TV’s Most Stylish Shows, According to New Book
● Hal Rubenstein's new book “Dressing the Part” dissects TV's most stylish shows, including “Friends,” “Bridgerton” and “RuPaul's Drag Race.”
“TV is everyone’s house stylist
— you get comedy, drama and fashion advice thrown in for free,” says Hal Rubenstein, the veteran fashion editor whose latest book, “Dressing the Part” (Harper Collins), discusses the impact of 50 of television's most stylish shows.
Rubenstein's breezy, photo-filled book surveys TV shows from the '50s to today, focusing on some of the most trend-setting from recent years, including “Bridgerton,” “Emily in Paris” and “Gossip Girl,” along with classics “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Dynasty,” “Miami Vice” and “Sex and the City,” and more unexpected entries, such as 1982 PBS Evelyn Waugh adaptation “Brideshead Revisited,” which the author surmises could have influenced Ralph Lauren's first multipage advertorial that bowed the same year, shot by Bruce Weber.
And indeed, the power of TV has continued to grow since Rubenstein finished the draft of his book, with “Euphoria,” “Wednesday” and “The Morning Show” inspiring designers, trends, TikTok challenges and brand collaborations.
“TV has never been more important culturally in people's lives, especially when you realize how hard it is to get people into the movie theaters because everybody's home binge-watching everything. They're watching new stuff, they're watching old stuff…you realize with the passing of Matthew Perry from ‘Friends,' all these TV shows are getting second, third, fourth lives,” Rubenstein said.
The former style director of InStyle magazine took his first fashion cues from TV. “When I was a kid, I was crazy about Dick Van Dyke. I just kind of was built like him — tall and gangly — and tripped over things like he did. And I always remembered at the end of the show, it said, ‘Dick Van Dyke's clothes made by Botany 500.' And I made my father take me up to the Botany 500 warehouse to get a suit. I was like 13 or 14, the first suit I got after my bar mitzvah suit.”
Here, WWD chats with Rubenstein about the book, and how TV costumes have helped influence trends and expand the scope and reach of style.
WWD: Across her three shows, Moore was really influential as a TV fashion inspiration. I was interested to read you write about “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” costume designer Leslie Hall making a product placement deal with Evan-Picone to supply her entire wardrobe. H.R.:
That was the first product placement deal on TV, and consequently set the pattern. It's when you realize the impact of people watching, the fact that Tory Burch had to keep that white trenchcoat in her store for seven years because Olivia Pope wore it every week on “Scandal.”
WWD: When you think about the fashion world starting to pay attention to television and wanting to collaborate, “Sex in the City” was a bellwether, but you also talk about “Gossip Girl” finally getting Chanel to loan clothes, that was a moment, too. H.R.:
Well, what happened was Eric Daman, who used to work for Pat Field at “Sex and the City,” what he did on “Gossip Girl” became so influential that fashion houses were sending clothes unsolicited, boxes of Givenchy and Burberry, hoping that Blake Lively and Leighton Meester would wear them. Instyle.com used to do a thing online the next morning about what everyone was wearing on the show and where to get it.
WWD: It was influential right away. H.R.: And it works both ways. When you look at “Bridgerton,” as I wrote, after the first season there was a 71 percent increase in search for corsets online, and a 150 percent increase in searches for Empire waist dresses online. And honestly, if you look at the collections that came down the runways in Paris and Milan after, they were full of corsets.
WWD: Circling back to “Friends,” which I’ve been rewatching, I think during its first run in the late ’90s was the first time I remember a website launching to try to help viewers get the look of what they were wearing on TV immediately. H.R.:
What Debra McGuire did was a tricky thing because these were not supposed to be fashion plates. They were just basically young, cool New Yorkers all living in apartments that none of us could ever afford. So they weren't going to show up in designer fashion but you still wanted them to look cool, so it was an interesting way to source materials. And then on top of that, and I think this is the magic of what costume designers do, is you have these six people who are basically almost in every scene together and they all have to look distinct.
WWD: It’s particularly fun to look back at the show now that there is so much nostalgia for late ’90s and early Aughts fashion. H.R.:
It is — and no one's ever given TV costume designers their due. What Debra McGuire and Lyn Paolo, Ellen Mirojnick and Bob Mackie did is remarkable. What Mackie did with Carol Burnett is almost more remarkable than what he did with Cher because who looks like Cher? Carol Burnett is not a classic beauty, but he dressed her up every week in sequins and stylish clothes and told American women they could be beautiful, too. In my section on “The Mindy Project,” I write about how Salvador Pérez convinced Mindy Kaling she was beautiful because she didn't think she was. It's not designing clothes, you have to design clothes to fit a character, you have to tell the viewer so they can remember what each one of these characters are, who each one of these people are. And they're partially defined by their dialogue, but they are also defined by how they look and how they dress.