VOGUE – Saoirse Ronan is “a person with the aura of a star but none of the pretence,” finds Reni Eddo-Lodge in the Irish actor’s November 2024 British Vogue profile – unfathomably her first. As the erstwhile child star-turned-Oscar nominee, whose talent has been compared to that of Hollywood matriarch Meryl Streep, took to the stage at this magazine’s Forces of Fashion event, Ronan, in a sinuous red dress, indeed had the charisma of a performer, but the warmth of a dear friend.

In conversation with the legendary British costume designer Jacqueline Durran, whom a 12-year-old Ronan met on the set of Atonement and has since worked with on Hanna, Little Women and Blitz, Ronan is just as keen to steer the tête-à-tête towards Durran’s work on Barbie (“it wouldn’t have been a film that interested me at all unless it was directed by Greta [Gerwig]”) than she is her own career. Still, the old acquaintances find a happy medium in delighting over their most recent collaboration on Steve McQueen’s new take on the quintessential Second World War film. “It was about looking at all of the people in London as individuals and thinking of the different stories, because it’s quite easy to forget that it was millions struggling,” notes Durran of the importance of cutting through the rose-tinted nostalgia. The costumes, meanwhile, are as detail-driven as we’ve come to expect from Jacqueline, who says the watchword on set was “authenticity”, particularly when considering the surprisingly overt glamour that was “part of the war effort to keep up appearances.”
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