The Unsung Inventors of 'Meg Ryan Fall'
On Nora Ephron's film sets, these costume designers dressed Ryan in cozy, autumnal outfits that the internet later embraced.
It’s never too early to celebrate “Meg Ryan Fall.”
At the height of summer, the internet began pining for it. Meg Ryan’s fans on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, swooned over stills from the beloved romantic comedies she made with Nora Ephron in the late 1980s through the ’90s.
“I can feel it…it’s almost Meg Ryan Fall!!” one fan wrote in August, posting photos of Meg as Sally Albright, sporting a brick-red turtleneck sweater, and as Kathleen Kelly, bedecked in a cozy gray pullover at her children’s bookstore, The Shop Around the Corner.
“My 14-year-old son is funny, but always in an unpredictable way,” the author Dan Charnas mused in July. “So we are in the middle of watching ‘When Harry Met Sally…’, you know, this great New York movie, and he says: ‘Why is it always Fall?!’”
Replying to Charnas, someone used all caps to shout: “BECAUSE SWEATERS. MEG RYAN IN FALL FASHIONS. NORA EPHRON DIALOGUE x MEG RYAN IN SMART FALL ENSEMBLES.”
Honestly, I could not have shouted it better.
If you tend to stay off social media, I’ll briefly explain the origins of Meg Ryan Fall: The phrase first appeared online during the pandemic, when housebound young women curled up on the couch and rewatched the rom-com holy trinity that Nora wrote and/or directed, with Meg as her star. They coveted Sally and Kathleen’s quality fabrics, classic tailoring and casual elegance. Meg made the ordinary seem aspirational. Her screen style was accessible and incredibly easy to emulate yet rather conservative — a rebuttal to the sequined drama of ’80s fashion. On TikTok, a new generation of Meg copycats recreated her characters’ outfits and kicked off an autumnal aesthetic that swiftly took on a life of its own. In 2021, Meg herself got into the trend, hashtagging #MegRyanFall via Instagram:
As I write this newsletter in 2024, Meg Ryan Fall is still a Thing. The styles that Meg wore, especially in When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail, endure.
We must give credit where it’s due.
Decades before Meg Ryan Fall went viral, costume designers Gloria Gresham and Albert Wolsky were sifting through Manhattan clothing boutiques and fabric stores for inspiration. Gresham, now retired and living in Indianapolis, collaborated with director Rob Reiner and Nora, his clever screenwriter, on When Met Sally in 1988. Here’s an excerpt from my book I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy, which turns seven years old this month:
Gloria Gresham took Meg shopping on Fifth Avenue and below 14th Street, scouring SoHo and the Village for Sally’s wardrobe. The two consulted popular magazines — Gloria partial to Life versus Vogue, real people versus glossy excess —and spotted an odd wide-brimmed hat that could belong to Annie Hall, J. Peterman, or Pharrell. It repelled Rob but grew on him later. Gloria, who dressed John Travolta in Urban Cowboy, Kevin Bacon in Footloose, and Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters II, worked primarily on corset-free contemporary pictures. She formerly assisted Annie Hall designer Ruth Morley, styling Diane Keaton’s menswear-inspired androgyny. For Sally, Gloria unpacked a fitted red turtleneck sweater, a boxy gray blazer, classic straight-leg jeans and loose-fitting pleated pants that harkened back to the 1940s. At night, Sally stepped out in an off-the-shoulder black cocktail dress. Prim, practical, appropriate. But her hat, like that spontaneous orgasm, was a surprise; just when you think you’ve pinned her down, Sally peels back another layer of her identity. With Harry — prone to fishermen sweaters and kvetching — what you see is what you get. “I don’t think we thought of her as chic, but as individual,” Gloria said of Sally. “She dresses to please herself.”
Recall that surprising hat and those spectacular autumn leaves:
While Annie Hall certainly inspired Gresham’s Sally selections, Wolsky looked further back in cinematic history to find the muse for You’ve Got Mail’s Kathleen. Specifically, he studied Funny Face, the 1957 rom-com starring Audrey Hepburn as a wide-eyed, winsome bookseller who donned a plain black turtleneck underneath a sleeveless, shapeless tweed jumper. (It had pockets!)
“She was as close as you could get to someone who was interesting and quirky and smart,” Nora once said of Audrey in that film. “You saw her in that bookstore, in Funny Face, in that little black turtleneck sweater, and it was the most compelling article of clothing anyone wore in a movie when I was growing up.”
I had the honor of interviewing Wolsky — who won two costume-design Oscars for All That Jazz and Bugsy — at his stunning Midcentury home in the Hollywood Hills during the research phase of I’ll Have What She’s Having. He was elegant, easygoing and gossipy, with impeccable taste and a twinkle in his eye. No wonder Nora had liked him. I went through my old interview transcripts circa 2015 and unearthed these nuggets from our conversation:
Wolsky on working with You’ve Got Mail writer-director Nora:
It was my first time with Nora and, first of all, she knows New York. She knew New York very well and, in fact, that was one of the major accomplishments of this movie — that the geography of it is totally correct.
She wanted [Kathleen] to look very real. The feeling of what somebody working, struggling, in New York would look like. That was her intent, and it was certainly one that she made very clear to me that she was going after.
The main intention was always [Kathleen’s] "work" look. Because in most of the movie, that's where she spends her time. It's a bookstore on the Upper West Side —she is resisting things like Barnes & Noble and stuff like that. She's her own person.
On creating Kathleen’s urban uniform:
I didn't want it to be prim. That was not the intent. But I wanted it to be fresh and to look like she works in New York, in a bookstore.
I prefer to go to the market. I ignore brands. People say, "Who's this?" "Who's that?" Which is, you know, the favorite question. And I don't even know because I haven't paid attention.
Particularly in her line, she had no money. She wasn't that rich. She was struggling with her bookstore. Why would she be in Armani?
On dressing Meg:
Oddly enough, I think it's the last time she's been Meg Ryan on screen — you know, the kind of youngish, innocent look. I think then she wanted to kind of discard her image. That ingénue image. But she was lovely to dress.
I [liked] her in a couple jumpers, you know, to do a blouse underneath or something like that. She wasn't too crazy about that.
If the actor's going to be uneasy with what they're wearing, and it sort of would stifle them some way — that doesn't work. It's not worth it then. I don't care how good that dress may have been. It's just not worth it.
On successfully persuading Meg to wear a jumper:
She didn't wear as many as I would've hoped. But there was a compromise there. She wore [a jumper] once or twice if my memory serves me. I never quite understood why she didn't like it. I thought it was such an easy garment. It would have been a natural for [Kathleen] in her wardrobe to just jump into and not think too much about.
I think she was getting to a point, really, where she was beginning to feel, "I don't know if I still want to be Meg Ryan." You know, it was a funny period for her, where she began to think, "How long can I play these ingénue parts?"
On compromising when Meg requested to wear Marc Jacobs — a trendy designer brand! — for her dress in the Riverside Park finale:
She’d been quite cooperative, and she’d agreed to most of what I’d asked for. So, “Aw, c’mon, she wants to wear that dress.” I finally added a little sweater and that saved me. That saved the dress for me. I felt the color was photographing a little “eh” and [that] was why it was dyed [to appear brighter]. Plus, I had to do a little bit of finagling because you could see right through it and that was not what the scene was about. And I had to convince Nora. … I said, “It will be fine, Nora.” Because I knew Meg really wanted it so badly.
On what Nora wore on and off the set:
Very simple. She was always very simply dressed. She did have collars and things like that. She had a thing about her neck — you know, she would shadow the neck somehow. I don't mean turtlenecks and all that stuff. But I mean shirts, with the collar pulled up, things like that. But her style was actually not very unlike any Upper West Side well-to-do woman. She moved to the East Side later, but still. When I worked with her, she was living in the Apthorp, that famous building on 79th. Gorgeous building. But she was always very simply dressed. Whether [she wore] all designers or not, I don't know. It was always appropriate, very simple, it suited the body, and it was OK. She was not a fussy person. … She knew what worked on her and she stayed with it.
Thanks to Nora, Meg and their skilled costume crew, Meg Ryan Fall is not a passing fad but a perennial hallmark of everybody’s favorite season. For more on the creation of the Nora Ephron Cinematic Universe, check out I’ll Have What She’s Having here.
END CREDITS
If I were to make a seasonal shopping list for, say, Sally Albright, I’d include Laurel Mercantile’s Fall Break candle, everything that Demi Moore wears in her new J.Crew campaign and Rachel Kushner’s latest must-read, Creation Lake.
I loved W. Kamau Bell’s tribute to the late, great James Earl Jones. “I still think 1988’s Coming To America is Eddie Murphy’s best film, and a big part of that is James Earl Jones as King Jaffe Joffer,” he writes. “When the King’s limousine pulls up in Queens, New York and the King steps out of his car as the music swells and flower petals are thrown at his feet, Black people in 1988 didn’t see King Jaffe Joffer dressed in his finest attire. We saw James Earl Jones as we have always seen him, as Black royalty, finally being treated the way he deserves.”
Over at the Ministry of Pop Culture, Kirthana Ramisetti defends former Real Housewife Crystal Kung Minkoff, Thea Glassman remembers how fictional New York City captured September 11th, and, because it’s New York Fashion Week, I interviewed Devil Wears Prada screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, who calls Miranda Priestly “an A-plus insult comedian.”
Taylor Swift iconically endorsed Kamala Harris moments after Harris and Donald Trump’s televised debate. Like a cat waiting to pounce on its prey, she struck at the right moment:
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!
Yours in “Sweater weather,”
Erin
Love this Erin! Happy Meg Ryan fall to all who celebrate 🍂🍂🍂
No one looks better in a black turtleneck than Kathleen Kelly. Also, I will pay a king’s ransom to anyone who makes a You’ve Got Mail-themed paper doll book with all of KK’s greatest fashion hits.
Another great post! 🍂 Is it just me or do you just keep topping yourself?