In the fourth episode of The Perfect Couple – the soapy Netflix murder mystery that takes place on the island of Nantucket – Dakota Fanning’s character, the snobby Abby Winbury, has some choice words about a revealing Missoni dress worn by Meghann Fahy’s Merritt Monaco. “That is not a dress,” she smirks. “She’s wearing a bathing suit.
” (Abby’s wearing a demure, ankle-skimming maxi.) Fanning, with one swipe at an outfit, confirms to the viewer what the show has been hammering home for the past three episodes: Merritt isn’t one of them. The them , in this case, is old-money WASP.
And in the setting of the show – a Monomoy mansion owned by the wealthy Winbury family – is a nest of them: people whose families have been vacationing in the exclusive enclave for generations, belonging to the same country clubs and attending the same private schools. You’ve heard it before: the clothes make the man. Yet, in The Perfect Couple and pop culture, it’s never felt more relevant.
Let’s dissect. The most obvious outsider is Merritt , the mistress of family patriarch Tag Winbury. That Missoni dress – which she wears through pretty much the entire series – is, sure, expensive.
Yet, it’s not the right kind of expensive. It looks like something someone would wear amid Don Julio 1942-popping partiers at a Miami pool rather than among the New England country-club set. There’s a general ingrained expectation of reserve in these places; such institutions often have strict dress codes that forbid showing shoulders and midriffs or wearing 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 fucking wallpaper,” Tom Winbury sneers during a fight with his brother, Benji, who is set to marry Amelia the next day. Yet, you can see it in Nicole Kidman’s Greer too: she wears a neutral palette of creams, light blues, and whites that match the colours 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 setup. “The whole reason to do it outside here was because of the fucking 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 using 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 one, 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.) 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 two, Robert is, yes, wearing an appropriate suit. But he’s a wreck about keeping it pristine: “I don’t want to ruin my suit,” he tells Nicole, the older woman he is very ill-advisedly sleeping with.
“I just got it.” 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 overdressed.
“You can’t wear that,” Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harrington) chastises Robert, who has arrived in a suit at what will turn into an exclusive ayahuasca gathering, 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 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 two, Colleen Morris-Glennon, told Vogue . “I just wanted for there to be that almost unconscious copying.
” Television characters may not always be wearing their hearts on their sleeves. But their wealth? Recently, it seems like they do..
