The HBO series Succession is a font of many things—intrafamilial subterfuge, swearing, inventive new ways to permanently damage the people around you—but the show’s attention to fashion has always been one of its most notable elements, from wannabe cool guy Kendall Roy’s expensive baseball hats to beleaguered lawyer Gerri Kellman’s signature blazers and pearls. Nobody on Succession was more fashionable (or more carefully costumed), though, than the scheming, dissatisfied youngest daughter, Shiv—until this season, at least.
To be fair, Shiv’s style has been consistently evolving. In a 2019 New Yorker article, Rachel Syme wrote of the character’s season-two look: “Turtleneck sweaters and high-waisted slacks have rarely looked so ruthless.” As Syme notes, even then Shiv occasionally looked “more like a recent law-school graduate in a midsize firm than a big shot prepared to take over an empire,” but season three ushered in a new low—or was it a new high for Shiv-related sartorial discourse? Suddenly, Shiv’s suits were cheap looking; her dresses for big, important events were oddly fitted; her entire sartorial sense of self seemed to be hanging by a thread. Ironically, Sarah Snook, the actress playing Shiv, looked better than ever, but her costuming appeared to be fighting her at every turn.
As fashion is not my forte (I am, famously, but a humble culture writer), I called upon Vogue’s fashion news editor, Sarah Spellings, to help me interpret what this change in Shiv’s style could mean. “Succession normally does a great job with rich-people fashion. Just look at Caroline [Collingwood, the Roy siblings’ haughty English mother] wearing a textured coat over pants to her wedding! Or Kendall’s Loro Piana hat. There’s not a ton of logos—it’s not flashy (normally, save for Kendall’s birthday Gucci bomber),” Spellings notes. “In past seasons, Shiv wore wide-leg trousers and turtlenecks that made her look powerful, put together, and, most importantly, casually superrich. This season, she looks like she’s trying harder as she’s struggling for power and in uncomfortable positions. For the most part, that comfort and ease is gone and she looks less comfortable in her clothes.”
It would be simplistic to think that Succession’s costume designer, Michelle Matland, didn’t have a specific and thought-out plan for Shiv’s wardrobe this season. (After all, nothing on TV happens by accident.) But even allowing for the possibility that Shiv was supposed to look uncomfortable as she grasped for control of her family empire—and finally ascended to a position of real power at Waystar Royco, despite being constantly diminished by her father, her brothers, and pretty much everyone else around her—the shift in her wardrobe still felt jarring.
“It all started with that terrible little black bag they had her carrying in the first episode of season three,” opined Vogue contributing editor Laia Garcia-Furtado. “She accessorizes unnecessarily, her suits are matronly and bad, and I don’t see Shiv shopping for these clothes herself, but I can’t imagine someone shopping for her and bringing these things back and her approving them. It’s like she’s cosplaying as a rich businesswoman who did a business and failing.”
Ultimately, maybe it doesn’t matter whether season-three Shiv is (a) a woman slowly coming undone whose internal turmoil is metaphorically symbolized by her increasingly off-kilter clothes (b) a clueless rich lady who doesn’t actually know what looks good on her or (c) some combination of the above. After all, in the final episode of the season, Shiv is potentially betrayed by her long-suffering husband, Tom, all while he’s clad in a light, flawless, Italian-vacation suit that seems like nothing so much as an antidote to all of Shiv’s weirdly fitted, chromatically off suiting this season. Who knows where we’ll meet her and Tom in season four? All we can do is hope against hope that it’s somewhere marginally more stylish—but, then again, who are we to negotiate against Shiv’s glow-down? After all, isn’t the definition of a good TV outfit one that gets people talking?