Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The bunny girl outfit, the Christmas jumper, the penguin pyjamas and — the ruby slippers of the romcom world — those “absolutely enormous pants”. We’re talking Bridget Jones’s wardrobe, of course. The Chardonnay-swilling character, back in new film Mad About the Boy, might not seem a paragon of style compared to, say, Holly Golightly or Jay Gatsby, but her clothes have helped make her part of the British cultural furniture. Albeit more shabby-chic sofa than edgy Ligne Roset Togo.Bridget, played by Renée Zellweger, is the OG frazzled Englishwoman, a meme that celebrates the harried 2000s aesthetic also espoused by Kate Winslet in The Holiday: trailing scarf, tweedy coat, clompy shoes . . . perpetual air of trying to recall your Hotmail login. Rather than ticking trend boxes, she reflects the zeitgeist by being her authentic self with a defined signature look. The new film opens with Bridget struggling to zip up the back of her dress as young children race around her messy house: “Bloody zip manufacturers should be cancelled for sociological bias,” she rails. The scene instantly conveys that while she is now in her early fifties, and the world has (supposedly) changed since her older male boss groped her in the lift and she thought she was fat at just over nine stone, she is essentially still the same. Chaotic, fond of retro swearing, and still wrestling with her clothes.Bridget Jones’s wardrobe is also woven into debates about whether the character is a dated embodiment of sexist 1990s and 2000s culture, consumed with self-loathing and obsessed with the frivolous. Or whether she offers a flawed but welcome foil to the cult of perfection. Or, as is often the case, both. As Bridget’s creator Helen Fielding said in 2016, “Bridget Jones is about the gap between how we all feel we’re expected to be and how we actually are.” Bridget is a reflection of the times, and a lot of the discussion, as with Sex and the City, seems to boil down to an unspoken question along the lines of: “Is it OK for me to enjoy this?”When I talk to the costume designer of Mad About the Boy, Molly Emma Rowe, she says: “I always took the whole weight thing as a satire. If you weren’t around in the 1990s or 2000s [the first film came out in 2001], then you might not realise what it was like constantly being told you were overweight — it was a lot.” Rowe, who is new to the Bridget Jones franchise, says that, back then, “I would dress someone for the red carpet, then see a full page in a magazine saying ‘sack the stylist’. Because of that I’ve always been adamant that women should be allowed to wear whatever they want. I think that Bridget is a positive thing . . . We should absolutely be allowed to see women struggling.”In Mad About the Boy, Bridget is widowed with two small children, four years after her husband Mark Darcy, a human rights lawyer played by Colin Firth, was killed in Sudan by a landmine. Rowe says she is “so deep in her grief, there’s no space for her to be shopping for new clothes”, and the costume team sourced many of her outfits from charity shops in Hampstead, north London, where much of the film was shot, to ensure they looked lived-in. And so she’s in thrown-together looks, novelty nightwear and fleece tracksuit trousers, hitting a low point when she does the school run in a rush and one of the children asks, “Why is your granny wearing pyjamas?” But the film’s plot hinges on Jones getting her mojo back, and soon enough she meets Roxster, a hot Hampstead Heath warden (Leo Woodall) who rescues her from halfway up a tree, and has a makeover of sorts. But it’s not an unrecognisable, high-maintenance glow-up, even though Jones lives within remote-car-key distance of Hampstead Heath, in a house that would be worth millions in real life. This is more of a “dusting off of her better pieces from the recesses of her closet to see if they still fit” sort of makeover. One where she gets back to her old self via short A-line skirts, printed blouses, crew-necked cardigans, a floral tea dress and a fitted denim jacket. The big pants make an appearance — they are not the originals but the most unglamorous pair the costume team could find in Shepherd’s Bush Market. Zellweger was very involved in the wardrobe and had a clear idea of which clothes “are Bridget”, says Rowe. “There’s always something a little bit off about the outfit and you can’t quite put your finger on it.” Rowe also revived items such as a grey hooded coat from a previous film, something Zellweger became quite emotional about, “because fashion is cyclical and it felt like a modern take on Bridget’s wardrobe to bring some pieces back”. Rowe adds: “It was really important to us to be representing a woman in her fifties, looking confident and great . . . Bridget’s well known for her short skirts, and why can’t she still wear those? I don’t think we should be meeting her in her fifties and she’s suddenly wearing long skirts . . . It felt like a great opportunity to subtly say, ‘Do what you like! Wear what you like.’” Daniel Cleaver (played by Hugh Grant) is very much a character who does and wears what he likes — a 1990s throwback who makes sexual innuendos and a cocktail called a “dirty bitch” while still oozing professionally inappropriate charisma. Grant’s original outfits were made by Richard James, and Rowe found a tailor called Ben Clarke who had worked with James to capture the earlier vibe. Bespoke shirt maker Deema Abi-Chahine put a deep collar stand on pale lilac and white shirts to frame Grant’s face and enable him to undo three buttons for Cleaver’s “lounge lizard” look. Grant, who knows his watches, suggested his character would wear a Panerai, because it’s an in-the-know brand.But Jones’s most zeitgeisty move in the era of the films Babygirl and The Idea of You and the novel All Fours, could be her younger boyfriend Roxster. His wardrobe, based on James Dean, is a masterclass in looking classic but not basic in vintage tees and denim from LA, along with T-shirts from Merz b. Schwanen (also worn by Jeremy Allen White as Carmy Berzatto in The Bear). As for the white shirt he wears to jump into a swimming pool, someone on the costume team spent a whole day at the pool with Leo Woodall, camera testing shirts for the right level of sheerness and muscle cling before they settled on one from Paul Smith. The texture and patina of fabric can speak volumes. To recreate the penguin pyjamas Bridget wears in the first movie, the graphics department had to print new fabric, before sandpapering and washing it endlessly. To underline how the other pristine mums at the school gates glide through life, Rowe dressed them in lots of high-maintenance buttermilk-coloured garments from Joseph. She asked herself what the antithesis of Bridget’s relatable chaos would be. Cream silk, of course. Frazzled Englishwoman and dry cleaning don’t mix.Follow us on Instagram and sign up for Fashion Matters, your weekly newsletter about the fashion industry
