Yahoo Lifestyle IMO, Bridget Jones is an OG style icon. This is why...
Move over Mia Thermopolis and Elle Woods, when it comes to the ultimate romantic-comedy heroine for the ages, that title belongs squarely to Bridget Jones. Sure, discovering you’re secretly royalty is all well and good, but hardly realistic. And as for pivoting your entire life to enrol and actually get into law school, in this economy with tuition fees where they’re at – no chance.
No one has managed to better encapsulate the strife of single women – read: trying to climb the career ladder while navigating dating and rebuking familial pressure to ‘settle down’ – than our Bridge. Her inimitable approach to life and love not only redefined an entire film genre, it caused women in their teens, twenties, thirties and older to all fall in love with her as they hard related. Even 21 years on from the release of Bridget Jones’s Diary, it feels as if not much has changed in the landscape of a single twenty-something woman.
A crucial part of that relatability lies in Bridget’s wardrobe. From wearing a skirt just a tad too short in an effort to gain attention, totally misreading the costume party theme, scrabbling into admittedly unattractive shapewear over sexy lingerie, to sobbing at home in pyjamas, we’ve all been there. This thread continued throughout the film’s sequels, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason released in 2004, (remember the too-tight evening gown that resulted in her hopping up the stairs at Mark’s important work function?) and Bridget Jones’s Baby released in 2016, in which Bridget opted to wear head-to-toe white to a muddy music festival. Her ensembles are not just intrinsically linked to telling the story of Bridget’s life, but are often central components of plot points.
With the fourth instalment in Bridget Jones’s story released in cinemas today [Friday 14 February 2025], Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy re-introduces our heroine at a very different point in her life. She is navigating life after Mark Darcy (RIP) as a widowed, single mother – albeit raising her two children with help from her friends, including a triumphant return for Daniel Cleaver AKA Hugh Grant – and learning to live and love again. Stuck in a state of emotional limbo, she does what anyone would do. She turns to the apps. As in, dating apps. Enter: Leo Woodall as her much younger love interest.
Longtime fans of the films (everyone, no?) will be pleased to know Bridget, as portrayed by Renée Zellweger, hasn’t changed a bit. And neither has her wardrobe.
“It was really important to me, and to Renée [Zellweger] too, that Bridget's clothes are authentic,” costume designer Molly Emma Rowe tells Cosmopolitan UK. Believing that Bridget wouldn’t prioritise clothes shopping for herself in the midst of her grief and raising her children, every piece of clothing was washed multiple times to look worn in. “We bought loads of stuff second-hand as well,” Molly shares. “We went to Hampstead, which is where Bridget now lives, and went into all of the consignment stores and all of the charity shops there, and bought things to help us ground everything in reality, which was really, really important for our movie.”
This also allowed Molly to revisit iconic pieces from Bridget’s past. If Bridget’s grey hooded coat in Magda and Jeremy’s dinner party scene looks familiar, that’s because it was sourced from the archives and was worn by Bridget to her parents’ annual turkey-curry buffet in the original film. “When Renée saw [the archived costumes] it really brought back for her a lot of emotion and feelings about making the first film and being in the first film, so that was really beautiful,” Molly says.
The penguin pyjamas are back, too. “They're not the original pyjamas, we had to remake them,” confesses Molly. “It was quite a meticulous undertaking.” The nightwear was washed multiple times and threads pulled out to give a faded, well-loved charm that would mimic the look of twenty years of wear.
Meanwhile, other items – like Bridget’s silver Tiffany heart pendant necklace – were updated to bring them in line with modern styling. “It's the only jewellery that Bridget wears, apart from her wedding ring. We imagined that her parents probably gave it to her in the 90s. We added the D [pendant] for Darcy, that kind of updated it a little bit.” Not only is it in line with current trends of the moment around personalised jewellery, it allowed Molly to put her own stamp on the character’s wardrobe. “It was really important to me to honour all of the costume designers that had gone before and created Bridget [while] updating things along the way where we could.”
One thing you won’t see much of is those absolutely enormous panties. They do make a brief appearance (pardon the pun) in the new film as we see Bridget getting ready for a date, but they’re returned to her underwear drawer in favour of a smaller pair of knickers. “The big pants are such an iconic part of Bridget's DNA, but also, time has come on a lot since then,” Molly says. “This is a really pivotal point in Bridget's life, actually, and it felt like a nice way to have a subtle little ‘you do you’ kind of thing. It’s about wearing what makes you feel good, not about the other person and the other person's gaze.”
Perhaps the biggest difference between Bridget of now and nostalgic Bridget is how she is viewed through her clothes. “Bridget's very well known for her mini skirts and we imagined that there would be focus on her age and what she was wearing. It felt important that we could have 50-year-old Bridget in a short skirt again, and she just looks great! There's no joke at her expense, there's no ‘thing’ that happens. I really hope that it feels empowering to the people it needs to,” Molly explains.
Because that’s what Bridget is all about, and has always been about. “I grew up with Bridget Jones. She changed my life as a teenager. Helen [Fielding's] writing allowed people, especially women, to kind of be chaotic and vulnerable and not perfect,” shares Molly.
Forget styled-to-perfection fashion inspiration, Bridget Jones is the realistic, down-to-earth fashion icon we need.
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