‘Barbie’ Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran Says She Wanted the Wardrobe to Feel ‘Timeless’ (Exclusive)

When Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran signed on for the Greta Gerwig-directed Barbie, one of her biggest goals was to create a wardrobe that sparked joy and made audiences happy.

It’s safe to say she’s succeeded.

Starring Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken — along with a long list of other talented actors as Barbies, Kens and beyond — Barbie transports viewers to Barbieland that’s full of bright colors and luscious outfits, all dreamed up by Durran and her team of costumers.

The nostalgic film, which taps into all the decades of Barbie from 1959 to today, brings audiences together to unite them in their love of the Mattel toy. The many years — and many, many dolls in Barbie’s history — gave Durran a lot of material to work with when it came to creating the wardrobe.

Here, she tells PEOPLE about diving into the fun project and how positively overwhelming the response to her work has been.

PEOPLE: We loved the incorporation of Chanel into the Barbie wardrobe, especially because Chanel is a big part of Barbie’s own history of fashion. Talk to us a little bit about bringing Chanel into the film.

Jacqueline Durran: I’ve worked with Chanel on multiple movies in the past. The first time I worked with them was on Atonement, and I worked with them on Anna Karenina and I worked with them on Spencer. I enjoy working with them. I find them really supportive of filmmakers and film storytelling, and they’re very supportive of the director’s vision. They will help where they can.

Margot, obviously, is a Chanel ambassador, so she had a relationship with Chanel already and there were multiple reasons why we wanted to make the collaboration work. One of them was the fact that there was a Barbie Chanel doll years ago, and we also knew we wanted to have some of those classic Barbie looks at the beginning of the movie. This all opened the conversation to having a Chanel suit.

Margot Robbie in Barbie.

Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.

When I went to Paris and went to the Chanel archive, I also discovered that Karl Lagerfeld had designed a Barbie collection in the ‘90s with Claudia Schiffer and all the supermodels modeling Barbie. It became the perfect Easter egg to put one of Karl’s costumes into the movie, which we did.

So Margot, at one point, is wearing Claudia Schiffer’s suit from the archive, the actual suit, not remade. She did also wear a pink suit that was remade from that collection — Chanel copied their own work and made a reproduction and then we used that in the movie. The Claudia Schiffer one, though, was the actual suit. It was the perfect match between what we wanted to be in the movie and what Chanel had already made. 

We also had the full top-to-toe Chanel outfit when Barbie Margot’s dressing up to go back and hopes that Ken still loves her. Which he does. And that’s full Chanel.

The wardrobe feels like it’s not rooted in any one time period — it spans decades. Was that your intention?

It was very, very much my intention. I didn’t want to stick to exactly this progression of looks or anything, but I wanted to start at the beginning and end at the end. In the middle, though, it gets a little bit jumbled because I don’t necessarily stick 100% to the order of things.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

I start off with 1959, obviously, then there’s the beach, which is very much influenced by the early ‘60s. And then there’s the minidress, which is also a bit ‘60s. So I tried to set up this idea that we were going through time, but at the same time, I wanted the passing of time to be related to the past of Mattel. I was looking at what Mattel had done in ’62 or ’65 or ’70, and trying to tie in themes from Mattel and fashion and the story.

Margot Robbie in Barbie.

Warner Bros. 

I really felt strongly about it, as a way into the Barbie story, because it seems, when you look at the movie now, it seems obvious. But when you start off and you’re thinking, ‘How do we make Barbie real? What do we do? Do we go high fashion from the beginning all the way through?’

And so it took time to kind of think, ‘Okay, no, let’s do it to the history of Mattel and let’s do it through time.’ And then hopefully, it will kind of jog memories of all different ages of fans. And it will be something that is very much part of everybody’s memories. That was the intention — that it would touch different people’s memories at different times. It’s timeless.

Barbie felt like she was everyone’s Barbie.

Exactly. When you do a costume, you often try and work out the character of the person that’s wearing them and what they do. But the character of Barbie is really the history of Barbie. If you were to delve into her backstory, it would be how she’d looked over the decades. It’s the way we chose to do it.

All these Barbies are largely based on Barbies that actually exist, but then you have Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) who is basically imaginary. How did you decide what to dress her in?

There was a lot of discussion about Weird Barbie, actually, because Weird Barbie could have gone in multiple ways. She could have gone to be literally in kind of a mismatched mess of clothes that were torn and burned and old and dirty. Or she could have gone into this high-fashion way. She’s not too Barbie, because she’s more strange, and I think that was the way that everyone in the end wanted to go. So our inspiration was a high-fashion but a strange combination of elements.

[Mattel is now taking pre-orders for Weird Barbie.]

Margot Robbie in Barbie.
Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.

Have you been surprised by the reaction to the outfits and things that have gone viral?

I’m thrilled, because you just don’t know. You make things, and you have this whole world-building idea. I just wanted it to connect with people so much and I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. If you love something and then you go and watch a live-action version of it, it’s terrible if you’re deflated by it. I had so much that I wanted people to like. I wanted people to like it, but I’m actually surprised by how much it’s taken on.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education