Jill Taylor

Jill Taylor (born 1957 in Elswick, Newcastle, England), is a costume designer for film. Since the mid-1990s she has worked on British and American productions, specialising in contemporary rom-coms, comedies and action movies including The Full Monty, Sliding Doors (1998), Johnny English (2003), and Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023) and The Final Reckoning (2025). Taylor has been twice nominated for a BAFTA award for Best Costume Design, and received the Costume Designers Guild Award for The Life and Death of Peter Sellers in 2005.

Jill Taylor grew up in Gateshead and went to primary school in Low Fell. After school she studied fashion at Northumbria University, though from childhood she had the ambition to work in film. After a Foundation course, she worked as a dresser and standby; one memorable job included dressing Barbara Windsor for pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle.

Costume for film and television Taylor's earliest costume designer credits were for feature-length programmes produced at the BBC within a number of drama anthology series, including Scene, ScreenPlay, Performance, Screen One and Screen Two. Across these series, Taylor had opportunities to work across a wide range of genres, including true crime drama (e.g. Killing Me Softly, 1995), period adaptations (e.g. The Mill on the Floss, 1997), live theatre (After Miss Julie, 1995) and social realism. Taylor received a Royal Television Award for her costumes for In the Cold Light of Day (1994, directed by Richard Monks), a Screen Two production.

These anthologies brought Taylor together with up-and-coming directors, for example Antonia Bird directed Safe (1993) for Screen Two. Bird would bring Taylor in to design costumes on two further independent film projects: Priest (1994) and Face (1997), both contemporary films with strong social and political themes.

Sliding Doors, released the following year, has been described by Vogue Magazine as "maybe the chicest rom-com in existence". Starring as Helen, Gwyneth Paltrow wears classic tailoring and "attainable" separates. According to Taylor, she avoided anything too fashionable as it would have looked out of date by the time the film was released. Working on a very limited budget, she was able to use Paltrow's contacts at Calvin Klein to source "wide leg pants, the skinny tops, the very simple roll necks, all of that type of thing".

Woody Allen films Following her Costume Designers Guild award, Taylor was approached by Woody Allen to design a series of films shot in the United Kingdom, namely Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006) and Cassandra's Dream (2007). Over the three films they worked together, Taylor said, "I sort of won that battle".

Taylor drew on the huge number of photographs of Marilyn Monroe in private and public, including images of her wearing a man's shirt with a pencil skirt. Michelle Williams also had input into the character's look, and the actor brought her own references to shape what she would wear. Taylor welcomed this, noting "a lot of actors don't [want input], and it's actually much harder."

Other projects The next film that gained significant attention for its costume was YA drama Me Before You (2016). Taylor designed a "quirky", "very English" wardrobe for lead character Louisa Clark, played by Emilia Clarke - with items found in vintage and thrift stores. The costume designer worked closely with production design, to ensure that the style of this "slightly outrageous" character was carried through to her bedroom decoration and belongings.