Michael Kaplan, costume designer for the upcoming Star Wars sequel, The Force Awakens.
I take all my cues from the script. Those cues might be the climate, the economic background of the character, the type of work or action they'll be doing.
Rey is written as a very strong character and it took all the elements that I mentioned earlier, the fact that she's working, doing very hard work in a very hot and dusty climate that might get cold at night. Everything that she's wearing and everything that she's carrying has a reason for being there.
Something I've never said to anybody about the costume is that she wears a head wrap. It's almost like a turban that she has on her head. It's actually a long-sleeve t-shirt that she put over her head and then took the sleeves and wrapped them around. That's the garment that she would carry with her if it got cold at night. Yet, she doesn't want to have to deal with her hair getting all full of sand and dust, so she tied it around her head during the daytime. Everything is dealt with like that.
If you look at the goggles that she wears closely, you can see that the lenses are actually old Storm Trooper eyes; maybe she found them in one of the old starships that she's been scavenging from. Then she's made them into goggles so she doesn't get dust in eyes. Coming up with that just adds ingenuity to her character...plus it's a bit of an inside joke.
