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Tuesday, February 25, 2025
The Bridget Jones breakdown squad: Mad About The Boy costume designer Molly Emma Rowe reveals all the on-set style secrets of the original Frazzled Englishwoman
Tatler: An empty answering machine on the landline. An all-the-emptier bottle of red wine. A lip sync to All By Myself in a matching pair of red penguin pyjamas. With that, Bridget Jones made history. Across her two-decade stint as the titular diarist, Renée Zellweger redefined British romance for a generation, making beatitudes out of breakups one playboy bunny costume at a time.
Although glitzy, glamorous costumes can be a lot of fun, there is something that is a lot more interesting and rewarding about the kind of work costume designer Molly Emma Rowe does for the Bridget Jones movies. When you have a character like Bridget who has a lot of idiosyncrasies, costuming becomes one of the quickest and most effective ways to get them across to the audience. Bridget is clumsy; in turn, she often wears clothes that are slightly too short, long, tight, or loose. She struggles to read the room, and so the outfits she chooses are often off dress code and make her stick out amongst an ensemble. Rowe is a big proponent of character-first costuming: instead of creating looks based on how the audience will react to them, she thinks about what might draw a character to a specific color or silhouette. It makes for a far more nuanced and genuine finished product in the newest Bridget Jones movie: now a widowed single mother, Rowe washed Jones’ clothes many times over before they were worn to show how she’s had no time to buy new clothes or care for herself. Small details like these are so cool!
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Although glitzy, glamorous costumes can be a lot of fun, there is something that is a lot more interesting and rewarding about the kind of work costume designer Molly Emma Rowe does for the Bridget Jones movies. When you have a character like Bridget who has a lot of idiosyncrasies, costuming becomes one of the quickest and most effective ways to get them across to the audience. Bridget is clumsy; in turn, she often wears clothes that are slightly too short, long, tight, or loose. She struggles to read the room, and so the outfits she chooses are often off dress code and make her stick out amongst an ensemble. Rowe is a big proponent of character-first costuming: instead of creating looks based on how the audience will react to them, she thinks about what might draw a character to a specific color or silhouette. It makes for a far more nuanced and genuine finished product in the newest Bridget Jones movie: now a widowed single mother, Rowe washed Jones’ clothes many times over before they were worn to show how she’s had no time to buy new clothes or care for herself. Small details like these are so cool!
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