Yahoo Lifestyle From Sharp Suits to Startup Merch, HBO’s ‘Industry’ Is a Spectacle of Menswear
Welcome to State of the Suit, a new Robb Report series in which writer and menswear stylist Caroline Reilly examines the sartorial choices of candidates, pundits, and other movers and shakers. Whether it’s an ode to a departing president’s timeless style or a fantasy list of items we think would better suit a prominent figure, she has plenty of thoughts.
Suiting is a language. It can telegraph power, wealth, pedigree (or lack of) and so much more. For the past few weeks of State of the Suit, we’ve turned our attention to the campaign trail, but the power of the suit transcends politics. Suiting writ large is, whether we realize it (or choose to admit it), a perfect conduit for larger conversations about the world and how we move through it.
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Television and film are ripe with examples of how the delicate nuances of suiting and menswear can be used to illustrate an individual’s station in life; to subliminally or directly alert viewers to a part of their personality, their motive, their backstory. Few shows on air right now better exemplify that craft than HBO’s Industry, which began its third series last night.
Industry, in large part, examines the particular, even idiosyncratic dynamics between old and new money in the often vindictive world of high finance. The show’s costume designer, Laura Smith, spent much time acclimating herself to the fine details that delineate these demographics. Be it the texture of a tie, the wear on a Barbour coat, or the placement of a pair of wellie boots, the show provides a master class in understanding that in menswear, there is no such thing as a small detail. For this week’s dispatch, I spoke with Smith about conveying power and wealth dynamics with clothing, high-end watch rentals, and how Aldous Huxley’s depiction of an acid trip informed her design choices.
Let’s start with when we meet Henry (Kit Harrington) because the first time we see him he’s in a very casual, almost earthy-crunchy outfit. Talk to me about the decisions behind that being our first impression of him.
He’s wearing this green shirt that he hasn’t really straightened out or fixed; he’s a busy man and he hasn’t got time for “nonsense” like making himself look good. It telegraphs that he comes from this level of class where he expects people to do things for him and while that isn’t clear initially it becomes apparent over time. So, I wanted him to look a certain level of disheveled in that first scene.
I discussed it with Kit because it’s a very particular thing, dressing in that sort of social class. People wear things until they fall apart; they wear inherited suits. Someone like Henry doesn’t really think too much about what he’s wearing because it’s instinctive; it’s a learned behavior: the right thing to do.
The shirt that he’s wearing is Lumi merchandise. It was really important to show how this startup has spent so much money on merch and as he walks around the room, people are wearing all the different iterations of the company merchandise to show that he’s picked up one idea, thrown it away, then picked up another. There have been loads of launches and this t-shirt he’s wearing is the one he’s picked for that day’s presentation.
It’s also about optics, this aesthetic of looking environmentally aware. That’s reflected in the kind of bracelets he wears.
I notice even when he’s dressed formally, there’s a texture to what he wears. A knit tie, where other men are wearing a silk tie; a craggy wool jacket where others are wearing a worsted wool.
That’s a very particular thing and I’m glad you noticed that. There’s this book, Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, and in it, he takes acid and he’s tripping and he talks about the wonder in the softness of his trousers – the weave in his trousers. And he loses half an hour of his life looking at his clothes, and that’s what I wanted to bring across with Henry, because he’s a very touchy person.
For example, he doesn’t wear jackets—it’s a point Henry makes, it’s like they get in the way of doing what he needs to do. At one point he loses his temper and he needs a jacket to cover the [signs of that] on his shirt and he asks someone for a jacket and they just look at him and say, “Um, you banned jackets.”
Going back to the tie you mentioned—that was very specific choice, it’s an Italian tie that’s only available from a beautiful place in the Burlington Arcade that’s just across the road from where the club he’s a member of is supposed to be. It’s meant to look like he just went in and bought it. Again, it’s all about that softness, a texture that won’t irritate him. It also illustrates how his style changes when he’s dressing himself. I wanted to create a distinction between when he is looking after himself and when he’s being styled by an assistant.
Let’s get into the particulars of that dynamic because so much of the menswear on the show is a subtle power play between old and new money. And there’s often this misconception that with more money, clothing becomes more fussy, more pristine, more expendable. But that’s actually not the case.
The way I approached this was I broke the men into a few different groups of people. So you have the ones who have already arrived, so to speak – and that’s Lord Norton, Henry, Charles, Otto. They’re all in a group of people who feel at ease everywhere they go, whether that’s walking into the House of Parliament, a grand country house, or a private club. Whereas people like Robert, or Eric—they’re less certain because they’re trying to appear and pass as something else. They move very differently and they don’t always understand each other. Someone like Rishi, for example, doesn’t understand Diana’s family wealth and that it’s not necessarily liquid—it’s tied up in property. In the the world of Norton and Otto, things are much more liquid because they have a combination of property and cash so they move through the world much differently, they spend differently. They also behave differently than someone like Eric, who is a rockstar purely in the world of Pierpoint.
It’s quite interesting to juxtapose these different types of groups and the different types of menswear against each other. For example, for Otto and Norton, the brand doesn’t matter. What matters is how good the piece is and whether it will last a long time. Norton has a variety of different wax jackets and it’s possible he’s been wearing one of them since, like, 1989. It outlived his last dog.
There are also scenes in the country house, where, in the boot room (or the wet room), there are clothes that you borrow to just put on. [When you’re there] it’s just like, ‘Oh I’ll take those wellies, I’ll take that jacket.’ We see Yasmin do that, even though she’s come to the country house with none of these things, she can appropriate them because in a country house these clothes are just there, it’s like they [belong to] the house.
That idea of longevity of wear and how it interacts with wealth is fascinating. Because these are people who have all the money in the world to treat clothing like it’s disposable but they don’t. And then to compare that with the newer money who consumes more quickly…
It’s quite a wild thing. I learned when I was looking into all this that you can hire a watch for a few weeks and it felt like something Rishi might do. You can hire it to impress someone and hand it back.
And of course I’d be remiss if we didn’t explore how the suiting on the show, in particular, is such an integral part of this dynamic.
Absolutely, [for example, with Henry] he makes a passing comment at one point that a suit he wears he’s had since university. Eric’s suits are very contrary to Henry’s. Henry’s have that softness, Eric’s are very sharp, clean lines, sleek cuts. Eric wears his suits like a suit of armor because again, it goes back to trying to pass for something. So I wanted to make his suiting look a bit younger on him. We’ve gone for these narrower fits. He has that Peter Pan quality where he loves when people say he’s a rockstar but he’s not one.
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