Les Miserables: Seriously, Javert? Seriously??

At the very end of its theatrical release schedule, I have finally gone to see Les Miserables. To be honest, I'm pretty impressed with myself because I managed to remain completely information-free about the whole thing. As in, I knew nothing whatsoever about the book, the musical or the movie prior to actually watching it. In fact, here is the sum total of my Les Mis background knowledge as of this morning.

• It's a musical.
• It's set in France.
• Anne Hathaway plays a prostitute who gets her hair cut off for some reason
• There are some cute young guys that Tumblr seems excited about. They might be revolutionaries?

Also, I sort of assumed that because it was categorised in my head as "a musical", there would be a) some spoken dialogue, and b) dancing. Wrong on both counts, but NBD.
Anyway, it was definitely the movie to watch if you like your onscreen emotions turned up to 11 on the Overwrought-o-meter, and are OK with the camera being rammed up Hugh Jackman's nose at all times. Like seriously, chill out with the close-ups. People had actually warned me about this beforehand and I was all, "No, what do I know about cinematography? I won't notice." But no, I noticed. It was like someone's parents were there with a camcorder, trying to zoom in on every important moment of their kid's school play. ZOOM IN MORE ON ANNE HATHAWAY'S SNOTTY NOSE WHILE SHE'S CRYING!! ZOOM IN MORE ON HUGH JACKMAN'S FACE WHILE HE'S EMOTING ABOUT GOD!! ZOOM IN MORE ON THIS TRAGIC STARVING KID WHO DOESN'T HAVE ANY FACIAL SORES LIKE THE OTHER KIDS, BECAUSE SHE'S THE STAR! etc etc.
The main thing I got from Les Mis, though, was that Russell Crowe's Javert is A+++ hilarious. Like, every time he came onscreen I started laughing uncontrollably because he was 100% straight-up doing an impression of when Harry was obsessively stalking Draco in Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince. JAVERT JUST REALLY WANTS TO CHAIN UP THAT TALL, SWEATY, MUSCULAR CRIMINAL, OK? HE WANTS TO CHAIN HIM UP AND CONTROL HIM AND PUNISH HIM FOR HIS SINS

I couldn't help imagining what all the other cops must think of Javert. Javert thinks he's the most upstanding, hard-working, god-fearing guy in the entire police force, but the other cops totally talk about him behind his back: Do you know that Inspector Javert guy who always looks like he hasn't showered in a week, and stands slightly too close when he's talking to you? Yeah, yeah, he's literally been stalking this random ex-con for like thirty fucking years. Not like a murderer or anything. This guy stole some bread and now Javert's all up in his grill, following him around the country, I don't even know. One time I went to his house to pick up some paperwork and it was just a mattress bed on the floor with Wanted posters of Jean Valjean taped all over the walls, the ceiling, the windows, every-fucking-where. Some things you just don't want to know, you know?

Aside from the roiling tide of Javert's sweat and/or self-loathing obsession with that evil, villainous thief who totally has the muscle power to lift an entire cart on one shoulder, I... guess there was some other stuff in the movie? Like, Anne Hathaway was good but I wouldn't personally have given her an Oscar for Fantine. But then again, I would have given her an Oscar for Rachel Getting Married in 2009, so all's well that ends well. I admit I started to feel a little tired whenever Helena Bonham Carter came onscreen, because she really does play herself in every role now, and not necessarily in a good way. Philosophically speaking I don't have anything against never brushing your hair, but if you're an actor it's kind of helpful to look slightly different in each role, you know? Whereas Helena Bonham Carter, charming though she is, looks like she's been wearing her own clothes, hair and makeup in every role she's played in the past 5 years.
Someone who knows more about the literary merits and background of Les Mis will probably have to explain to me just what the impact of the story is meant to be. Perhaps I'm a pessimist, but all I thought when I came out of the cinema was "revolutions are pointless, and there are definitely going to be food poverty riots in real life, near where I live, in the near future". The fact is that I don't actually think revolutions/direct action/political protests are pointless in the slightest, but all the cute young idealist boys in Les Mis certainly were hideously familiar. Particularly Marius. It's very difficult to warm to a poor-little-rich-boy character in a movie where are starving on the streets in every scene -- even if he does have cute freckles and the guileless expression of an anime character.

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Threeasfour, Fall 2013: The 13th sign of the zodiac.

Thirteen outfits long, this collection was based on the signs of the Zodiac. Technically Ophiucus, the so-called thirteenth Zodiac sign, is actually a Zodiac constellation and therefore not directly connected to the exacting and fact-based science that is astrology, but whatevs. The combination of mysticism and stargazing made for an intriguing mix, resulting in some excellent sci-fi priestess outfits: one for each sign.

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Sadly I couldn't work out which was which. The first was Ophiucus, but where did it go from there? Perhaps there's someone out there with some more astrology expertise who can help me out. But I don't think the designs are very literal. There certainly wasn't any single outfit out there that reminded me specifically of a bull, a ram, or a pair of twins.

New Age themes aside, this was an interesting and well-developed collection. Threeasfour tend to be a little eccentric anyway, but they're consistent in their eccentricities. Lots of asymmetrical tailoring and patterns made up of repeated circles, as seen in previous seasons.

One of my favourite aspects of this collection was the headwear, which was straight out of Gallifrey. Laser-cut (presumably?) from leather and what may have been cardboard, these crowns looked like clockwork or 3D renderings of mathematical diagrams.

We can only theorise who will actually end up wearing these designs. They'd make excellent costumes for a high-budget 1970s sci-fi movie, but sadly not many people in the real world actually dress like this. However, Threeasfour have successfully managed the weirdness of their brand for several years now, so I can only assume (and hope) that there are some people out there who are enthusiastically willing to spend $$$ on grey woollen chaps and wraparound Zodiac robes.

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Person Of Interest: The man in the suit.

Person Of Interest is three different genre shows stuck together. For Detectives Carter and Fusco it's a police procedural drama, whereas John Reese lives in a spy thriller and Harold Finch's story is gradually edging towards being a full-on dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi. Overall it's marketed as a crime show, more or less, which is what it mostly looks like on the outside. Like the majority of characters in procedural cop shows Carter and Fusco have very boring dress-sense, for practical and professional reasons. In costume design terms, the real interest lies with Finch and Reese.
Before I even saw the show, Reese had been described to me as a man who wears his clothes like a uniform. When he first appears he has nothing: no home, presumably no money, no real identity... until Finch comes along and sets him up with his very own apartment and a wardrobe full of identical black suits. Mysterious benefactors are a popular theme in fiction -- who doesn't wish a nameless billionaire would show up and randomly gift you with a new house? -- but Person Of Interest has a refreshing way of tackling the subject. Rather than twisting himself up in knots about receiving so much help from a total stranger, Reese just takes it.

What with his CIA training, subsequent betrayal, homelessness and total lack of friends or family, Reese is a man who has been stripped down to his bare bones. The things that normal people care about just do not bother him any more. Actually, Finch is like that as well, but for him it's more because he's been elevated beyond ordinary society thanks to his wealth, genius, and devotion to the Machine. With Reese there are scenes in almost every episode where you see him just fail to react to things that would have any normal person shying away in discomfort.
He doesn't care about people touching him or getting in his personal space. He doesn't care about money. He doesn't care about being watched and tracked constantly via CCTV. He doesn't care about getting beaten up, except in the sense that it's an inconvenience. When Finch picks him out of the gutter and sets him up in an enormous loft apartment with his own private arsenal, the only thing Reese is openly thankful for is that Finch has given him a purpose again. When you get right down to it, the only thing he really cares about is efficiency, which is why he wears the same outfit every single day of his life -- barring necessary disguises. Not having to think about clothes or look in the mirror every morning just removes another obstacle between him and his mission.
From a purely practical standpoint, Reese's monochromatic wardobe of identical suits is a stroke of genius. For all that you can compare the John Reese/Harold Finch duo to Batman and Bruce Wayne, Reese's main strength lies in his complete lack of distinguishing features. Although he's definitely good-looking enough to get by with a little superficial charm when the need arises, Reese is forgettable enough to be the perfect spy. The fact that his nickname during the police manhunt was "the man in the suit" tells you all you need to know, because as soon as he changes out of the suit? They don't even have a physical description. The sheer boringness of the outfit just amplifies how forgettable he can be, never mind how ridiculously easy it is to get into almost anywhere when you're a white, middle-aged man in a suit.

Finch's attitude to clothes is the polar opposite of Reese. Just by looking at him you can tell that he really enjoys dressing up -- even before you find out that he's a tailoring nerd. While Reese dresses to look as forgettable and generic as possible, Finch dresses for himself. Despite the fact that he spends most of his time alone in a disused library, he wears a three-piece suit almost every day, often including a pocket square. He definitely has different grades of suits, though. When he's just going to be sitting in front of a computer he wears softer, more comfortable outfits in warm colours like brown and maroon, whereas on days when he's going undercover in one of his millionaire personas he wears suits that are more obviously businesslike and luxurious in appearance.

Both Finch and Reese's suits have been cleverly matched up to the physical appearance intended for each character. Jim Caviezel, who is in reality beginning to look rather thicker around the middle than is ideal for a elite special-forces agent, looks far slimmer in his black suits than in anything else he wears on the show. His jackets are very rarely buttoned, both because an open jacket allows for more flexibility during fight scenes and because it's far more flattering to Caviezel's broad-shouldered frame. Finch's suits are typically quite soft by contrast and the waistcoats make him look a little rounder, which fits in with his list of harmless, birdlike cover identities: Finch, Crane, Wren, Partridge. Like most stories that focus on a partnership, the two characters have to balance each other out. While brains/brawn would be an unfair description considering Reese's skill as a tactician, it's certainly the case that much of Reese's strength lies in his ability to physically intimidate, whereas Finch relies on people mistaking him for the boring, fussy middle-aged man he appears to be.

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Teen Wolf creator answers fan questions about season 3.

Jeff Davis, Teen Wolf's creator and lead writer, was answering fan questions on Tumblr last night! He's given a whole bunch of hints about season 3, as well skillfully dodging most of the Sterek-related questions. ;) Click here to read the highlights.

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Secret Avengers #1

Previously: The costumes and characters of The Avengers: Black Widow and Hawkeye.

As someone who has quite happily been using fanfic to cut through the Gordian Knot of Marvel comics canon for years, I found Secret Avengers #1 very easy to understand because it basically is Avengers fanfic. Clint and Natasha are bros, a reasonably Clark Gregg-looking Coulson shows up, and the story focuses on the mysterious Budapest incident Joss Whedon namedropped in last year's Avengers movie. There's even an explanation as to why Clint and Natasha might remember the incident in different ways, but that doesn't necessarily mean this comic locks in perfectly with movie canon. For one thing, Nick Fury is a field agent.

Images from Secret Avengers #1, which can be bought here.

Following Battle Scars (yes, another comic I read because Coulson was in it, shut up), we know that "this" Nick Fury is the illegitemate son of "original" Nick Fury, and was recruited to SHIELD at the same time as old army buddy Coulson. Apparently some Marvel fans are butthurt about the Fury switcheroo, but I'm tempted to attribute that to boring old racism -- particularly since I remember people complaining about this exact same "problem" a couple of years ago. The thing is, superhero comics canon is already such utter chaos that updating Nick Fury from David Hasselhoff to Samuel L Jackson almost makes things seem less complicated. Secret Avengers is aimed pretty solidly at fans who were introduced to the characters via the Avengers franchise, so why bother reintroducing 1980s white Nick Fury when we already know the other guy from like four different movies?

Anyhow, this issue was a promising prologue to what seems like a vaguely Dollhouse-esque storyline. Coulson recruits Hawkeye and Black Widow to join a taskforce that requires them to have their memories wiped after every mission, which sounds to me like a great way for SHIELD to avoid paying them. As for connections to the movie universe, it's kind of difficult to see how much characterisation carries through. Coulson was satisfyingly Coulson-y, but the focal character in this issue was Hawkeye, who for obvious reasons had very little character development in the Avengers movie.

Mostly I'm interested to see how the movie and comicbook canons converge and divide. You can do so much more with a comic than a film, mostly because it's way easier to suspend disbelief when you're looking at a cartoon instead of a real human person with split ends and mud on their shoes. While Marvel's Hollywood adaptations restrain themselves to relatively realistic robots and supersoldiers, in one 22-page comic we've already had Jason Bourne-style amnesia, a presidential assassination attempt, magical portals, a Hungarian wizard arms dealer, and Hawkeye being kidnapped and tied up in a room with a giant, unexplained Cthulhu statue in the corner. You couldn't get away with that shit on the big screen.
The only real problem I had with Secret Avengers was Natasha's painted-on suit. I haven't read superhero comics since I was in highschool, and I'd kind of forgotten how Hawkeye Initiative the costumes can get -- even when the characters are just standing around talking. Like, have you met boobs? Boobs don't just stand around like two separate water balloons duct-taped to your chest, not unless you've specifically tailored your catsuit to encase each breast separately in its own boob-pod. Which would be kind of an unusual choice, tactically speaking, for someone who has to scale walls and kick people in the face on a regular basis. I know that there's an Uncanny Valley of superhero comic realism, but at the same time I find it kind of implausible for Black Widow to be infiltrating Eastern European terrorist cells with her suit unzipped to her sternum. Especially since we've all seen Scarlett Johansson's equally skin-tight but way more practical Black Widow costume in "real" life.
Final note on the tangled web of alternate canons: I'm curious to see what relation, if any, this comic will have to the SHIELD TV series. At this point I'm not hugely optimistic about a Black Widow or Hawkeye/Widow movie ever happening (IF ONLY), but Coulson has only shown up in a couple of comics so far. I say it's entirely possible that they'll graft his comicbook backstory onto the TV show's own canon. 

Previously: The costumes and characters of The Avengers: Black Widow and Hawkeye.

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Womenswear and The Hour.

Previously:  Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon & Menswear and The Hour.

As a kind of doomed swansong for The Hour's recent cancellation, here's the third and final part of my series of costume posts.

Marnie is absolutely the classic stereotype of 1950s womanhood. In season 1 she doesn't get much to do, but by season 2 Hector's terrible behaviour has shaken her up enough that she transforms into what I can only really describe as a 2010s-style ultra-femme liberated woman. Probably my favourite detail of this was the fact that she clearly had an affair at some point, but it was so subtle that we'll never really know who with. With any other character I'd dismiss this as meaning they didn't have enough time to include it onscreen, but with Marnie you know that it's because she's just so damn discreet -- unlike Hector, whose affairs are all an unmitigated disaster and end up splashed all over the tabloids.

Marnie dresses like confectionary every day of her life. She's terrifyingly put-together, at first because she's a rich young aristocrat and has nothing else to do except look good, and later because she'll be damned if she'll let things slide just because she's done the unthinkable and got herself a career. I particularly loved her super-coordinated pink swirling skirts and aprons for when she was appearing on television -- in black and white. In some ways Marnie can look a little cartoonish because of her permanent glossy smile and carefully arranged layers of brightly-coloured skirts and petticoats, but the fact is that the fashionable colour palette in the 1950s was a lot brighter than nowadays. Meaning that oddly enough, Marnie's candy-coloured costumes are actually more realistic than Bel's skin-tight businesswear.

Sissy is a relatively minor character, but her costumes are so good she draws the eye whenever she appears onscreen. To me, Sissy looks a lot like a modern woman dressing up in retro/vintage styles, because she's so incredibly on-trend while still wearing the kind of widely available working-class clothes that show up in vintage stores in the 21st century. Marnie's brand of femininity is such that she wears pretty much nothing but frothy, full-skirted dresses, which is actually a look that shows up at weddings and upper-crust social functions even today. Essentially, the idea of what we think of as super-feminine formalwear has not really changed in about sixty years. Sissy is part of the next generation of fashion-conscious girls, following inner-city London trends, going to mixed-race nightclubs and moving in with their boyfriends before they get married. Sissy wouldn't look out of place in Camden in 2013.

Freddie's wife Camille is kind of the flip side of Sissy. They're both very modern, young and trendy, but Camille represents the hipster (in the old sense of the word) beat-generation side of 1950s pop culture. She wears men's sweaters and is a member of the fledgling Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She and Freddie live in an unfurnished flat in a neighbourhood run by a Rachman-esque slumlord. Camille's main role in the show is to introduce some conflict into the Bel/Freddie story, so we only ever really see her in a negative light. I suspect they gave her less screentime on purpose, because the more we saw of her the more likely we'd be to empathise with her. She moved to another country to be with her husband, but as soon as they arrived he transformed from a cool, poetry-loving bohemian into a BBC workaholic who clearly has some kind of ongoing thing with his female best friend. Really, Camille is better off without Freddie.

source

It's difficult to pick out a favourite character from The Hour because everyone is just so brilliant, but if I had to choose one I'd go for Lix Storm. I can't even just call her "Lix", it has to be LIX STORM all together: the coolest name for the coolest lady. In season 1 she was mostly a side-character, providing pithy commentary and drinking at two in the afternoon ("Whisky is God's way of telling us he loves us and wants us to be happy."), but her season 2 plotline with Peter Capaldi's Randall Brown was one of the most gripping aspects of the show. 

Lix has some of my favourite character-based costume design on the show. She dresses in a purposefully masculine way, to the extent that some of her suits are a direct analogue for menswear. In a show full of well-written female characters, this isn't the two-dimensional indicator of tough womanhood that it might've been in another show. Instead, it's a nod to her backstory. In her role as a kind of surrogate mother/mentor figure to the younger people at The Hour, Lix is the voice of experience -- and the voice of the past. She's a war reporter who was on the ground, alone, during the Spanish Civil War. And unlike Bel and Freddie, she can remember WWII from an adult perspective. Lix's dress-sense is stuck in the 1940s, when for practical purposes womenswear fashions skewed more towards masculine styles. Even though she's working in an office in central London in the 1950s, she's still dressed as an on-the-ground reporter ten years in the past.

If we're going to get over-analytical here, I'd say that in the offices of The Hour, Lix, Bel and Sissy represent three different generations of women in the workplace. Similarly, we see three generations of womenswear on the show. Lix is the practical wartime woman, wearing a limited selection of simple, durable shirts and trousers, whereas Marnie is the postwar New Look woman who dresses as girlishly as possible in reaction to the clothes rationing and utilitarian styles of the 1940s. Sissy and Camille are both edging towards the 1960s, with Sissy representing the working-class trends that would rule the later decades of the 20th century, and Camille representing the counterculture.

Previously:  Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon & Menswear and The Hour.

Petition to save The Hour.

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Fall 2013: Thom Browne Womenswear.

Previously on Thom Browne. 

Amazingly, this is Thom Browne's Ready-To-Wear collection. If you've heard of Thom Browne, chances are it's either because of his rather eccentric menswear or because Michelle Obama wore one of his designs to this year's Inauguration -- you know, the dress that made her look kind of like a Vulcan. This collection drew far more from his menswear than from his more sedate womenswear designs, however. Not because it was remotely masculine in appearance, but more because of the exaggerated proportions and Browne's unique ability to make grey look like the loudest colour on the spectrum.

Many of the outfits on display this week reminded me of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, not just because of the red rose imagery but because the styling seemed so in tune with Helena Bonham Carter's hair and makeup as the Queen of Hearts -- and her personal appearance in real life. The overall themes, however, were not particularly gothic. This wasn't so much a Twilight rose with sharp thorns as the image of a rose taken from girlish embroidery or cake decorations.

Thom Browne loves to play with gender in his designs, and viewed through the lens of his recent menswear shows, this collection does show some aspects of that. Where the silhouette of his menswear designs was rounded and soft (even if it was the roundness of overly-padded muscles), many of the coats and dresses in this show were angular in the extreme, going well beyond the squared-off shoulderpads of the 1930s and '80s. Some of these outfits reminded me of nothing less than the duo of oblong-torsoed spies in Belleville Rendez-vous:

 As well as the resolutely right-angled 1930s box suits, there were a few nods to 1950s Dior, in the form of ladylike dresses with nipped-in waists. Even these were exaggerated, however, with Browne including bulky crinolines at the hips.

This collection was a real breath of fresh air when compared to the multiple New York Fashion Week shows that focussed on leather trenchcoats and conservative cocktail dresses. While obviously very costumey, most of the clothes were far more season-appropriate than much of the other supposedly "Fall" designs I've seen on the runway over the past few days. Following on from the beautifully weird suits and gowns at the beginning of the show, the final few outfits focused on outerwear, featuring rose-red fur and layer upon layer of heavy wool tweeds.

images from Style.com

Youtube guide to watching New York Fashion Week online.

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A Youtube guide to New York Fashion Week.

Thanks to the snow storm that buried New York this weekend, watching Fashion Week from the comfort of your laptop is suddenly seeming a lot more appealing than being among the models and movie stars who have to freeze their extremities on the red carpet.

Not every Mercedes-Benz FashionWeek show is available online (this season, anyway), but there are still many to watch each day, including such big names as Vera Wang and Oscar de la Renta. If you don’t have time in your schedule for livestream viewings, we already have a few recommendations from the first couple of days of shows...

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Elementary: "M", "The Red Team" and "The Deductionist", Part 2.

Previously: "M", "The Red Team" and "The Deductionist, Part 1.

I hope everyone else was as invested in Clyde the turtle as I was. Sherlock used him as a paperweight. He said he was going to make him into soup. If you don't find this unspeakably, twistedly adorable then I despair of you. SHERLOCK FAILS THE VOIGHT-KAMPFF TEST. SHERLOCK IS A REPLICANT. IF SHERLOCK SAW A TURTLE ON ITS BACK IN THE DESERT, HE'D MAKE IT INTO SOUP.

On top of the introduction of this vitally important new supporting character, "The Deductionist" was another legitimately good episode all round -- except, perhaps, for the opening scene. Man, could you lay on the whole "we're pandering to the Superbowl audience" thing any thicker? There were a few seconds where I was like, "wow, has Sherlock seriously hired a couple of hookers to do a criminal roleplay striptease for him?" but no, it was pretty much just a gratuitous girls-in-underwear scene. I can't be bothered getting all angry feminist about that, but I will say that right now, Holmes' sexuality seems like the weak point in some otherwise very solidly-written characterisation. Some moments, such as when Holmes is being up-front about his sex life to the point of social awkwardness (ie, when he's talking to Watson about the profiler in "The Deductionist") seem very in-character, but other things just don't ring true. One scene that comes to mind was when Holmes was waving off a couple of hot blonde twins at the beginning of one of the earlier episodes. That brought me right out of the show because it just seemed like such a cheap shot: "I AM MAN".

Maybe this is just me being unnecessarily neurotic, but the writing for Holmes' sex-life feels very unbalanced. I'm totally willing to remain open-minded about Sherlock Holmes as a sexual being, particularly since Elementary is already such a different setting from the original stories, but it seems a lot like the writers went too far in the other direct and are now hanging in mid-air, windmilling their arms around. What is Sherlock, really? Is he an emotionally damaged former addict whose attitude to relationships was ruined by the death of his ex-girlfriend, and who now can only engage with sex workers? Is he the man we saw in the pilot episode, who views sex as a passionless bodily function? Is he a submissive who hires professionals because he wants to be in experienced hands? Or is he the guy who engages in dire American teen-boy TV fantasies like threesomes with a pair of blonde twins?

Overanalysis of Sherlock's sex-life aside, I'm hoping that the story structure of episodes like "M", "The Red Team" and "The Deductionist" will be carried through to the rest of the season. The main issue with the crime-writing the first 11 episodes was that they were trying to emulate the structure of a classic Holmes short story in a modern crime TV style. Unfortunately, weird set-ups and overly complicated resolution scenes do not a Holmes story make. "M" wasn't just good because it was an emotionally-charged backstory episode, but because there was no need to liven up the story with unnecessarily wacky twists and turns. Like "The Deductionist", it was a chase story in which audiences and characters both (more or less) already knew the culprit. Apparently, removing the whodunnit factor from Elementary makes it a significantly better crime show -- who knew? "The Red Team" was more similar to an early Elementary episode, except the silliness of its storyline fit in perfectly with the silliness of many classic Holmes storylines. Secret cabal of anti-terrorist war game geniuses, slowly being killed off one by one? Straight from Conan Doyle's typewriter, seriously. (Although the smarmy old rich white guy in the sweater vest turning out to the murderer was maybe the least surprising development ever.)

I've never been to NYC so perhaps this is just me being a n00b, but I looooved Joan's pornstar subletter storyline. I mean, it's always cool to see these hints of how Joan is gradually becoming a detective in her own right (which is something Elementary does better than any other Holmes adaptation I've seen, I think), but "subletters making a porno in my apartment while I'm not there" seems like such a NYC horror story that I had to love it. It was practically a Sex And The City subplot.

As for costuming, I adore the almost religious attention to consistency the designer has been putting into Joan's outfits. As well as the purple/grey colour scheme that she and Sherlock share in many scenes, Joan's clothes are incredibly uniform: mini-skirts, opaque tights, an untucked shirt or t-shirt and soft knitwear in pretty much every episode. Plus the costume designer shops specifically at realistically affordable stores like H&M. Sherlock, I think, has been getting more formal recently. In the last couple of episodes we've seen way more appearances from the shirt-and-waistcoat combo rather than all the thriftstore t-shirts, although that may just be coincidence. The best detail of all was when Sherlock barged into Joan's room while she was asleep and laid some clothes out for her to wear.... and then later on in the episode you see that she's wearing the outfit he picked out for her.

 Previously on Elementary

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