Your shopping region is

Heidi Bivens Is Hollywood's Sartorial Savant

With Bold-Faced Credits Under Her Belt And A Directorial Debut In The Works, meet the costume designer behind ‘Euphoria,’ ‘Spring Breakers’ and ‘Mid90s.

Writer: Layla Halabian
hero

Heidi Bivens fell into an Amazon shopping wormhole recently. She came across a lace, Victorian dickey that she had once upon a time saved for Euphoria’s resident dreamy art girl, Jules Vaughn, played by Hunter Schafer. It was just cosplay-adjacent enough to prompt Bivens to click through to the shop itself, which happened to be stocked with tons of Jules-core threads. As the HBO show’s costume designer, Bivens loves finding the perfect piece in the most random place—it makes the characters’ personal style seem real in a way that goes beyond accuracy. “People curate their life and wardrobe over time,” she says over the phone from New York’s Hudson Valley. “And that's part of [costume design], bringing ideas through that filter of just trying to piece together [your style] over time.”

'Euphoria' protagonists Jules and Rue.   Photos: Eddy Chen/Courtesy of HBO

Fleshing out Euphoria creator Sam Levinson’s complex Gen Z party monsters gave Bivens the chance to really play with costume design in relation to character growth. Through Bivens’ trusty eye, tomboy Rue Bennett (played by Zendaya) battles addiction in her dead dad’s zip-up hoodie, Jules matures from her candy-coated anime waifu origins toward the self-assured, and Alexa Demie’s Maddy Perez makes matching sets a staple to burgeoning hot girls everywhere. Levinson was never too concerned with reality when it came to his suburban teens, which opened the door for Bivens to go wild. You’ve got to suspend disbelief in quite a few aspects of Euphoria, especially when it comes to how a suburban teen like Jules can afford pieces by rising star designers like Barragán and Beepy Bella retailing for hundreds of dollars on an allowance. But that’s half the fun of the show.

Photo: Eddy Chen/Courtesy of HBO

What’s special about Euphoria’s costume impact is how effortlessly it took over IRL style. One doesn’t even need to watch the show in order to recognize its influence on personal style. Sure, it’s par for the course as far as teen shows are concerned—one can argue Gossip Girl made a similar sartorial splash on culture at large when it premiered in 2007—but Emmy accolades are a whole different story. Euphoria dominated in the 2020 Emmy Awards nominations, including Bivens herself for Outstanding Contemporary Costumes.


“That was really special for me because I think since the beginning of having a career, one of my main objectives is to be respected by my peers and people who are doing the same work as me,” she recalls. “I don't think I was really expecting that at all. It was a surprise to me. Mainly because [Euphoria] being a teen show, even though it's not necessarily for teens—those shows aren't always necessarily recognized.” 

The cast of Harmony Korine's 2012 cult favorite 'Spring Breakers.'   Photos: Courtesy of A24

Bivens’ work on Euphoria may have been the catalyst toward pushing her out of the cult favorite category and toward the mainstream, but she’s known her way around youthful, wild energy way before she ever linked with Levinson. The neon nihilism of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, the vacation sleaze of that same auteur’s Beach Bum and the authentic skater looks of Mid90s are all part of Bivens’ impressive resumé. Not every costume designer could work with Korine to create imagery as powerful as Spring Breakers’ degenerate hotties in matching swimwear and bubblegum-pink balaclavas toting firearms without a care in the world, but they all sure as hell could aspire to.

“He's one of the more visionary filmmakers alive today,” she says of Korine. “He's imagining [everything] and putting it on the page. Harmony is a painter and he's also a visual artist beyond movie-making, [so] he can be even more specific in his descriptions, his wardrobe descriptions. It's fun for me to be able to execute that because it's like I'm helping him make a painting.”

Bivens shares a similar dynamic with Levinson, another ideal collaborator: he’s giving, trusting, and lets Bivens do her thing without getting in the way. “When a director trusts you and lets you do your thing, it's the greatest gift,” she explains. “To be second-guessed and micromanaged doesn't really breed creativity in my experience. I always am so thankful for working with someone who is willing to collaborate in a way that is super respectful, and he is.”  

When a director trusts you and lets you do your thing, it's the greatest gift.

Heidi Bivens

Levinson works wardrobe cues into his script, allowing Bivens and the cast to visualize the scenes at full-tilt. Take the two special episodes released this winter to bridge season one and the COVID-delayed season two. Each focuses on protagonists Rue and Jules separately: their relationship, Rue’s addiction, and Jules’ reluctance to be swept away in it. The episodes are characteristically raw and heavy, filled with both resentment and love; the two girls share an intense connection, which Levinson plays with in their shared dream world. Rue and Jules inhabit the same fantasy of living in New York together after high school, right down to their exact outfits. “Sam's doing this interesting thing there with the dream world and connecting their subconsciouses,” says Bivens. “That was something that I didn't really understand on the page. And then it became clear as we were shooting and then even with the end result and watching the episode, it just was so seamless, it works so well.” 

While most of Bivens’ costume design work glows with the sweaty sheen of excess partying and too much sun, her latest project, the erotic thriller Deep Water, explores a significantly more ominous terrain. Directed by Adrian Lyne and adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel, Dark Water stays firmly planted in their established psychosexual realms—these are the people who brought us Unfaithful and The Talented Mr. Ripley, respectively, after all. This is their language.

Bivens, who counts herself as a fan of both Lyne and Highsmith, wasted no time in signing up for the project. If the ethos of costume design is all about serving the story at hand, it’s a chance for Bivens to flex her subtler muscles. Deep Waters costumes are sophisticated and cool, and with all eyes on leads Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck, Bivens’ own star is also on the rise.

Bivens' take on the teens of Jonah Hill's 'Mid90s.'   Photos: Courtesy of A24

Bivens is hard at work defining herself as a true Hollywood force of nature, expanding her wheelhouse outside costume design and currently working on her directorial debut. While she still has to stay hush on the project, a television adaptation of Lois Lowry’s fantasy young adult novel Gossamer, it’s very much a realization of a longtime goal. A young Bivens studied filmmaking at Hunter College in New York and had her sights set on directing before moving laterally behind the scenes toward fashion; it only makes the full-circle moment all the more sweet. “It feels great and something that I wanted to do for a while,” she says, “and to be starting on that road is super exciting. I'm enjoying it more than I ever could have imagined.”

Bivens is in a unique position. Through Euphoria, she influences youth culture in real time. Her movies ignite trends. And with Deep Water, she’s swimming from the niche to what will in all likelihood be a mainstream box office smash. While uncertainty plagues almost every corner of life these days, there’s one thing that feels worth betting on: Bivens’ mark on Hollywood is only beginning.