Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran on ‘Pride & Prejudice’ 20 Years Later: ‘It Feels Like a Different Era of Filmmaking’

“People tell me how it’s their favorite film to watch on a Sunday afternoon when it’s raining. I’m so thrilled that it’s got that place in people’s hearts,” Jacqueline Durran said, reminiscing on the lasting relevance of the 2005 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s venerated novel “Pride & Prejudice.” The two-time Oscar-winner served as the costume designer for director Joe Wright’s feature film debut, a time when Durran was completely new to the world of cinema.

“Pride & Prejudice” celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2025, coinciding with Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. The film received wide critical acclaim at the time of its debut, and earned four Oscar nominations, including Durran’s first nod of nine for her costume designs. She’s since won the Best Costume Design statuette for “Anna Karenina” (2013) and “Little Women” (2020). Twenty years on, even Durran cedes to the film’s continued accessibility.

“We were talking about it recently because it feels like a different era of filmmaking,” Durran said on a late March afternoon over Zoom, a Hoover running indiscriminately in another room of her home.

“We were so much on the hoof, and we were young to it. And it was all fresh,” Durran said. “It was really a skeleton crew compared to the kind of crew sizes you have today. We just moved around the country as this kind of traveling band of filmmakers and made this film that we just loved making. It really was a pleasure to make. It was hard. But there was just something in the spirit of the film that was just a wonderful experience.”

Durran described the production of the 2005 film as a “blossoming” of then-burgeoning talents, including now-Oscar-nominated actors Keira Knightley, Rosamund Pike and Carey Mulligan. At the time of the film’s pre-production, Durran recalled her interview for the film. “I wasn’t sure that I really even wanted to do the job when I first went for the meeting because I just felt I was the wrong person for it,” Durran said, referencing the then-“establishment” of filmmaking.

“I think back then it was maybe film wasn’t such an open industry,” she said. “It was much more, kind of, traditional, at that point. And I felt like perhaps it just wasn’t the job for me. I was a young designer and I hadn’t had that much experience. Particularly not in that kind of period. So, I went to meet [Joe Wright] but I think that, really, my newness was something that was appealing. [Joe] wanted to come at it with such a fresh take. He didn’t necessarily want somebody who’d done it before. He wanted someone coming at it freshly as he was.”

That newfangled approach to Jane Austen’s material began with the time period. Though “Pride & Prejudice” was originally published in 1813, square in the middle of England’s Regency era, Wright and Durran took the film back to the late 18th century, at the time when Austen began the first drafts of her tale, then titled “First Impressions.”

“Joe and I discussed the different styles — the difference between, say, 1797, which I think was the date we chose to set [the film] and say 1815. It was really to do with how the waist rose and rose and rose,” Durran said, referencing the waistline of Regency era dresses.

“[Joe] found the earlier [style] more interesting and more attractive. I was very happy to go with that.” With Durran understanding the time period for the film’s production and execution for the costumes, she was met with “another problem” that invariably received some criticism. “There are so few things available correct to 1797 versus how many things are available to 1815,” she said of sourcing the costumes.

“I got a lot of criticism about the army uniforms being the wrong date. Obviously, in a film like ‘Pride & Prejudice,’ you’re not going to make 250 soldiers of the correct uniform.” Durran used the Waterloo uniforms, characterized by the red waist jackets, gray trousers and stovepipe shakos.

“You’re going to use the Waterloo uniforms because they’re there and, actually, it’s not about the uniforms.” Really, Durran’s costuming served as part of the film’s visual language — an extension of each character’s qualities and idiosyncrasies. Her process begins with consideration for “how the character would be reflected,” she said.

“There was definitely a feeling that the Bennetts were provincial and were behind the curve fashion-wise,” Durran said of the principal family in the story. “For Jane, she would be so feminine. She’d be in pink and pale blue. Elizabeth would be in much more earthy colors. She would be not-so feminine. In fact, there was more criticism of the fact that Elizabeth was wearing a man’s coat at the beginning,” Durran recalled.

The Bennett sisters comprised five in all — Jane (Pike), Elizabeth (Knightley), Mary (Talulah Riley), Kitty (Mulligan) and Lydia (Jena Malone) — with each character possessing their own unique look and style. “When you have a group of girls like that, it’s really important to give them all a distinct character,” she said.

Despite the decision to largely include styles from the late 18th century, Durran subtly nodded to the changing tone of fashion, particularly silhouette, with one character. “Caroline Bingley was definitely more advanced fashion-wise because she’d come from London,” Durran said of the character, portrayed by Kelly Reilly in the film

“It was very important to understand that the Bennetts were provincial — they lived in the countryside, they made their own clothes, if not they had them from a local dressmaker. There was nothing London about them. Any moves in fashion would be evident by Caroline Bingley, not by the Bennetts,” she said. “That was definitely baked into the characterization of the film.”

For the production, Durran relied on English fashion houses Cosprop and Sands Films, where the principal characters’ costumes were made. “That’s again another example of a different scale of filmmaking,” Durran said. “Nowadays, most probably, I’d have a workroom and we’d make them in-house. But we didn’t. It was a small film and we just made them in the costume houses. That was the size of our budget and what we could achieve.”

Since “Pride & Prejudice,” Durran collaborated with filmmaker Joe Wright on several of the director’s films, including “Atonement” (2007), “Anna Karenina” (2012) and “Cyrano” (2021), among others. Its a collaborative relationship Durran calls a “thrilling ride. You know that you’re in the hands of a director who will make your work look good and will value your work. If you’re putting that much energy and effort into what things look like that will really be represented in the film. He’s a director that loves the visual aspect of filmmaking.”

The oftentimes arduous, challenging process of making a movie is front-of-mind for Durran, especially in the year of this “Pride & Prejudice” adaptation’s 20th anniversary. “I was thinking about the kind of alchemy of filmmaking,” Durran said.

“You can put the best group together…but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I think there was something very distinct in the alchemy of ‘Pride & Prejudice.’ [Joe] wasn’t an established director. It was his first high-profile film. It was my first time working with him. We were a new team and it was young actors and we were going off on this adventure and the kind of feeling amongst the crew was tied to the feeling in the book: it was very youthful,” she recalled.

“I think ‘Pride & Prejudice’ is a fantastic example of that filmmaking alchemy of when everything comes together and makes a really beautiful film.”

A “beautiful film” derived from a classic work, Durran reflected on the serendipity of both the “Pride & Prejudice” 20th anniversary and Austen’s 250th birthday, calling the revered author a “brilliant” and “incredible” writer. “She has held this particular place in our culture,” Durran mused.

“I think it’s because she’s so accessible. It doesn’t feel like you’re reading an old story. You immediately understand the dynamics of the characters…the way it can be adapted to modern interpretation or classic period interpretations; it’s just stories that are so true and they’re so alive. I think she will just continue to be held in the esteem she’s held in nowadays.”