After we first meet the friends of The White Lotus season three, pulling into the dock on lush Koh Samui, three of them are having the time of their lives, falling throughout each other laughing on the boat journey over. They’re all blond, they’re all wrapped in luxurious clothes (a Zimmerman maxi, a Paul Smith sundress, and an Alemais mini—a gross sales receipt equal to about $2,000), shielded by monumental designer sun shades, and clutching varied different IYKYK high-fashion objects (classic Chanel wedges, a Loewe Squeeze purse, a Valentino shoulder bag—the baggage are one other $8,000 or so collectively, and the sneakers have been listed round $400 on resale websites). We are able to’t instantly differentiate between Leslie Bibb’s Kate, Carrie Coon’s Laurie, and Michelle Monaghan’s Jaclyn, however one look tells us that these ladies aren’t simply wealthy—they’re wealthy wealthy.
Fabio Lovino/HBO
In a later episode, as a boozy dinner dialog turns to the election, and Jaclyn (made-in-Italy swimwear model Pin-Up Stars) and Laurie (Bella Freud) ask Kate (Alemais once more, with Polene earrings and, as at all times, two Cartier Love bracelets clanking on her wrist), with a dawning horror, whether or not she voted for Donald Trump.
Kate blows them off with a sip of rosé and a query of her personal: “Are we actually gonna speak about Trump tonight?”
We fireplace up our screens on Sunday night and tune in to see the newest of White Lotus’s wealthy folks behaving poorly, swanning round in caftans that disguise all method of sins. It’s simple to elucidate our obsession with the present as an escapist pleasure, however within the Trump period, maybe these LBHs (“losers again residence,” within the present’s parlance) are acquainted: A vital mass of rich and entitled individuals who need to talk to you precisely how well-off they’re, choosing a locale the place everybody who isn’t a touring companion is there expressly to serve. The loud luxurious of The White Lotus and the actual world bears sufficient quantity to drown out questions on who’s donning the outfits, corresponding to: What do they are saying in regards to the wearer?
Within the period of Trump 2, have you learnt precisely who’s MAGA in your life? Are you positive? Style might maintain the clues.
Alex Bovaird, the present’s costume designer, tells Vainness Honest that the homogeneity of the three associates’ seems to be, regardless of their hailing from totally different areas (New York, Texas, and California), purposefully gestures towards the assumptions we are inclined to make: that individuals who appear like us are, the truth is, like us.
“I wished to maintain them all through as form of nonetheless interchangeable, in order that once they reveal themselves, it’s type of refined, and it begins to make you suppose, Oh yeah, they’re not all the identical,” she says. “It’s not like Kate comes off the boat carrying a MAGA hat or something.”
Bovaird drapes the present’s characters in manufacturers meant to invoke costly style and the social background that may afford them, whether or not by means of generational wealth, marriage, lengthy hours of white-collar work, or just lengthy hours of white-collar crime. They’re carelessly wealthy: Jaclyn wears an open Chanel robe to the pool over a swimsuit, treating a $7,000-plus archival runway look as casually as a lodge gown. (Her Eres one-piece swimsuit retails at a friendlier $600.) Kate later dons a equally easy hot-pink tank swimsuit; it’s by Valentino. Males are sockless in Gucci loafers; ladies are lounging in Loewe and pulling lip balm and lorazepam out of their capacious JW Anderson baggage. Bovaird says she would have stacked “like 20” of the Cartier bracelets on Kate, had funds allowed (“like 20” would run round $147,000).
Fabio Lovino/HBO
