“There wasn’t much wardrobe on last night’s episode,” admits Girls costume designer Jenn Rogien. Instead, the focus remained on three characters: Hannah, Ray, and Hannah’s new love interest, Joshua, played by Patrick Wilson. Joshua is handsome, charismatic, and totally adult — he wears white linen shirts, for crying out loud — and his casual maturity is the perfect foil for Hannah, who wears a delightfully ridiculous parrot-print romper for most of the episode. Rogien breaks down the episode’s outfits for us.
Is Hannah wearing yet another set of shorteralls? Also, how are shorteralls different than a romper?
She is! And they’re really not different at all. That’s just Hannah’s funny name for them. We found these at H&M, and they’re parrot-print. It’s just continuing the story we have with Hannah wearing shorteralls all the time, and also that she wears a lot of birds. She’s really hopped on the bird trend, like, a year after the fact. And as usual, it doesn’t fit quite right.
How did you decide what Joshua should wear?
We really wanted him to exude maturity and adulthood. He’s not a hipster at all. I can’t remember exactly what brand of jeans he’s wearing, but they’re modern and grown-up, and his shirt is fitted and heather gray. All his clothes are new and probably cost some money, but they’re still very casual and comfortable. When Hannah puts on his gray sweater, she even makes a joke about how it’s probably worth more than her rent. And in Joshua’s second scene, he wears a nice, crisp linen button-down. He’s a man who takes his shirts to be cleaned.
Is it supposed to be symbolic that Hannah changes into his sweater at the end of the episode?
Maybe, but it’s more that Hannah just puts on the first thing she finds. This plotline is very much about showing Hannah this alternate path in life that she could take, with this guy who has his life together.
Did you mean for Joshua’s outfit to be quite similar to yet very different from Ray’s?
Sort of. Like Joshua, Ray is wearing a T-shirt and jeans, but his outfit looks completely different. He’s wearing a Top Gun T-shirt, which was actually a very specific request from the creative team. We couldn’t find one that we liked, so we wound up printing a different T-shirt, and dyeing it and distressing it until it looked right.
