The Costumes in 'Joy Ride' Are in on the Fun

Warning: Spoilers for "Joy Ride" below.

Much ink has been spilled about the return of the raunchy comedy: The summer promised a hearty dose of R-rated, laugh-like-it's-2005 fun, starting with Jennifer Lawrence's "No Hard Feelings," then leveling up with Adele Lim's "Joy Ride."

"Joy Ride" is significant in many ways. It stars four AAPI actors — "Emily in Paris" breakout Ashley Park, comedian Sherry Cola, Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu and stand-up Sabrina Wu — which is still a rarity, especially in a comedy with a... let's say, more risqué sensibility. It's Lim's directorial debut. (A longtime TV writer and producer, she became more widely known for co-writing "Crazy Rich Asians." However, she left the sequel because of the drastic pay disparity between her and her white male counterpart.) She developed the story alongside screenwriters Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao; many of the heads of other departments working behind the scenes also come from the AAPI community. That includes costume designer Beverley Huynh, who came onto the project only a few weeks before cameras started rolling, but was determined to further push what representation meant in this film.

"This was an opportunity for us to highlight our community," she says. "This movie was shot shortly after the world was allowed to come back up from Covid, and during Covid, the AAPI community experienced a lot of racism. It was really important to us that, when we were creating this movie, with our all-Asian cast and many AAPI heads of departments, we showcased and highlighted the talents available to us."

Most of the looks in the film were purchased by the costume team or sent by brands directly. Huynh worked closely with the Lionsgate licensing team to ensure there were AAPI designers (like Sonia Hou, Taro Ishida, 3.1 Phillip Lim and Gentle Monster) available among the options.

Huynh also put a little bit of herself into the wardrobes of our core four: Audrey (Park), Lolo (Cola), Kat (Hsu) and Deadeye (Wu). "The funny thing with all four of our characters is that I kind of base each one off of my personal experience of growing up Asian in Canada, going through the motions of learning about myself and my culture and embracing my identity," she says.

Ahead, Huynh breaks down the fashion (and the style evolution) of the film's protagonists, as well as the signature style of the newest K-pop group, Brownie Tuesday. She also shares which character served as a sort of sartorial avatar of her young self and what career-long dream she reached by working on this movie.

Audrey (Ashley Park)

When we meet Audrey, she's a hard-working lawyer vying for partner, about to set off on a trip to Beijing to close a deal. She's straight-laced and self-serious — especially compared to best friend Lolo, whom she decides to bring along as a translator (and who encourages her to use this opportunity to learn more about her birth mom).

"Audrey is our ambitious go-getter," says Huynh. "Her wardrobe was very inspired by American culture — very white-picket fence, very goal-oriented and corporate... The colors aren't too loud, lots of grays and blues and neutrals. The only times we see her in color or when she's a little bit more experimental is when she's hanging out with Lolo by herself."

The walls Audrey's built around herself translate to her clothing choices, which include buttoned-up, tailored pieces from brands like Smythe, J.Crew, Massimo Dutti, James Perse, L'Agence and Sandro. But things change as the film progresses (and goes off the rails).

"When it gets too hot, she's able to [go down to a] T-shirt, and you can see the bralette underneath, but she puts a blazer over it. It's a story of, 'I'm strict. I'm straight. Nothing can be out of balance.' Then, as you progress, her vulnerability is shown," Huynh says. "And the more vulnerable she gets, the more the layers come off."

After a disastrous train ride and a slight debaucherous detour, the group makes it to Lolo's family's house, where Audrey's able to change and we start to see her wardrobe transition. "She becomes a little more comfortable, her clothing becomes a little bit looser and not as tailored," Huynh says. Out go the blazers, in come the knits.

"Once her story kind of breaks down even further, everything is more textured and knitted," she continues. "My vision for her, for that arc, was for her to become more huggable. You just want to hold her and be like, 'Hey, it's going to be okay.'"

By the time Audrey reaches Korea, both of these style narratives meet. "She adopts a little bit of Korean style, but still hangs onto her old life — the knit vest with that crisp white shirt," Huynh says. "Then, near the end, when she's apologizing and owning up to her mistakes, it's that softening... She's no longer blaming anybody for any shortcomings. It's in those moments that I want the audience to connect with her."

Lolo (Sherry Cola)

"I dressed Lolo exactly the way that I wished I had dressed if I had been more of a confident high schooler," Huynh says. "Each one of these characters has a little bit of me... and Lolo's definitely my hidden artist when I was younger."

From the get-go, Huynh establishes Lolo — an erotic artist — as a complete opposite of Audrey through her color palette and mixing of patterns. She wears Anthropologie, Doc Martens and vintage pieces. The idea, Huynh says, is for the viewer to think, "'This girl is confident. She's not afraid of who she is. She knows so much about herself.'"

However, the costume designer argues that, "in a way, wearing that many bold patterns and colors is a mask in itself."

"She's hiding behind that. She's maybe secretly unsure of herself, but she puts up that overconfident facade," she says. "I wanted to show that Lolo understands color and loves it, but you'll see that I didn't reveal too much skin or cleavage, for someone who's so body-positive in her artwork. That vulnerability is still there for her, that she doesn't know how to put herself out there yet. She was covered-up, but still sexy in her own way."

The only time she deviates from her bold, pattern-clashing style is actually at the very beginning, when her parents and Audrey's parents come together to send them off to China. "You see her in a muted oatmeal palette that's kind of mellow in comparison to the rest of her wardrobe," Huynh says. "The entire look is based off of the reaction she had when her parents were like, 'Well, she's going to need a lawyer.' She jokingly says, 'Better get the bail money.' There's a sense of vulnerability and insecurity there that I wanted to show, that she's never going to live up to expectations and comparison to Audrey."

Whereas Audrey breaks down her walls emotionally and sartorially, Lolo further transforms into the person she's been projecting to be. She catches up to her clothing, in a sense.

"Near the end, she recognizes further and further that the person that she's becoming is who she always wanted to be," Huynh says. "Her clothing is consistent. She knows herself so well now that she can execute it in a way that she steps forward more confidently."

Kat (Stephanie Hsu)

Kat, Audrey's college friend who's now a successful actor in China, has built a reputation for being a "good girl," concealing her colorful sexual history (and her current urges).

"To put it in a way that best describes this character, she's a little bit delusional," Huynh says.

Kat's contradictions are on full display: She wears the pieces you recognize from pap walks, meant to conceal someone's identity (sunglasses and trench coats and big hats, for example), but they have massive logos or are oversized to the point of being unmissable; she's meant to be this chaste woman, but wears cutout bodysuits to the club and super-short mini skirts.

"There's this overwhelming, overconfident individual that I feel, in a manner of speaking, is like when you start to make your riches and spend them faster than you can keep them," Huynh explains. "I wanted the big J.Lo hat to hide [her] face from the, like, non-existent paparazzi. I wanted her navy dress to have almost like a Dior cut where it's a sweetheart neckline, but has a little flared skirt, and is in this beautiful incognito color, but the belt screams, 'Look at my waist.'"

With Kat, "you don't know what's real," she continues.

Kat wears a mix of high and low — but the high brands you clock instantly. (No one can miss that oversized gold "V" on her Versace belt.)

Only when one of her darkest secrets gets exposed in the most public (and viral) of ways do we see a glimpse of the "old" Kat, wearing what we presume to be clothes from her past in the U.S. "When there is actually paparazzi behind her, she's in what I call the 'L.A. pap look': the long coat, the jeans — you never see her in jeans — and the baseball cap," Huynh says. "She's literally hiding. She looks like a normal person walking out the street. She's come to terms with her life, and she can't lie about it all the time."

Still, even after she comes clean, the two Kats sort of meet in the middle, as she holds on to this costume-y approach to dressing. "That's what I really liked about Kat's character, that at every point in time, there's contradiction — until the very, very end, when we see her reunite with everybody in Paris, and it's like the L.A. version of a Parisian, with the over- the-top houndstooth," Huynh says. "That bold Kat is back, but she's found a happy medium between her old self and new self."

Deadeye (Sabrina Wu)

When we meet Deadeye, they're introduced as Lolo's awkward cousin that may or may not have burned off some of Audrey's hair. They're introverted and don't have a lot of IRL friends, instead connecting with fellow BTS fans online. But they want to be accepted in and by the group.

Deadeye's sartorial arc unfolds more subtly, as they come into themselves and out of their shell. It had the biggest evolution pre-filming, though.

Originally, Huynh had a lot of images from J-pop and K-pop, as well as the Taiwanese "cat girl" archetype we see early on in the film, when Audrey, Lolo and Deadeye first land in Asia. "But by the time we got them into the fitting room, my notes from producers and directors were that anything that I put Sabrina in, they ended up looking too cool," she says. "We had to pull back a little bit and really just simplify what Sabrina would wear."

The costume department evolved in a more "ironic" direction, per Huynh, that allowed them to also "show the introverted vulnerabilities behind the oversized hoodies and things that were just a little bit baggier."

"This individual is hiding within their clothing — everything's just a little bit too big so that if they ever feel scared or not willing to come out of their shell, there's a place for them to hide," Huynh says. "The best description for what we went for is Tilda Swinton — anamorphic, non-binary."

Their first look, however, stands out among all of the costumes, as one of the best of the whole film: To travel from Seattle to Beijing, Deadeye wears that graphic tee featuring Sandra Oh's iconic quote, "It's an honor to be Asian." It was actually in the script, and Huynh had to source it (and Lionsgate had to clear it).

"There's a company that makes those T-shirts... But by the time that we were able to reach out to the company and get permission to use it, it was no longer available," she says. "What ended up happening is that we were allowed to use the saying — they gave us permission to use it and the quote from Sandra Oh —  and we got a basic American Apparel T-shirt and printed it out in the typeface on the shirt. The company that makes them was very generous and kind."

By the end of the film, when we fast-forward a year to the group's reunion in Paris, Lolo's cousin uses they/them pronouns, like Sabrina Wu, the actor that plays them. "In a way, the costumes reflected that as well," Huynh says.

In Paris, Deadeye's had a glow-up, so to speak: "They know who they are. They're better. And they've adopted this beautiful Japanese oversized style, with this amazing collared shirt and bomber jacket. You see a cleaner, more mature and more tailored version and of what they wore at the very beginning."

"Basically, how I dressed Sabrina at the end of the movie is what I was going for at the beginning," Huynh adds.

Brownie Tuesday

Of course, we must discuss the hottest K-pop group to watch, Brownie Tuesday, who just made their debut in Shanghai and whose first single already has nine million downloads.

It'll come as no surprise that Blackpink served as the blueprint for Huynh, especially given their popularity now and at the time of filming. She also pulled from Girls Generation, which she was first introduced to by her mentor many years ago. "I had never been exposed to K-Pop or J-Pop in my life, ever, up until that point," she says. "I remember watching my first K-pop video — I was like, 'What is this?'"

That became, as the Internet would say, a canon event for Huynh: "I told myself, 'One day, I'm gonna get my ass to Korea and I'm gonna do at least one K-pop video. I just need to do one.' My dream came out in a completely different way."

Part of her hope in getting to style a K-pop music video was that she'd get the opportunity to design her own graffiti. "Joy Ride" made that come true, too, allowing her to create her own print inspired by the street art you might see in cities like New York City, L.A. and London. This also served as one of the elements that connected the four individual looks. (Often, you'll see members of pop groups coordinate their looks so that they each stand out individually, but also fit in together nicely, be it through a color scheme, an embellishment or a construction detail.)

"Lolo's jacket, Audrey's skirt and Deadeye's T-Shirt all have this graffiti on it," she says. "How Kat ties into all of it is the color scheme — black, pink, teal and purple."

The ribbing, belts and fabrics also bring together the looks of the four members of Brownie Tuesday: Cutie, Sassy, Lisa and Lisa Two. Huynh also tied each outfit back to the characters themselves, like how Kat opts for pieces that accentuate her figure (the dramatic sleeve, the bustier, the mini skirt, the knee-high boots) and how Audrey's look is a reflection of the fun, daring persona she wishes she could inhabit.

"Lolo, I just had so much fun with — the color, the netting, the bustier and this kind of fun, sporty feel, she says. "Then, Deadeye is more androgynous. I feel like out of all of them, they would've put the most thought into their outfit, because they knew the most about K-pop. Like, their vest looks normal at the front, but then the back has all these amazing gold chains with all these designer names on them. That's where all that personality comes out. I loved that it was really based off of Deadeye being like, 'If I were to form a group, I know exactly what I would do.'"

"Joy Ride" is in theaters starting on July 5, 2023. 

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