Saoirse Ronan is “a person with the aura of a star but none of the pretence,” finds Reni Eddo-Lodge in the Irish actor’s November 2024 British Vogue profile – unfathomably her first. As the erstwhile child star-turned-Oscar nominee, whose talent has been compared to that of Hollywood matriarch Meryl Streep, took to the stage at this magazine’s Forces of Fashion event, Ronan, in a sinuous red dress, indeed had the charisma of a performer, but the warmth of a dear friend.
In conversation with the legendary British costume designer Jacqueline Durran, whom a 12-year-old Ronan met on the set of Atonement and has since worked with on Hanna, Little Women and Blitz, Ronan is just as keen to steer the tête-à-tête towards Durran’s work on Barbie (“it wouldn’t have been a film that interested me at all unless it was directed by Greta [Gerwig]”) than she is her own career. Still, the old acquaintances find a happy medium in delighting over their most recent collaboration on Steve McQueen’s new take on the quintessential Second World War film. “It was about looking at all of the people in London as individuals and thinking of the different stories, because it’s quite easy to forget that it was millions struggling,” notes Durran of the importance of cutting through the rose-tinted nostalgia. The costumes, meanwhile, are as detail-driven as we’ve come to expect from Jacqueline, who says the watchword on set was “authenticity”, particularly when considering the surprisingly overt glamour that was “part of the war effort to keep up appearances.”
Ronan recalls the ease with which Durran puts actors when shaping their characters and gearing up to wear the likes of that Atonement slip (Keira Knightley) or the cream organza dress Ian McEwan’s precocious Briony Tallis (Ronan) wears in a crucial scene in Joe Wright’s period piece – two of Durran’s most beloved costume moments from a career scoring two Academy Award wins for Anna Karenina and Little Women and seven other nominations. “I was so pleased that the most showy thing in Atonement wasn’t the director’s favourite,” says Durran of the latter costume, which caught the light and gave a young Saoirse a special kind of aura. “That must be why [Keira] hasn’t called me after all these years,” quips Ronan.
The pair shares the same thoughtful approach to red-carpet dressing, which is a riot for some film stars and a necessary evil for others. Ronan, who worked with Elizabeth Saltzman for a decade before switching to Danielle Goldberg for the press tours around Blitz and The Outrun, admits that “it was a terrifying time to step onto the red carpet after not doing it for so long. I was very self-conscious. I wasn’t feeling my best at all. I was sort of having to navigate what it felt like for the first time, and I really wanted to find a way to get clothes that would just make me feel as strong as I could be.” Her solution? Louis Vuitton. Durran, who usually lets the Hollywoodites take centre stage on those marquee nights, says her favourite red-carpet look was the painterly DIY creation she wore to the 2008 Oscars, which was printed with words her young kids were saying at the time and places they had been in LA as a family.
As wonderfully polite as we’d expect two industry insiders who major in period dramas, the best behind-the-scenes gossip the Forces crowd snaffles up is when talk turns to their shared projects with Gerwig, whom they both praise for her ingenuity and humour. It is a crying shame, they both agree, that Ronan’s role as Weird Barbie didn’t materialise in the 2023 Mattel movie. (“I was born to be Weird Barbie,” asserts Saoirse.) The set of 2019’s Little Women adaptation with Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh and Emma Watson, meanwhile, was when Ronan learned to “go bigger with [her] creative choices… to mess things up a little bit” – particularly when interchanging costumes with Chalamet: “Laurie and Jo were this sort of gender-fluid couple in a way.”
Although neither will be pressed on their dream jobs, there can be no doubt that, after spending an hour in Saoirse and Jacqueline’s company in London’s Central Saint Martins, they already landed on the dream creative partnership long ago.
