HBO's Girls: WTF Are they Wearing?
In honor of HBO series Girls’ resurgence in 2023, I’m unpacking the iconic wardrobes of the Girls characters with the show’s costume designer, Jenn Rogien. This article contains spoilers.
Everyone’s talking about it: 2023 is the year of the Girls renaissance.
The 6-season HBO series following the relationships, tumultuous friendships, and career paths of four girls in New York has made its comeback, largely due to Millennials reflecting on their 20s and Gen Z’s coinciding coming of age: now we’re also navigating our early 20s as either the, frankly, annoying and parentally dependent Hannah, stubborn anti-hipster barista Ray, ambitious college grad Shoshana—or none! These characters are often not relatable, but that’s the joy of watching Girls—you’d probably never sing an A cappella version of Stronger by Kanye West at your ex-boyfriend’s work party, but Marnie would.
The Girls renaissance is absolutely a fashion movement—at least in television. Amidst the Maddys from Euphoria and the Sex and the City reboot Carries, there is, once again, a Hannah. In all her wooden fruit necklace and ill-fitting graffiti shorts glory.
Hannah’s ill-fitting clothing and kitschy accessories were intentional. Jenn Rogien, Girls’ Emmy-awarded costume designer, was behind the scenes over-dying Hannah’s underwear to make them look worn, curating fruit erasers to fill the bottom of Shoshana’s clear platform shoes in her Tokyo wardrobe, and personally designing both Marnie’s red ‘Bob Mackie Barbie Doll’ dress and her plastic peplum dress from Booth Jonathan’s (best name in television) loft party.
I spoke with Jenn Rogien to unpack Girls’ decisive styling choices and growing popularity in the past year, nearly eleven years since its pilot.
Rogien had initially conceptualized a more polished wardrobe for the girls, but on the first day of shooting was called to set—the equivalent of “getting called to the principal’s office”.
“It wasn't that anything was wrong,” Rogien said. “But the note had come back from [the producers] Jenni Connor, Judd Apatow, and Lena Dunham, that no one would believe the girls were as messy as they were if they looked as good as they did on our first day of shooting.”
Wardrobe adjustments began with altering the garments’ shape on the characters bodies to add to the visual chaos around these characters, naturally beginning with the show’s chaotic lead, Hannah.
“We had done Lena [Dunham]’s fittings with Spanx, and then we let all those Spanx go in our first week of shooting. Things that we had fit with shapewear all of the sudden weren’t fitting properly because the shapewear was gone, and that actually worked to the advantage of conveying where Hannah was emotionally.”
Hannah’s clothes were further altered to fit poorly, including her underwear, which were overdyed gray and tan, and “stitches were picked out of the elastic so that it would look like it’d been knocking around in her drawer since college.”
“That was a lot of fun to get her in a cute dress that she then vomits Cosmo all over,” Jenn said. “But then to mess with the hems, so it wasn't quite at the right level and helped contribute to the overall visual chaos around Hannah to reflect the chaos that was in her life. Some of it was self-generated, and some of it was just the byproduct of living in a big city and trying to find your way when you're in your 20’s.”
Jenn remembers altering Ray’s wardrobe the most, the show’s anti-fashion (and anti-everything) coffee shop owner and city councilman.
“We altered every single one of those t-shirts so they would fit [Ray’s actor] Alex [Karpovsky] in a very specific way to reflect that he was this sort of anti-hipster, anachronistic guy,” Rogien said. “That was really a deliberate and conscious effort at the time…You know that his character is little bit older, so he's kind of found his thing. He's not grasping around trying to find out what his style is or what's important to him, and we wanted his clothes to reflect that.”
Ray’s wardrobe consisted of almost entirely graphic tees, sourced from Salvation Army, L Train Vintage and Urban Jungle.
“The graphics didn't want to be chaotic,” Rogien said. “They wanted to be sort of ironic and tongue in cheek, and bonus points where we could find someone else's family reunion, or someone else's high school cross country, he was sort of deliberately being obtuse.”
Hannah’s boyfriend, Adam, is also seen wearing t-shirts—although most often no shirt at all.
“We spent a lot of time finding t-shirts that hung on Adam Driver as Adam in a really specific way, so that when he was wearing clothing or costume, it was really distilled and simple, and it was really not fussy, which is kind of how Adam the character saw himself at the beginning,” Rogien said. “He was on his path, he wanted to be a carpenter and an actor, and that was his thing…And then you realize that's not totally true and it was a bit of a facade. And that's kind of what those t-shirts were, is a well-fitted facade of clarity.”
An iconic Adam fashion moment was, simply, a red t-shirt, a notable shift from the exclusively navy and gray tees.
Prior to making alterations, Jenn ensured these clothes reflected the character’s lives accurately, striving to only purchase clothing the characters could, hypothetically, afford by utilizing thrift stores around NYC, or as the characters progressed in their careers, Bloomingdales and Intermix.
Hannah’s white dress worn for her first day of work at Ray’s coffee shop—which he promptly tells her to go home and change into jeans with a ‘slim leg’—becomes a leafy green McQ by Alexander McQueen dress from Intermix as Hannah’s earns her first steady income at GQ.
As Marnie progresses from art gallery receptionist to nightclub hostess to lead singer of an indie duo with a partner who, according to Hannah, “looks like someone in the Pacific Northwest knit a man,” so does her wardrobe.
“Her more relaxed and casual boho inspired musician look was our take on her trying really hard to look like a chill & laid back musician while still being a little over the top in her Marnie-way,” Jenn said.
Shoshana’s career change from jobless NYU grad to corporate Tokyo girl marks the most significant wardrobe rebrand of the series—and one of Jenn’s favorite fashion moments. Most apparent in her return to New York from Tokyo as Shoshana clops through JFK in fruit eraser-filled clear platform shoes (each eraser individually curated by Jen) and a fur-lined shirt printed with the phrase “Je Ne Se Blah.”
Jessa, by contrast, always looked great—often even extravagant.
“It was fun to be able to break my own rules when it came to Jessa, because we had no idea what her true story was,” Rogien said. “She shows up with Louis Vuitton luggage and a glamorous hat in the pilot (I didn't do the pilot, full disclosure, but I did the whole series), where’d that LV luggage come from? We have no idea.”
Similarly, how did Jessa find Ann Demeulemeester feathers to wear to a Bushwick loft party?
To the same party, Shoshana wears a silver sequined mini skirt (which she later loses while accidentally smoking crack). Marnie reaches for a purple, backless, business-casual dress. Adam wears a t-shirt, hand-painted by Jenn with blacklight ink so it would show up on camera.
“Marnie would have thought that dress was so daring and so appropriate for a Bushwick loft party, but she's just wearing a corporate cubicle dress,” Rogien said. “It's a party, so of course Shoshana would wear some sequins…she's going to a Bushwick loft party which, literally, you should wear your gross jeans too. But putting that aside, it felt festive. It felt like Shoshana was dressing for a party. But then you really noticed when that skirt went away that it was gone.”
Marnie, like Jessa, is another wealth enigma—do her parents provide financial support? Where does her money come from (surely not that singing career).
Marnie’s most memorable looks, the plastic dress and red gown from “The Panic in Central Park,” were Jenn’s own designs.
“Charlie jokes about Marnie looking like a Bob Mackie Barbie, which is a very specific reference,’ Rogien said. “I knew it wasn't going to be a full Bob Mackie, you know, diamond cut outs through the midriff, stuff like that, because that's not really what Marnie does. But if I can incorporate touches of a deep v, latticed back, high slits that would help justify the joke.”
Various replicas of the dress were made to withstand the episode’s rollercoaster of a plot—going to the Plaza with her ex-boyfriend Charlie, getting mistaken for an escort, dancing at the pizza shop, and falling in the pond at Central Park. Instead of wearing a wet dress, actor Allison Williams wore a version of the dress painted to look like it was wet and mildewing.
Marnie’s plastic dress at Booth Jonathan’s loft party was also Jenn’s own design.
“It was such a statement and such a reflection of how hard she was trying, not just in that moment, but particularly in that moment, to impress these people around her, and being such a chameleon with her wardrobe in all of the show,” Jenn said. “For Marnie’s plastic dress I not only designed it, I was riveting it together. I walked into one of my favorite fabric stores in New York, and I saw some gold croc-embossed vinyl and knew in that moment exactly what that dress should look like…An added bonus was that Allison could actually separate the dress and then carry half of it through the turnstile.”
The garment treated with the most care on set was the crochet hat worn by Laird, Hannah’s strange-but-friendly neighbor, handled only in a special Ziploc bag.
“The hat was [actor] John Glazer's personal [that] he kindly brought…And so that became a huge part of his character. We want to put sweaters with shorts and high socks and sandals, we just want to go for it and make it look like his clothes came off the floor when he rolled out of bed, probably from a futon also on the floor.”
Jenn’s attention to detail is incredibly evident on screen—you can understand Laird’s strange, friendly, at times stalker-ish personality from the first glimpse of his odd hat. This is true of all the characters, especially the four girls who, near the end of the series, appear to be entirely different people (or in Hannah’s case, the same). The girls are seen one last time together at Shoshana’s engagement party.
“Hannah was wearing maternity overalls…And she wasn't invited, and she shows up anyway,” Rogien said. “These looks were very much distilling where their characters were at the time. And while all the colors work together, and I made sure that that was true, the looks don't really work together, and that's very much on purpose because they're not really getting along. They're not really in the same place. Physically they are, but emotionally they're not anymore.”
