did you deliberately infuse these outfits with a sense of humor?

Ken and Barbie had to look strange and stand out in the real world because they have a doll-like quality. If you jump back a minute to Ken and Barbie arriving at Venice Beach, they’re wearing their Hot Skatin’ Barbie look.

Skin-tight and the colors are burning hot!

Their outfits make everyone look at them and potentially laugh, and this is Venice Beach, where it’s not that easy to look eye-catchingly funny. We investigated lots of different looks but in the end, I went back to the original Hot-Skatin’ Barbie costume from the eighties or early 90s because it was stranger. I didn’t copy it, but I kind of re-invented the costume, changed elements, and made a Ken version as well.

While Barbie’s learning hard lessons about modern America, Ken discovers his inner dude and starts strutting around in a faux white mink coat. How did you arrive at this alpha male piece of wardrobe?

Greta and Ryan had been talking, and between them, they had pictures of Sly Stallone looking fantastic in this fur coat from the eighties. I had not spoken to Ryan Gosling about Ken before and wasn’t quite sure how far he wanted to go. It turned out that he was more than ready to embrace the “Ken-ness” of things. That fur coat became critical in pinning down how far we could go with Ken and how much fun we would have.

Barbie arrives on HBO Max on December 15.

For more on Barbie, check out these stories: 

Hit Makers Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt on Adding a Pop Punch to “Barbie” Soundtrack

“Barbie” Casting Directors Allison Jones And Lucy Bevan on Populating Barbie Land

“Barbie” Hair & Makeup Artist Ivana Primorac Conjures Personality From Plastic

Pretty in Pink With “Barbie” Production Designer Sarah Greenwood & Set Decorator Katie Spencer

Featured image: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING as Ken and MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Jaap Buitendijk.