In the fourth episode of ‘The Perfect Couple,’ the soapy Netflix murder mystery set on the exclusive island of Nantucket, Dakota Fanning’s character, the snobby Abby Winbury, has some choice words about the revealing Missoni dress worn by Meghann Fahy’s Merritt Monaco. “That is not a dress. She’s wearing a bathing suit,” she smirks. (Abby herself is draped in a demure, ankle-skimming maxi.) Fanning, with one swift remark, confirms to the viewer what the show has been hammering home for the past three episodes: Monaco isn’t one of them. The ‘them,’ in this case, are the old-money WASPs who dominate the show’s setting – a Monomoy mansion owned by the wealthy Winbury family. These are people whose families have been vacationing in this exclusive enclave for generations, belong to the same country clubs, and attended the same private schools.
You’ve heard it before: “the clothes make the man.” But in ‘The Perfect Couple’ and other popular shows, this adage feels more relevant than ever. Let’s dissect how clothing silently speaks volumes about the characters. The most obvious outsider is Merritt, the mistress of family patriarch Tag Winbury. That Missoni dress—the outfit she wears throughout most of the series—is, sure, expensive. Yet, it’s not the right kind of expensive. It looks like something someone would wear at a Miami pool party, not among the New England country club set. There’s a general, ingrained expectation of reserve in these exclusive circles; these institutions often have strict dress codes that forbid showing shoulders and midriffs or casual apparel, like denim and flip-flops. When another “outsider,” the middle-class Amelia Sacks, runs downstairs in her underwear, you can feel the entire Winbury family grimace—where is her robe? “At least my wife matches the f—king wallpaper,” Tom Winbury sneers during a fight with his brother, Benji, who is set to marry Amelia the next day.
But the subtle code of clothing extends beyond the obvious outsiders. You can see it in Nicole Kidman’s Greer, too: she wears a neutral palette of creams, light blues, and whites that match the color palette of her estate’s hydrangeas. (Which she won’t stop talking about: “Now, we’re going to have to do the photos indoors in our own house,” Greer snaps when rain threatens her family photo set up. “The whole reason to do it outside here was because of the f—king hydrangeas.”) She’s often, however, in silks—an oddly hot and formal choice for summer at your own home on a laid-back island. Now, Greer looks great. But she never looks comfortable or natural. This is in great contrast to her husband, Tag Winbury, who lounges in bathrobes and wrinkled linen button-downs in the house his family has owned for generations. At the end of the series, the uncomfortable high heel shoe drops: Greer is a former escort who married Tag and attempted to reinvent herself. Suddenly, her overdressed, overcompensating aesthetic makes sense.
‘The Perfect Couple’ isn’t the only show that uses clothes to send subtle signals about class. Watch ‘Industry,’ the hit HBO show now in its third season, and you’ll see how clothes speak silently on behalf of their characters. One doesn’t need to understand English accents to know that Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) is from a working-class background: In Season 1, a managing director rips off his shirt pocket while in the bathroom of investment bank Pierpoint. “You’re not here to fix the lights,” he says. Meanwhile, the posh trust fund kid Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) shows up as a first-year associate wearing a Burberry trench coat. (The designer style can retail up to 3,000 pounds.) She doesn’t need to earn money like Robert. She already has it. Even as Robert becomes more comfortable in his surroundings—and makes more money—clothes show how he’s still ill at-ease. In Season 2, Robert is, yes, wearing an appropriate suit. But he’s a wreck about keeping it pristine: “I don’t want to ruin my suit. I just got it,” he tells Nicole, the older woman he is very ill-advisedly also sleeping with. Yasmin, however, does several lines of coke in a Saint Laurent dress. In this season, Robert commits perhaps the greatest sartorial faux pas of all: coming to the party embarrassingly over-dressed. “You can’t wear that” Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harrington) chastises Robert, who has arrived at what will turn into an exclusive ayahuasca gathering in a suit, tossing him a Lumi T-shirt. Even when it comes to psychedelic trips, there is an appropriate attire that certain characters seem to intuit.
The financial ascension and “fitting in” of Harper, too, is seen reflected in what she wears. During the first season, she wears nondescript outfits; by season two, she’s walking into Pierpoint with a Prada Bag and a camel coat. “You see her with a camel coat, very reminiscent of a coat Yasmin wore during the first season,” the costume designer of season 2, Colleen Morris-Glennon, told Vogue. “I just wanted for there to be that almost unconscious copying.” Television characters may not always be wearing hearts on their sleeves. But their wealth? Recently, it seems like they do.
