When the script for Lady Bird—the 2017 coming-of-age film written and directed by Greta Gerwig starring Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet—landed in April Napier’s hands, she was immediately drawn to it. The renowned, L.A.-based costume designer has worked on everything from films (Julia, Certain Women, and The Cell, to name a few) to music videos.
Saoirse Ronan plays Christine (known as Lady Bird), a high school senior at a Catholic school in Sacramento, California. It’s 2002, and her family isn’t rich—in fact, much of the film touches on her parents’ financial struggles... We watch Lady Bird experience all the obligatory highs and lows of 18-year-old youth (in what Napier calls “painful” early 2000s fashion, no less): losing one’s virginity, mother-daughter turbulence, friendship drama, drinking, and general existential confusion...
April Napier comments on how she approached costume design for the film:
“I certainly checked some magazines, too, but to be handed a treasure trove of candid photographs from that era—ones that are kind of painful because they’re just so unattractive—is such a great gift. I used that as sort of the ground for the atmosphere all around Lady Bird. It applies to Danny [Lucas Hedges], it applies to the general background, and it applies a little bit to Jenna [Odeya Rush] in that there’s that one scene where Lady Bird first has sex with Kyle [Timothée Chalamet] and her mom picks her up and she’s crying, and her mom is like, “Whose sweater is this?” She’s wearing Jenna’s Juicy Couture track jacket, which of course Lady Bird would never have, but that was a thing at that moment and of course Jenna would have it. You think about it in terms of the class of all those people—that was a really important part of it, too. Lady Bird’s family doesn’t have very much money, so she’s always struggling to find her voice or find her own identity and what’s appealing to her. At one moment, what’s appealing to her is Danny and his family, who are sort of of patrician and upper class. They live in the “Fabulous Forties” neighborhood, so she’s sort of like, what would Jackie O wear? What’s the right thing to wear to their house? And when she gets involved with Kyle, she thinks, what does a more indie person wear? What does a person who’s reading Howard Zinn wear?”
“What I realized in procuring all of her costumes—and she had, like, 96 outfit changes or something—is that when I would go through the ’50s or the ’60s or the ’70s, I found pieces that were in pretty good shape because they’d been really beautifully constructed and out of decent materials. The 2000s was kind of the beginning of fast fashion. I went to a lot of costume houses looking for stuff and there weren’t necessarily sections dedicated to the 2000s because no one really knows what it is. But I did end up at one place, Palace Costume and Prop Co., which had a section dedicated to that era, and that’s where I found a lot of her crop tops and those little polo shirts that zip. But even though Palace takes really good care of their garments, they were all falling off the hanger, yellowing at the shoulders, and fraying...”