Christmas Movie Dress Advent Calendar Day 4: Winona Ryder in LITTLE WOMEN

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Yesterday, a Christmas bad girl! Today, a holiday wild woman. We hope it’s clear by now that this advent calendar of Christmas movie dresses is designed to have some unexpected or offbeat choices on it, but there was no way we were going to avoid some of the more expected, perhaps even cliched choices. You’ve simply got to tip your hat to a ball gown or two. Once you do a search for “period Christmas movies,” you’re almost immediately going to be faced with which version of Little Women is going to wind up on your list. After some rushed viewings through all of the major adaptations, we decided on Jo March’s New Year’s Ball dress, worn by Winona Ryder in director Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation. It’s loaded with meaning and character revelations and it’s also just Christmassy as hell.

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This was legendary costume designer Colleen Atwood’s first period film and she spent a lot of time deconstructing old dresses from the period and even sourcing original textiles. It shows on film. The clothes all have a lived-in feel to them, as if they’d been worn many times and possibly even repaired, as clothing would have been during this period, especially by down-on-their-luck families like the Marches. It’s always possible we’re reading too much into any costume analysis, but Jo’s dress resembles quite a few of the dresses worn by her mother, played by Susan Sarandon in the film. At the ball, it looks clearly less trendy and less fine than most of the other dresses and both the lace cuffs and the satin bow look like pieces that were added to a more utilitarian dress to make it appear more formal. All of the attention was clearly lavished on older sister Meg’s dress, as she’s the far more marriage-minded of the two sisters and very much in search of a beau, unlike the tomboy Jo. It’s notable to us that Meg is in green in counter to Winona’s red. This is a common trope in Christmas movies and it’s repeated later in the film when the dress is worn by Beth the following Christmas:

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A sturdy, useful holiday dress passed from woman to woman in the March family; both a family tradition and a family history written in clothing.

Next up: A Holiday working gal!

[Photo/Still Credit: Columbia Pictures]

• Columbia Pictures
• Costumes
• Little Women
• Movie Advent Calendar
• Movie Costumes
• Winona Ryder