You'd Never Guess 'Barbie' and 'The Batman' Share This in Common

Plus 'Atonement,' 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'Little Women,' and more do too.

Barbie and last year’s The Batman are two very different blockbusters but share some surprising similarities. Both breathed new life into iconic figures deeply ingrained in pop culture — Barbie and Batman — but more specifically, both films share the same costume designer, two-time Oscar winner Jacqueline Durran. The costume design for Barbie specifically has received plenty of praise, but some of Durran’s most well-known work has been for period films like Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina. She’s also famously responsible for the showstopping green dress worn by Keira Knightley’s character in Atonement, which has gone on to become an iconic dress in cinema history.

Jacqueline Durran has been working as a costume designer for film and television since the early 2000s, teaming up with Joe Wright for seven out of nine of his feature films, and working with a number of other directors like Mike Leigh, Sam Mendes, and Pablo Larraín. Barbie marks her second collaboration with director Greta Gerwig, the first of which was Little Women in 2019, which won Durran her second Academy Award for Best Costume Design. Her first win in the category was for Anna Karenina in 2012, and she's been nominated in the category a total of eight times, most recently for Cyrano in 2021. Though she's known primarily for her iconic costumes for various period pieces, she's also designed more modern costumes in The Double, Spencer, the 2016 Black Mirror episode "Nosedive," and of course, Barbie, and The Batman.

The costume design in Barbie is an integral part of the film and did wonders for its promotion. It's been a major contributor to the viral "Barbiecore" trend, and when the first photos of Margot Robbie as Barbie in her hot pink Western costume hit the Internet in June 2022, it went viral on various social media platforms (TikTok especially) and reportedly inspired a 416% increase in online searches for pink clothing. Durran — along with some contributions from French fashion house Chanel — produced an abundance of memorable looks like Barbie's light pink gingham dress, Barbie and Ken's Western outfits, Ken's (Ryan Gosling) white fur coat and "I am Kenough" tie-dye hoodie and the pink jumpsuits worn by the Barbies. Some were inspired by actual Barbie dolls of years past like the very first Barbie's black and white striped swimsuit and Barbie and Ken's matching '80s rollerblading set. Pink clothing seems to be in stores everywhere these days, with retailers like Zara and Show Me Your Mumu launching Barbie-inspired collections this year in collaboration with the film. With October approaching, it's likely we'll be inundated with a variety of Barbie costumes come Halloween.

For The Batman, Jacqueline Durran acted as a co-designer along with costume supervisor David Crossman and concept artist Glyn Dillon in creating an updated Batsuit for Robert Pattinson's turn as the brooding billionaire turned masked vigilante. In a 2022 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Pattinson praised the new suit's design and its differences from previous iterations with its homemade yet tactical look, saying "It felt like a really new thing... It looks like a soldier's armor in some kind of strange parallel universe where you have to wear little ears on top of your head as well."

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In her decades-long career as a costume designer, Jacqueline Durran has created plenty of memorable costumes. Her magnum opus, though, is undoubtedly the exquisite emerald, silk green dress worn by Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) in Atonement, which even has its own Wikipedia page. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Durran revealed the backstory to this iconic dress, including Wright's notes on what he was looking for in the design - something green, bare-backed, with movement in the skirt. The dress takes inspiration from styles of the '20s and '30s, but it was never intended to be an accurate replication of a dress from the time period in which the film is set. In Durran's words, "I'm under no illusion that the dress that I've created isn't a true 1934 dress. It's a combination of elements that have been made up by someone with a modern perspective. Any time you're not taking elements and recombining and interpreting and creating, you're going to move outside of what is exactly the correct period. But, everything within the dress is from the period; it's just recombined in a modern way."

The low-cut green dress with its plunging open back and full, flowing skirt was the perfect choice for the steamy love scene between Cecilia and Robbie (James McAvoy) which also marks a dramatic turning point in the film's plot. High-quality replicas of the dress go for thousands of dollars, and it's already considered an iconic dress in cinema history like the red gown worn by Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman or Marilyn Monroe's hot pink dress in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Durran's costumes always take into account the characters wearing them and fit the tone of the film they appear in, but there have been some questionable design moments here and there. Though the average viewer may not be able to tell the difference, those with a trained eye have pointed out issues with some of her costumes, particularly those in Beauty and the Beast and Little Women, for their lack of historical accuracy. Online creators with expertise in costume design, garment construction, and historical fashion like Mina Le, Bernadette Banner, and Micarah Tewers have all dissected the various issues with Little Women's costumes after Durran won an Oscar for her work on the film.

Despite some anachronisms, intentional or otherwise, Durran remains a talented costume designer responsible for a plethora of memorable costumes across a variety of time periods. Her work in Barbie is a case in point, and it would hardly be a surprise if we see Durran earn yet another Oscar nomination for her skill in bringing some already iconic Barbie outfits to life and creating new ones.

Claudia Picado is a Features Writer and NYU grad based in Miami, FL. She enjoys all things satire and anything starring four time Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan. Will not hesitate to talk your ear off about Love Island UK.