Random Colors Of Your Favorite Movie Costumes Really Mean (16 items)

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  (#7) Clueless

  • Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Stacey Dash, Wallace Shawn, Billy West, Donald Faison, Mike Judge, Amy Heckerling, Breckin Meyer, Dan Hedaya, Jeremy Sisto, Nicole Bilderback, Julie Brown, Carl Gottlieb, Jace Alexander, John Kricfalusi, Elisa Donovan, Twink Caplan, Sam Maccarone, Joseph D. Reitman, Roger Kabler, Micki Duran, Michael Klesic, Gregg Russell, Jermaine Montell, Justin Walker, Aida Linares, Ron Orbach, Sean Holland, Herb Hall, Bobbie Sunday Starr, Josh Lozoff, Christopher E. Cooper, Danielle Eckert, Anthony Beninati, Susan Mohun, Craig Ponder, Sabastian Rashidi

  Alicia Silverstone wears what is arguably the most famous plaid outfit ever in Clueless. She plays Cher Horowitz, and the yellow plaid was designed to be bold so the audience understood something crucial about the character right away. Cher is near the top of her high school's social ladder, so the yellow is a way of setting her apart from everyone else. It implies that she stands out in a crowd - and, in this case, she literally does.

  Clueless costume designer Mona May explained the bold color further to Bustle. "You start with: What would the girls' first day of school outfit be? The quintessential plaid skirt," she says. "Then you want to take that to the next level. So you say a suit would be much better. Then what color? Yellow pops."

  Look closely and you'll see that whenever Cher is wearing this outfit, she's surrounded by people - other than Dionne, naturally - and objects that are more dully colored, just to reinforce the dynamic.
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  (#4) Mean Girls

  • Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Lacey Chabert, Lizzy Caplan, Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer, Daniel DeSanto, Neil Flynn, Jonathan Bennett, Diego Klattenhoff, Daniel Franzese, Jonathan Malen, Eve Crawford, Jack Newman, Bruce Hunter, Laura DeCarteret, Clare Preuss, Dan Willmott, Talia Russo, Marc Allen, Alisha Morrison, David Reale, Dwayne Hill, Darryl Armstrong, Kaylen Christensen, Sima Fisher, Rajiv Surendra, Krysta Carter, Ely Henry, Chris Ploszczansky, Julia Chantrey, Tara Shelley, Jan Caruana, Elana Shilling, Wai Choy, Michelyn Emelle, Jill Morrison, Bathsheba Garnett, Les Porter, Olympia Lukis, Noelle Boggio, Kristen Bone, Stefanie Drummond, Megan Millington, Nicole Crimi, Shannon Todd, Andreja Punkris, Jo Chim, Randi Lee Butcher, David Sazant, Erin Jarvis, Tyson Fennell, Sharron Matthews, Valerie Casault, Molly Shanahan, Miranda Edwards, Erin Thompson, Danielle Nguyen, Jessie Wright, Jacky Chamberlain, Jeff Moser, Ky Pham, Stephan Dickson, Michelle Hoffman, David Aherne, Graham Kartna, Nicholas A. Catalano, Alexandra Stapley, Ayo Agbonkpolo, Jordan Dawe, John Gadsden, Lucila Grzetic

  Pink is generally equated with femininity. In fact, the color has long been used for baby girls in clothing, bedding, and, more recently, gender reveals. Red tends to represent strength or aggression. When white is added, it softens those qualities, creating something more representative of romance, charm, or tenderness. 

  The ensembles worn by Lindsay Lohan and her co-stars in the comedy Mean Girls use pink ironically. These characters are not sweet and demure. They're, well, mean, even going so far as to pen nasty comments about classmates in a "burn book." The use - or, one could argue, abuse - of pink in this way weaponizes femininity. Cady and pals might look pretty on the outside, but they're often ugly on the inside. Their outward appearance belies a sense of malice underneath. 

  The film's costume designer, Mary Jane Fort, compared the mean girls in their pink ensembles to over-indulging at a candy store, saying, "When you see this group, you want to feel like you walked into something delicious and wonderful even though it's kind of bad for you."
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  (#15) Breakfast at Tiffany's

  • Audrey Hepburn, Mickey Rooney, Mel Blanc, George Peppard, Martin Balsam, Buddy Ebsen, Patricia Neal, Joan Staley, John McGiver, Henry Beckman, Hanna Hertelendy, Alan Reed, Frank Marth, Stanley Adams, Tommy Farrell, Elvia Allman, Dick Crockett, Michael Zaslow, Antonino LoTempio, Joe Gray, José Luis de Vilallonga, Nicky Blair, Kip King, Mike Mahoney, Richard Stapley, Charles Sherlock, Claude Stroud, Sue Casey, Beverly Powers, Gil Lamb, Fay McKenzie, Kate Murtagh, Joyce Meadows, Helen Spring, James Lanphier, Chuck Niles, Robert Patten, Joseph J. Greene, Marian Collier, Orangey, Linda Wong, Glen Vernon, Henry Barnard, John Perri, Wilson Wood, Bill Bradley, Dorothy Whitney, Paul Lees, Frank Kreig, Bill Neff, Al Avalon, Roydon Clark, Tom Curtis, Mary LeBow, Barbara Kelley, Joe Scott, Peggy Patten, William Benegal Rau, Hollis Morrison, Towyna Thomas, Miriam Franklin, Florine Carlan, George Fields, James Field, Annabella Soong, Leatrice Leigh, Christine Corbin, Michael Quinlivan, Mel Leonard

  The outfit Audrey Hepburn wears at the beginning of Breakfast at Tiffany's has had a long-lasting impact. It's credited for kick-starting the "little black dress" fashion phenomenon that continues to this day. The character Holly Golightly is first seen getting out of a cab wearing a black satin gown accentuated with a string of pearls and sunglasses. 

  To grasp the power of the black dress, it's crucial to understand the way we see it. Holly gets out of the taxi somewhere around dawn, implying she's been out all night. Noted fashionista Hubert de Givenchy was hired to conceive a look for the character's introduction, which he did in collaboration with Breakfast at Tiffany's costume designer Edith Head. They felt that having Holly emerge looking radiant in a black dress would hint at her wild side. Only someone of extreme glamour would be able to have nocturnal adventures and still look like a million bucks first thing in the morning. Black is often considered a color of mystery and elegance, so that made it the natural shade for Holly's onscreen debut.
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  (#6) Kill Bill Volume 1

  • Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Quentin Tarantino, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Chiaki Kuriyama, Sonny Chiba, Chia Hui Liu, Michael Parks, Michael Bowen, Julie Dreyfus, Ai Maeda, Jonathan Loughran, Hikaru Midorikawa, James Parks, Jun Kunimura, Christopher Allen Nelson, Akaji Maro, Kazuki Kitamura, Sakichi Satô, Zhang Jingchu, Shun Sugata, Ambrosia Kelley, Naomi Kusumi, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Issei Takahashi, Juri Manase, Shu Lan Tuan, Goro Daimon, Michael Kuroiwa, Yamanaka Soh, Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama, Tetsuro Shimaguchi, Stevo Polyi, Yoshiko Yamaguchi, Sachiko Fujii, Xiaohui Hu, Yōji Tanaka

  Uma Thurman played "The Bride" in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill saga, but it's not a wedding dress that comes to mind when you think of her. Instead, it's that yellow jumpsuit, which has gone on to become iconic. Keeping in mind that this character is motivated by a desire for revenge, yellow might seem an unlikely choice, given that it's considered a bright, cheery color.

  It's important to remember, though, that the Bride wants revenge because her happy day was ruined by assassins. She tells Bill that she's pregnant right before he unloads his weapon on her. As the Bride later eliminates her enemies (and their henchmen), her yellow outfit becomes more stained with red blood. We can therefore infer that the yellow represents a single-minded obsession with the anticipated happiness that a marriage and baby would have brought, while the red is the trauma she sustained because it was taken away from her.

  At the same time, it could be argued that the yellow jumpsuit also represents Tarantino's own single-minded obsession. Kill Bill was inspired by his favorite martial arts films, especially those of Bruce Lee, who frequently wore yellow onscreen (including in his final film, Game of Death, in which he dons the original version of the Bride's jumpsuit). Dr. Steven Peacock, head of media at the University of Hertfordshire, points out, "Tarantino is a very accomplished filmmaker in his stylistic choice, and color would be a huge part of that. He's drawing together all those associations of previous movies and character types and costume design and iconography - it’s all there for a reason, folded into the drama on-screen in a way that doesn’t suggest itself as willfully placed."
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  (#1) Us

  • Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop

  To understand the meaning of the red jumpsuits in Jordan Peele's Us, you first have to understand the twist ending, so consider this a spoiler alert if you haven't seen it. The whole film is about the "Tethered," who live in subterranean tunnels and are connected to people above the surface. Four of these doppelgangers, led by Red (Lupita Nyong'o), come out to terrorize Adelaide (also Nyong'o) and her family. In the film's final act, it is revealed that Adelaide is actually the Tethered version. She escaped as a child and made the real Adelaide take her place underground. The one we know as Red, in other words, is the one who came from the normal world.

  Red is a bold primary color, often considered "hot" and frequently associated with violence or warfare, which is how it's used here. The now-grown "real Adelaide" is angry about having been forced into a life she was not meant to live. Therefore, she and her cohorts wear the color when they escape and make their way above ground. Kym Barrett, the costume designer for Us, said that was a very deliberate choice meant to reflect the character's rage. “She completely enshrouds her being with this red,” Barrett told The Atlantic. “It’s a symbol of aggression, a screaming mission. You cannot miss it.” 

  Furthermore, the "fake Adelaide" always wears white, and her clothes become more covered in blood as the story advances. According to Barrett in the same interview, this was to connect Red to Adelaide, so that by the end, "she's almost as red as Red."
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  (#11) Spring Breakers

  • James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Gucci Mane, Heather Morris, Jeff Jarrett, Russell Stuart

  Love it or hate it, if you've seen Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, you probably remember the scene at the end where Alien (James Franco), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), and Brit (Ashley Benson) get revenge on Big Arch (Gucci Mane) and his crew. They're decked out in bright neon swimwear and neon masks. The big finale is filmed in blacklight to make them literally glow.

  This is more than just a case of making something look cool. The filmmakers had serious intentions with the use of these colors. Costume designer Heidi Bivins said that she and Korine wanted to visually convey how the characters transition from college girls to crooks while on vacation. Their clothing becomes more colorful as the film goes on, but what they wear at the end represents that they have been fully transformed. "[Korine] had a vision from the beginning," she said. "He always had the idea to use neon colors, with neon being so predominant in a place like Florida."

  In other words, the neon clothing represents the manner in which Candy and Brit, in particular, have been swallowed up by a new, illicit way of life they discover in the Sunshine State. Because the brightness of neon is believed to distort the colors' inherent traits, having the now-distorted characters wear them makes perfect sense. 

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