The clothes make the widow in House of Cards
Madame president?
“I actually hate madame,” Robin Wright, as Claire Underwood, deadpans at one point in the just-out final season of House of Cards. “It makes me think I am running a brothel and not a country.”
In its chilly-as-ever denouement — a season in which her husband is gone, but not blotted, the spectre of Frank ghosting over much of the narrative, as chickens come home to roost from many a past season of the show — the delivery is classically Underwoodian. Except that it is now #HerTurn, in the parlance of hashtag.
And as morbidly fun as it is to watch a series that reads now, at times, like Gone Girl in the Oval Office, what struck me as much when sneaking the episodes is how much it also reads as a subversion of widowhood. “Was she sad about his (Frank Underwood’s) passing?” retorted Kemal Harris, House of Cards’ ace stylist, when I interviewed her recently. “It does not appear so … because it got her to where she wanted to be.”
Having masterminded a sartorially inspired, even iconic, wardrobe for the changing ambitions of Mrs. Underwood — from First Lady to UN ambassador to acting president to the president proper, in only the last several seasons — Harris went on to say: “Again, any indication of mourning or playing the widow, is all for show, a calculation.” Watching Underwood scheme and cling in this final act, it struck me, moreover, that here we get a portrait of widowhood that is as far as you can get from the old tropes found in literature — take the saintly sad sack that was Mrs. Dashwood in Sense or Sensibility. See, too: real-life examples like that of Lee Krasner, who would spend decades being a spousal footnote to her husband, Jackson Pollock, and who often bristled (rightfully) at being identified as his widow first and an artist in her own right second.
In the art/life continuum of
widowhood, the leading lady of House of Cards is on one that includes both Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the most famous widow of all time, as well as, say, Lady Mary of Downton Abbey, whose moping eventually turned into a scenario for reinvention.
Other recent examples include the character played by Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook, a young woman who memorably described herself as “a crazy slut with a dead husband.”
Interestingly, this Netflix moment coincides with another subversive portrait, in theatres now. A movie that’s actually called Widows. Starring a badass quartet of women led by Viola Davis — all of whom play women who are left high and dry when their husbands die — they are grief-mired, even while getting wrapped up in the criminal activity left behind by the men in their lives. “Their status of ‘widow’ defines them, hence the movie title,” as a critic in Newsweek put it.
In terms of new-school widows, it cannot go unremarked that this moment also arrives on the back of Sheryl Sandberg, who became the most illustrious widow in America more recently when she lost her husband suddenly. Of her new status, the Facebook exec has confessed, “I have a really, really, really hard time with the word widow. I don’t want to be a widow, you know? And I think even using that word to describe myself is something that was really hard for me to do …”
It is something that President Claire Underwood might relate to, even if her reasons are considerably more ghoulish. Watching her now, it becomes clear that she has an elastic approach to the role. “One minute she is playing the grieving widow and the next, she is riding on his coattails,” as someone sums up re her, and her husband, in an early ep. A widow of convenience, you might say.
Indeed, his death only emboldens her, as Harris told me: “She moves on. Is ready for battle.”
This certainly comes through in the narrative told through clothes, something that has always been a persuasive part of the Claire character sketch. A “militaristic vibe” was introduced in Season 5 and becomes even more enunciated this season. Geeking out in research, as she always does before shooting, Harris did a lot of vintage research on women in the military, while also taking inspiration from some Helmut Newton images (which influenced not only the clothes, but Claire’s moresevere-than-ever hairstyle).
“You could literally spend 10 hours looking up military buttons on the internet,” the ace stylist said. The result is a power-wardrobe that combines bracing gold buttons, belted frocks, high necks. The styling choices are even meta in that Robin Wright is being dressed in a way that Claire Underwood herself has always had intuitive sense of when it comes to reaching her goals. Clothes as “marketing tool,” Harris emphasized.
Given this, we played a little game of What Would Claire Underwood Never Be Caught Dead In? Harris, not surprisingly, had a funny ready litany: “No jogging pants … no athleisure at all. No flip-flops. No logo T-shirts.” No spaghetti straps either.
Something else that is verboten, at least in this phase of her life: a handbag of any sort. Researching real-life male presidents of the past, Harris noticed that you are never going to see them holding a briefcase or “rolling a bag. Obviously, they have people for that.” She doubts that a prez even carries a wallet. And while previous seasons have shown Ms. Underwood carrying highend bags courtesy of Ralph Lauren and Saint Laurent, “she’s the president now … has a country to run.” Purses are for the little people.
And though 80 per cent of the clothes were custom-made for this final arc, Harris confirmed, there was one designer piece that she pulled for Wright that stands out: a fitted black satin trench coat, courtesy of Phoebe Philo’s Céline. The character, I am reminded, wears it when she is running around “off-duty.”
As far as grieving widows go, the trench coat makes for a slinky guise, all right. If you can’t mourn ’em, beat ’em.