From left: Billy Howle, Nicole Kidman, Sam Nivola and Jack Reynor appear in the mystery drama series. Photo: Netflix
“It’s not a documentary,” said Signe Sejlund, the costume designer for the Netflix limited series The Perfect Couple. “It’s a murder mystery.”
Yet the compulsively watchable show is not merely a murder mystery.
Set on Nantucket, a glorified sand dune 30 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, in the US, – where superyachts bottleneck in the harbor every summer; the median home price has surpassed US$3mil (approximately RM12.8mil); and the guy in line at Something Natural, a favourite local sandwich stand, could well be a billionaire – the show is in some sense a travelogue offering a worm’s-eye view of rich people behaving appallingly.
It is also a statement on our cultural fascination with the folkways of people with too much money to count.
The series, adapted from a novel by Elin Hilderbrand, is a tale of “them” and “us”.
Embodying “them” in this case is the fractious Winbury family: patriarch Tag (Liev Schreiber), matriarch Greer (Nicole Kidman) and their three sons. Everyone else is “us”.
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The Winburys have for generations vacationed at an oceanside mansion – putatively located in Monomoy, an enclave with some of Nantucket’s costliest real estate – among peers who attended the same private schools, belonged to the same country clubs and adopted the same form of garb that was once a tell for quiet wealth.
Think modest A-line dresses; knotted-rope sailors’ bracelets; boat shoes so weathered they are patched together with duct tape; polos and T-shirts worn almost to transparency; and stiff Nantucket basket purses whose lids are topped with bone medallions incised like sailor’s scrimshaw.
That old-money look barely factored into Sejlund’s costumes for The Perfect Couple, which, unlike Succession, Industry and other series revolving around social class, revels in being a caricature.
“I wanted to do my version of Nantucket,” said Sejlund, who also conjured a sartorial version of Upper East Siders as the costume designer for The Undoing, a 2020 HBO series starring Kidman that was made memorable by a single green coat.
Sejlund’s version of Nantucket meant treating some of the Winbury men and other affluent male characters as “peacocks”, she said, referring to their flashy style.
If that is inconsistent with the way the moneyed elite historically dressed on the island, it mattered little to her.
“The real Nantucket might be a little boring,” Sejlund said.
The closest the show comes to staid upper-class tastes is in the costuming for Kidman’s character, Greer, who wears her wardrobe of pastels (in ocean, sand and sky shades) with minimal, toned-down makeup and a strangely immobile hairdo that is ostentatiously unlike the traditional country-club bob.
Her clothes are intended to differentiate Greer from characters like Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson), the middle-class love interest of a Winbury son, and Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy), Amelia’s friend and, as it happens, Tag’s mistress.
Amelia’s clothes, which include a bra and boxer shorts worn at a family breakfast, seem almost like flashcards for how not to dress on Nantucket.
As does the one outfit Merritt is seen in: a flimsy Missoni dress. That the dress is from a costly designer label is hardly the point; Merritt’s look all but shrieks TikTok striver.
Sejlund did not visit the island while working on the film, she said.
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If she had, she might well have noticed a trend that Connor Soverino, general manager of Murray’s Toggery Shop, a clothing store established on Nantucket in 1945, has lately observed: “Official Preppy Handbook” stereotypes, as he put it, no longer define island style.
The era of trust-fund yachties for whom “ratty country-club clothes” were wardrobe staples, Soverino said, has given way to one characterised by luxury goods labels like those seen at any other resort where the rich congregate.
These days, he suggested, you are as likely to see people picking their way along the cobblestone streets of Nantucket’s downtown historic district in US$1,000 (RM4,270) Bottega Veneta padded flat sandals as you are to see them in Top-Siders.
“We still sell traditional patch madras shirts and jackets, embroidered shirts and belts and hats with critters on them,” Soverino said, as well as the salmon-colored pants known as Nantucket reds that continue to substantially fuel profits at Murray’s Toggery Shop.
“But the island has become so popular people are coming from all over the world,” he added. “Anything goes.” – The New York Times
