The 6 Best Movie Closets of All Time—And What Makes Them So Memorable

Photos: Photo 12, ? Touchstone Pictures, Entertainment Pictures / Alamy Stock Photo. Photo illustration: Lizzie Soufleris

When deliberating what to wear, who among us hasn’t dreamed of having a closet like Cher Horowitz from Clueless, with its revolving racks and high-tech interface. With some cinema magic, the homes in movies are often aspirational, and the closets are no exception. From Clueless to Barbie, we’ve rounded up the six best movie closets of all time and spoke to the people behind them.

Clueless

It’s hard to think of an on-screen closet more alluring than Cher Horowitz’s (Alicia Silverstone) in Clueless. With color-coded, revolving racks and a high-tech (at least for 1995) interface that shows whether or not a canary yellow tartan blazer matched (or was a MIS-MATCH!) with a black skirt on a clone of Cher’s body, it’s every young girl’s dream imagined for the big screen. That was the goal of costume designer Mona May. “This was something on a computer that a rich girl could achieve with the status and money that she had, and it was very aspirational,” she says. “To this day, we all want to have one of those closets.”

Production designer Steven Jordan found inspiration for the revolving aspect of the closet from a visit to a baseball collector’s museum-like home in New Jersey years prior. “He took a painting off the wall, and behind it was a conveyor belt full of historical baseball jerseys and things like that,” he recalls. “When I was trying to put a bedroom together for Cher, it just seemed like the way to go for the girl who has everything to add a dry cleaning conveyor belt.”

Even 25 years later, the Clueless closet largely remains a singular force. Still, there have been some who have tried to emulate it. Whering, for instance, is an app that allows users to style from their closet via the app on the go. Reformation even adopted a futuristic “smart” dressing room, where shoppers could view pieces on an iPad and order them to the dressing room. These are good attempts, but in May’s eyes, they’re still not the Clueless closet. “I don’t think anybody 30 years later has done it successfully,” she explains.

Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion

Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion quite literally begins and ends with clothes. At the beginning of the film, viewers get a glimpse of BFFs Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele’s (Lisa Kudrow) affinity for colorful and kooky looks through the closet in their shared apartment in Venice Beach. Production designer Mayne Berke told director David Mirkin that the pair were the visual embodiment of “sherbet.” Their closet was an extension of that, with oranges, purples, blues, and pinks playing off of his aesthetic vision. “They were clubby girls,” says the film’s costume designer, Mona May. “They were going out, so the closet was a lot more fun. It was chain mail dresses, boas, a lot of leather and crazy patterns and much brighter, wild colors.”

Filming Romy and Michele from inside their purple-walled closet, the filmmakers were able to showcase the full extent of their fun and zany wardrobe. “We literally oversized it [to about] eight feet wide,” Berke recalls. “And we made the back of the closet removable so we could have the closet’s point of view.” For Berke, clothes are an important through line in the film: “It starts with the closet and clothes, [and] it ends with clothes in a designer boutique on Rodeo Drive

The Princess Diaries 2

In The Princess Diaries 2, Mia Thermopolis, Crown Princess of Genovia (Anne Hathaway), is preparing to ascend the throne. So it’s no surprise that her closet got quite the regal upgrade from the first film. “It was supposed to be every young girl’s dream,” recalls the Princess Diaries 2 set decorator, Casey Hallenback. Lined with tailored, pastel suits and shoes and drawers brimming with sparkly trinkets only the one percent could afford, Mia’s closet embodies how much her life had shifted since she went from clumsy, frizzy-haired San Francisco teen to amateur royal. According to Hallenback, director Garry Marshall was “the driving force” and visionary behind the closet and its mechanisms, which included remote-controlled doors and drawers and backlit display-like shelving. “You push on a drawer and it automatically opens,” he recalls. In short, it was fit for a soon-to-be queen.

Confessions of a Shopaholic

The stiletto-sporting writer Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) may be riddled with debt, but she has a closet—quite literally—stuffed to the brim with every article of clothing imaginable. It’s so filled that everything is hyper-organized in plastic packaging: That is until it explodes. “It was like a fantasy room,” says Kristi Zea, production designer for Confessions of a Shopaholic. “It was a bedroom that she had turned into a closet, basically.” Despite Rebecca’s shopping addiction, she still had a strategy when it came to organizing her endless racks of eclectic dresses and shoes. “Her clothing meant the most to her, so her ability to keep all of that in some kind of order—even though it was an amusing order—was good,” she explains. But Rebecca’s “female cave,” as Zea calls it, remains a pipe dream for many in New York City—unless you’re Carrie Bradshaw.

13 Going on 30

When Jenna Rink (Jennifer Garner) goes from 13 to 30 with a sprinkling of wishing dust, so does her wardrobe. What begins as scrunchies and bedazzled boatneck tops from 1987 turns into an opportunity for Jenna to play dress-up in her very own only-in-the-movies walk-in closet in New York City. “In the fantasy of 13 Going on 30, you’re pushing it to what would be this fantasy, perfect closet,” says the movie’s cinematographer Don Burgess. The closet is elevated by backlighting the clothing, drawers, and shoes. “Every time you look up where the shoes are, the shoes are all lit and it looks like a shoe commercial,” he recalls. In essence, Burgess says, the closet was meant to look like it could belong to Barbie: “For better or for worse, it’s playing on the idea, What do I want to be when I grow up?”

Barbie

Barbie was everything, in part, due to her very pink, fully stocked, and highly curated dream closet. It turns out that the hub for her flirty gingham dresses and sparkly jumpsuits in Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film was inspired by Mattel’s packaging for the plastic doll. “It was like window dressing and evolving the idea of when you buy a Barbie in a box and you have accessories all the way around it,” says Barbie production designer Sarah Greenwood. In terms of the aesthetic, Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer referenced Catherine Deneuve and her role in the 1964 musical romance The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to create the “singular closet.” Because Barbie has her makeup in her closet, Greenwood and Spencer had to create a life-size version of what would be in a toy box. “Literally everything was fastened with magnets,” Greenwood adds. The closet was “magical” not just because of its contents but because Barbie was able to instantly swap outfits too.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

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