The woman who styled your favourite ​’80s teen movies

Cos­tume design­er Mar­i­lyn Vance knows a thing or two about cre­at­ing icon­ic looks for the movies, hav­ing designed Julia Roberts’ red gown in Pret­ty Woman and col­lab­o­rat­ing with John Hugh­es on many of his cher­ished com­ing-of-age fea­tures. From Fer­ris Bueller’s leop­ard-print vest to Bender’s flan­nel shirt, Vance has a knack for light­ing up the screen with just the right fab­rics and colours.

Reflect­ing on 1985’s The Break­fast Club, Vance reveals how Hugh­es’ sto­ry­telling instincts guid­ed her approach to the cos­tumes. ​“He want­ed you to feel his sto­ry and to feel what he wrote. When they pull up in their parent’s cars, you see right away who their fam­i­ly is and who they are. Claire comes and her father is dri­ving a BMW, she’s got the dia­mond ear­rings and the whole suede and leather look. It’s obvi­ous that the rela­tion­ship with her father is that she’s it. She’s their lit­tle girl and she’ll get what­ev­er she wants.”

Vance explains that she sourced the cloth­ing care­ful­ly so that it felt unique to each char­ac­ter. ​“For Emilio [Estevez], I bought the wrestling out­fit and I cut it away so he looked broad­er. I made his jack­et with­out a waist­band, it was just a school jack­et because he was a small­er stature. For Alli­son, I was influ­enced by Japan­ese design­ers like Yohji Yamamo­to; Japan­ese cloth­ing was becom­ing huge­ly pop­u­lar around that time. I couldn’t find any­thing black that was appro­pri­ate for her, so we had to make her a skirt. I used black pat­terned fab­ric as she was sup­posed to be wear­ing her father’s sweater. It was a process. Every­thing came togeth­er in a nat­ur­al way.”

She stuck to the same process for bad boy Ben­der, played by Judd Nel­son. ​“He was a take on a lot of dif­fer­ent bad boys. He made his cloth­ing work because of his atti­tude and because of where he came from. It was obvi­ous he was under­priv­i­leged com­pared to these oth­er kids. That’s why his coat is a thrift store coat. He cre­at­ed his own per­sona and that’s why he had the ripped shirt, the den­im and the vest under his over­coat. He was the out­cast he want­ed to be.”

Anoth­er of Hugh­es’ best-loved films is Pret­ty in Pink, for which music formed an impor­tant part of Vance’s work. ​“It was a great expe­ri­ence because John was so involved in the music. With the char­ac­ters and the music, every­thing fit togeth­er so well. For Duck­ie Dale it was very impor­tant. Andie and he were from the oth­er side of the tracks, they couldn’t afford to be shop­ping at Banana Repub­lic or even the Gap at the time. They didn’t want to look like that. They were indi­vid­u­als and they pushed them­selves to be them­selves. Their anguish and their feel­ing of being out­siders, we tried to por­tray that in their clothing.”

In Fer­ris Bueller’s Day Off, the title char­ac­ter wears just one out­fit through­out the film, but find­ing his style was far from straight­for­ward. ​“If you notice, noth­ing on Fer­ris match­es but you don’t feel that when you look at him. The pants he wears to get Sloane out of school, with the over­coat on top, are the pants he wears through­out the whole film. Lit­tle black and a blueish-grey pantsuit and the white t‑shirt was impor­tant to me. We had to have a sim­ple white t‑shirt on him because we couldn’t have any­thing with writ­ing on. Then I went over to [the depart­ment store] Mar­shall Field’s and looked at the sweaters; I cut the sleeves off one and that was his sweater vest.”

The rest of the out­fit was equal­ly chal­leng­ing to put togeth­er. ​“His shoes were white laces-ups, very con­ser­v­a­tive but at the same time told their own sto­ry. I then designed the jack­et to look like a Let­ter­man jack­et. I made it in three tones of grey, black and white, and had a reg­u­lar fit­ting jack­et. I’ve become an expert at that. I want­ed to have more char­ac­ter in the clothes because Fer­ris didn’t belong to any club, he had his close friends and that was it.”

Design­ing for the char­ac­ter of Fer­ris’ girl­friend, Sloane, pushed Vance’s imag­i­na­tion fur­ther still. ​“With Mia Sara, I made all of her cloth­ing because I couldn’t find any­thing that was real­ly unique to a wealthy young girl. So we made her those suede shorts, I got a pair of Gators army shorts, and it gave her a look. I made the white leather jack­et and it looked great, but a lit­tle too dressy, so we added the fringe all over and aged it down a little.”

A lot of thought went into Fer­ris’ best friend Cameron’s wardrobe too. ​“The jer­sey that he wore was giv­en to us by an actu­al hock­ey play­er called Gordie Howe. John got me his infor­ma­tion so I could get one of his shirts to put on the char­ac­ter for the film. I also had the skin­ny sus­penders on him, he was an out­sider too. They didn’t fit into any one cat­e­go­ry at school, they marched to their own drum. It was dif­fi­cult because the per­son­al­i­ties are so intri­cate in that script – it explains who they are and what they do, the psy­cho­log­i­cal aspects of who Fer­ris is.”

While Vance became asso­ci­at­ed with dress­ing the teen screen idols of the 1980s, her next Hugh­es’ pic­ture had her styling everyone’s favourite movie uncle. ​“I designed John Candy’s out­fits in Uncle Buck to look like peo­ple that I knew who were like his char­ac­ter. I had to make all of his clothes. Mak­ing him that over­coat and shap­ing the hat to work for him. I gave him a con­tem­po­rary tweed coat, sweater, slacks, his boots and his shirt to give him that ​‘Hey, I’m just a reg­u­lar guy!’ look. I loved John and I loved giv­ing him that look.”

Mar­i­lyn Vance is now work­ing on her new pod­cast Design­ing Hol­ly­wood, avail­able on Apple Music, Spo­ti­fy and YouTube.