We spoke to LittleWomen costume designer Jacqueline Durran, an Oscar and BAFTA Award winner who has previously designed costumes for Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, about the process of dressing the stars of one of this year's biggest movies.
What was your first step in envisioning the costumes forI created a mood board, researching a lot of period-accurate paintings to get a feel for the era. I searched through old photos looking for the essence of Jo, Meg, etc., then I went through all of that with Greta. I looked at early photos of female radicals and people living different kinds of lives at the same time as Louisa May Alcott.
Each girl had a core color palette that we played with; it wasn't a firm rule, but we wanted it to be repetitive and consistent. Meg's was green and lavender, Beth's was brown and pink, Amy's was light blue, and Jo's was red and indigo. The colors are actually pulled from the notebooks that Marmee gives the girls in the book, and we added lavender for Meg.
What about Meg? There's a famous scene in the book, that's also reflected in the film, involving her and an expensive dress that doesn't "haunt her delightfully, as a new dress should." Marmee was probably the hardest costume. I was inspired by Louisa May Alcott's mother, who was a radical herself, and Laura [Dern] interpreted that Marmee should be a radical woman, even though she's from a good East Coast family. Marmee is an adult and an important person in her community, so her clothes needed to be quite Victorian to contrast with the girls. Still, she's progressive, so it was tricky to show both.
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