‘Ryan Gosling asked me if he could have Ken underpants’: Barbie costume designer Jacqueline Durran spills her secrets

When Jacqueline Durran was crafting the costumes for the Barbie film, which whipped the world into a hot-pink frenzy last summer, she first worked out all of Barbie’s outfits – and then she “fitted Ken in”. He is, says the British costume designer perhaps best known for her work on period dramas, “the accessory to what she’s wearing”.

The notion of a clinger-on Ken clearly amused the cast and crew, as much as it tickled the rest of us when the film exploded on to our screens. “Greta had this great image of ‘Kens’,” says Durran, referring to the film’s director Greta Gerwig. “Like what do Kens do when Barbie doesn’t need them? They just stand idling and waiting: they don’t have anywhere to live, they’re just there.” The fact that the film’s main Ken was played by ultimate “internet boyfriend” Ryan Gosling only makes the joke funnier.

In terms of the costumes, this dynamic was expressed by, for example, dressing all the Kens in the same white jumpsuit for a block party while each Barbie got a different, uniquely fabulous outfit. It was, says Durran, the “physical manifestation of that sort of Ken”.

But Ken’s second-fiddle role is not being reflected in the real world. As Durran speaks to me via video from a nondescript room at Shepperton Studios, wearing a normcore navy blue jumper and thick-rimmed glasses while drinking from a mug with a blue tit on it, it is not long since the Oscar nominations were announced. Although Durran is nominated for her work on Barbie, her eighth Oscars nod, Gerwig was omitted from the best director category and Margot Robbie from the lead actress nominations. Gosling, on the other hand, is nominated for best supporting actor for his role as Ken, with America Ferrera gaining her first ever Oscar nomination for her supporting role as a Mattel employee.

Durran is quick to laud what Gerwig achieved – “a movie that was original, extremely popular, that took something that we all know and transformed the way people viewed it into something amazingly different”. She says she doesn’t understand “why that isn’t recognised, with other directors who maybe didn’t make such a splash this year”. In Robbie’s case, Durran thinks