Like many a modern press tour, Lili Reinhart’s globe-spanning, Y2K-ified endeavor to promote her new film, The Love Hypothesis, began on Pinterest.
“It started with a Pinterest board called ‘Rom-Com Baddie’ that I made and shared with my stylist, Ib Abdel Nasser,” Reinhart tells Vogue. The brief? A sartorial homage to the romantic comedy heroines that shaped the actor’s generation. “We wanted to pull a lot of vintage and lean into the ’90s and early 2000s aesthetic as a way of acknowledging the era of rom-coms and romance movies I grew up watching.”
Reinhart and Nasser originally planned to stick to the poppy colors and flirty silhouettes of the era. “The board slowly evolved from general references into photos of characters from those films and their iconic looks, and that’s really where the idea of doing various homages came from,” she explains. In pivoting to specific movie looks, the pair also had the chance to flex their vintage fashion muscles—including a one-of-a-kind Elie Saab couture gown from spring 2004.
But they also tapped designers to fashion new rom-com-inspired looks; Hervé Léger’s Michelle Ochs put her spin on Sandra Bullock’s lavender mini dress from Miss Congeniality, while Miu Miu offered their take on the pink velvet number from My Date With the President’s Daughter. “We started brainstorming in the spring and spent all summer going back and forth about which homages we wanted to do and which designers might be game to play with us. Miu Miu, Rodarte, Hervé Léger, Rebecca Taylor, and Tory Burch were all on board,” Reinhart says. “We shared references for the dresses we wanted to pay tribute to and then let the designers come back to us with their own ideas and sketches.”
Not every look was a direct replica of a rom-com past, including an Ungaro dress that reminded Reinhart of a Petri dish—a nod to her Love Hypothesis character, Olive, and a buttery yellow Versace skirt set that Nasser had been waiting to use for years. “For the looks that weren’t custom or direct homages, we still wanted everything to live within that romantic, vintage world,” she says. “Ib spent hours and hours searching online for rare pieces we could bring back to life, which made the whole tour feel like one big treasure hunt.”
Seeing how the sausage was made only reignited Reinhart’s love for rom-coms. “I hadn’t watched many of those movies in the last 10 or 15 years, but I started rewatching them while we were filming in Montreal last summer,” she says. “There are iconic dresses I’ve been in awe of since I was a kid, so having the opportunity to pay tribute to them while putting my own spin on things was really exciting.” Maybe, if she’s lucky, one of her costumes will join the rom-com canon.
Here, Lili Reinhart walks Vogue through her Love Hypothesis press tour wardrobe.
