My continuing love-affair with the costume design of Revenge.

Click here to read previous Revenge reviews. Warning: This post contains unavoidable spoilers for the first two episodes of season 2.

I'm impressed by the way Revenge has transitioned smoothly from its original single-season arc to a more long-running format. With a specifically goal-oriented storyline like Emily's revenge plot I was worried that we'd end up in a Twin Peaks type situation with the writers frantically trying to pull new plotlines out of nowhere, but season two is already shaping up to be excellent. I don't see much point in discussing every little plot detail because there are just so many, but my favourite thing so far has been the way Victoria's resurrection was revealed almost immediately. Revenge is a soap opera at heart, but it's damn well-written, and I admire the decision to let Victoria out at the beginning of the season when a lesser show would surely have kept that secret hanging over half of the characters for much longer.

The huge gap in Emily's backstory is a real gift to this show, particularly since it means we now get to see a whole bunch more of her Batman side. Batmanda is one of my very favourite parts of Revenge because watching intelligent women coolly brutalise their enemies makes my heart blossom like a flower. Sadly this storyline also comes with one of the worst aspects of the show, ie the two-dimensional racist stereotype that is Takeda, but fortunately it seems like his mentor role will be explored more thoroughly this season. Flashback scenes to her Batman training with Takeda are particularly interesting because she has such a radically different attitude towards him than she does towards anyone else in the show. In the Hamptons every person aside from Nolan is an unknowing pawn in her revenge plans, but Takeda is in the unique position of having Emily genuinely look up to him for guidance.

Emily's costuming has made me happy right from the start because it says so much, both about her own characterisation and about how much the showrunners have thought about the way she views herself. Revenge is the latest in a very long line of dramas about rich, attractive people trying to destroy each other -- not to mention the fact that the lead character is a woman who purposefully manipulates her enemy's son into marrying her. The obvious route to go with this would have been to make her into a vamp, but in reality Emily's dress-sense is very subdued. I think she's calculated very carefully to project this girl-next-door persona which not only requires her to act nice and bland all the time, but also involves this whole wardrobe of casual white t-shirts and pretty but nondescript summer dresses. The clothes she wears to parties fit in perfectly with the rest of Hamptons society, but she always looks rather more demure than Ashley or Victoria Grayson. Ironically, it's the seemingly genuine nature of Emily's persona that makes her attractive to Daniel Grayson in the first place, because her simple style and quiet, charitable disposition provide such a contrast to most of the other women he knows.

So I kind of loved it in the first episode of season two, when Emily showed up to the Graysons' boat-party wearing this ridiculously hot, eyecatching red dress. Emily doesn't usually like to draw attention to herself, but in this particular case it was a Breakup Dress, a protective outfit for her first appearance back in the Hamptons after last year's very public breakup with Daniel. A totally valid choice both for Emily herself, and for her good-girl persona. Oh, and another thing re: that scene? I loved Nolan's temporary disguise as a normal Hamptonite who wears sombre ties and doesn't pop his collar. In fact, I enjoy any formalwear/party scene where Nolan and Emily are together, because while Emily is almost always in disguise, Nolan is almost always in costume, dressing up in playful mockery of the people surrounding him. In this case he's gone for the pinstriped businessman look, but he nevetheless stands out from all the other men because as usual, he's gone several steps too far.

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This season sees Nolan continue to be a glowing blond demigod of delightfulness, with the additional gift that he's temporarily moved in with Emily. In case anyone's wondering what my reaction was when I realised that they'd fallen asleep on the sofa together while watching blackmailable security footage, the answer is that I built a set of wings out of wax and feathers and then flew towards the sun until I self-immolated and fell down to earth as a shower of sparks and ashes. Nolan and Emily are the best thing ever and made even moreso by the fact that Nolan apparently packs a red, white and blue-striped dressing-gown in his overnight bag. Along with flamingo-pattern boxers.

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While I'm happy to see some things remain the same (see above re: Nolan's penchant for colour-coded pocket squares and popped collars), other aspects of the show are being greatly improved by change. Daniel Grayson, for one. For me, Declan was the real weak-link in season one so I'm glad to see him become less of a dick in recent episodes, but Daniel's transformation from Hamptons himbo to businessman-with-a-backbone has been even more interesting to watch. As of 2x02 we've already seen him stand up to his father in a real argument between adults, make actual real-life use of his business degree (yes, Daniel went to college, remember?), and simultaneously become more ruthless and go out of his way to do the right thing by Charlotte. And as the transformation took place, his personal style graduated from Ivy league douchebro to full-on Young Republican, complete with Romney hair.

Click here to read previous Revenge reviews.

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Revenge season finale: "Reckoning".

Warning: Spoilers for the season finale, and spoilery allusions to the rest of the show. 

Back in the larval days of this blog, I wrote a couple of posts on the costumes of Nolan Ross, the delightfully beanpole-ish henchman character of ABC's Gossip Girl/Count of Monte Cristo/Girl With The Dragon Tattoo mashup, Revenge. In general the costumes of Revenge, while pretty, don't really inspire (or require) much overthinking, but this week's season finale was just too damn awesome not to warrant a post of its own.

BRB turning this photo into a mural for all my walls.

I'm constantly impressed by the abilities of the Revenge showrunners to up the ante without descending into ridiculousness. They've packed at least three seasons' worth of shocking revelations, blackmail scandals and torrid affairs into 22 episodes, but none of it seems unwieldy. When it comes to soap operas or dramas that rely on this kind of rapidly-escalating conflict, new plot-twists quickly begin to feel forced because they are forced -- the writers have to keep them coming in order to fuel the melodrama juggernaut. But with Revenge, the solution to this problem already exists within the show itself. Amanda's main purpose in the Hamptons is to stir up trouble, meaning that the issue of seemingly-forced plot-twists is already out the window. Secondly, every character is either so amoral or so desperate that it's perfectly believable for them all to be constantly collecting blackmail material on one another like a bunch of unusually well-dressed Cold War spies. At the beginning of the series there were a few "nice" characters to balance out the ferocious vitriol and paranoia of the Grayson family, but by the finale everyone has become tainted.

The costumes of Revenge aren't bad, but the nature of the setting means that nearly every character is dressed in a very perfect, studied and formulaic manner. Conrad Grayson is always in a somber, expensive suit; the younger men mostly wear relaxed everyman clothes; the women are dressed up but never ostentatiously so. Women on TV tend to be more put-together than women in real life, but in the case of Revenge we have a whole host of female characters who only ever remove their high heels to put on a negligee, and wear makeup 24 hours a day. In the dog-eat-dog world of being an evil trophy wife in the Hamptons, image is everything, and characters like Victoria Grayson and Lydia are rarely seen out of their uniform of tight, knee-length dresses.

Victoria is the most uniform dresser of them all. I don't think I've ever seen her wear anything that isn't a skin-tight dress plus high heels in the entire course of the show. Victoria's style is so immediately recognisable that I've noticed that Madeleine Stowe (the actress who plays her) tends to show up to Revenge publicity shoots wearing exactly the same kind of super-tight bandage dresses and lacy cocktail frocks.

Revenge is far less guilty of Male Gaze camerawork than most female-centric drama shows, but when it does come to purposefully sexualised cinematography it's usually Victoria on the receiving end of those shots, not Amanda. It's a pretty good characterisation choice, actually, since Victoria is definitely the vampy seductress of the show whereas Amanda's public persona is far more girl-next-door.

Amanda's costumes are almost all disguises. Everything she owns, wears and does in the Hamptons is tied into her revenge plans rather than expressing her own desires or sense of self. At heart she's a very controlled and practical person, someone who has been stripped back to the bare bones and will now do anything to fulfill her quest for vengeance. To that end, she's created the harmless Emily Thorne persona for the benefit of her Hamptonite enemies, a wolf in sheep's clothing. Once you accept that her appearance can't be judged the same way as most characters', her costumes can be divided into three categories:

1. Public Emily. The pretty, chic dresses she wears to parties and meetings with public figures like the Graysons and other Hamptons millionaires. These fall somewhere between Victoria Grayson/Lydia, and Charlotte Grayson. Expensive and classy, but more fresh and youthful and less sexy than Victoria's clothes.
2. Private Emily. Amanda's informal style is quite relaxed and boyish, involving a lot of blazers, sensible sweaters, and low-heeled boots. But since she's in the Hamptons and therefore technically playing at being Emily Thorne whenever she's in public, those clothes are still chic, designer outfits. In the context of her being a millionaire and the girlfriend of a Grayson, she probably comes across as quite preppy/Sloaney. 
3. The real Amanda Clarke. To me, she's at her realest when she's wearing her Girl With The Dragon Tattoo outfits: black hoodies, black jeans, and sensible black combat boots. The minute she puts on her Batmanda gear, we know that someone's going to be in trouble.

Nothing to do with costume design, but one of the little details I enjoyed about the finale was the motif of boxes and containers. In Revenge, all the Maguffin props are information-carriers. We've got to a point where almost every character has been directly involved in some kind of secret spy-camera or webcam blackmail scandal, and files change hands and swap email accounts with dazzling speed. Once upon a time it was just Nolan's infamous whalecam and Amanda's Infinity Box, but now we have any number of secret files and surveillance tapes.

The Infinity Box is this show's one great failing. It's a good prop for scenes where you need your protagonist to stare pensively at something while having childhood flashbacks, but for a character as practical and ruthless as Amanda it seems like a needlessly obvious Achilles heel. I was actually relieved when it first went missing because it's such a clunker of a clue pointing directly to every one of Amanda's well-planned deceptions. The fact that she's still got it now is rather frustrating.

The box may look empty, but it's OVERFLOWING WITH SYMBOLISM.

And then at the opposite end of the spectrum, there's Victoria's gift box to Amanda. This scene filled me with pure glee because it was such a perfect example of Victoria purposefully orchestrating a moment of theatrical cruelty, purely for her own vicious entertainment. And the thing is? Amanda respects that. She even smiles a little when she opens the box, impressed by Victoria's panache -- and glad that Victoria is no longer her future mother-in-law. In a show full of these staged moments of retribution and public humiliation, this was right up there with Victoria holding Lydia close and whispering in her ear, "Every time I smile at you across the room or we run into each other at a luncheon or I welcome you into my home? Let that smile be a reminder of just how much I despise you. And every time I hug you? The warmth you feel is my hatred burning through." I mean, WHO TALKS LIKE THAT? Only Graysons.

"I'm not worthy." -- direct quote from Nolan Ross in this scene.

The relationship between Amanda and Nolan is my favourite thing about Revenge. This show does a lot of interesting things with gender roles, beginning with the fact that the protagonist is a woman who, for all intents and purposes, is Batman. One thing I particularly love about Amanda is that unlike most female spy/deceiver characters, she doesn't rely on sex appeal and seducing information out of people. Although she uses her relationship with with Daniel as an integral part of her revenge plans, it's an actual relationship, not a collection of scenes where the camera pans over her wearing a sexy outfit before cutting to some man's comically gobsmacked facial expression. To me it feels quite telling that although the female characters in Revenge are mostly trophy wives (or, in the case of Fauxmanda, a former stripper), they are judged far more on their own terms than most female characters on TV.

With Nolan and Amanda, you have this brilliant relationship where Nolan is basically her henchman, but also is the one person who knows her secrets. On paper, it seems like he should have been more of a mentor figure to her -- he's older, he was friends with her father, he's her key to the Hamptons -- but instead he's very clearly in the sidekick role. Also, Nolan is the only character in the show who isn't desperate for control, either of his life or the world around him. There's this almost submissive side to his personality that means he's perfectly happy to look to Amanda for direction and take genuine pleasure in her success.

Just got kidnapped; still found time to pick out a pocket square that matches his trousers.

This kind of open, one-sided admiration between main characters is vanishingly rare, particularly when it's a man's (apparently) platonic admiration for a woman. In a less nuanced show, Nolan's loyalty would be written off as a poorly-socialised nerd with a crush on a hot, powerful woman. Rarer still is the fact that every moment of that admiration is tied to her actions and not her appearance. At first he was desperate to be let into her revenge plans, and now he's earned her trust he's openly gleeful about getting to watch her take people down. Although he clearly has a skillset far outside the reach of any other character on the show (those handy hacking skills...) it's also obvious that he couldn't have done any of the things Amanda continues to do. She's got an excellent strategic mind, she's ruthless, and she doesn't back down from a fight. Nolan, on the other hand, literally cowers away from physical confrontation. Gabriel Mann's ability to bend his 14ft limbs into various poses of snivelling terror is both impressive and entertaining.

This episode saw several excellent Nolan outfits. First, the vulnerable white t-shirt, checked trousers and pink/lilac shoes and socks of the kidnap scene. Another wonderful example of gender role reveral in Revenge, because in most TV and movie scenarios where a woman is kidnapped and tied up, she's at least partially stripped to highlight her vulnerability. Buffy and Angel are the only shows I can think of that objectify men in the same way as women in that type of setting, and although I wouldn't say this scene was sexualised, I appreciated the fact that Nolan was the weak one (as always) while Amanda was still tough and fully-dressed in her Batmanda outfit.

I almost punched the air in excitement during this moment of over-the-top visual symbolism. Victoria and Amanda, meeting for the last time on opposite sides of an ice-covered door! Amanda, dressed casually and all in white, comfortable in the knowledge that she's finally getting the revenge she desires! Victoria, dressed all in black like the archetypal Evil Queen she is, looking more like Morticia Addams than she ever has before! Delicious.

The closing montage was stunning. Victoria, wearing pure, innocent white from head to toe, absolving herself of her sins (as, she said to Charlotte earlier in the episode, the only way to cope with your own acts of cruelty and retribution is to forgive yourself and move on) and stepping up the heaven-like staircase to the airplane. Of course, being regular viewers of Revenge, we already suspected that the plane would crash, but on the other hand... as a regular Revenge viewer, I also suspect that Victoria survived that crash.

Links

I didn't used to be a Florence + The Machine listener, but thanks to the excellent usage of Seven Devils in this scene (plus the Snow White & The Huntsman trailer), my current playlists are becoming dangerously Florence-adjacent.

Revenge’s Gabriel Mann Talks About His Snarky One-liners, Fan Appreciation, and Nolan’s Fate.

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REVVVEEENNNGE: Nolan Ross costume analysis RETURNS.

I've already written quite extensively about my love of the character Nolan Ross in Revenge. Not only is he the best character in what is already an extremely entertaining show, but his dress sense is eye-bendingly awesome. He has this whole peacockish prepster-satire thing going on, and once you start looking out for it you notice that he appears to be wearing themed outfits in certain scenes. Last week he donned a sleazy-looking brown silk patterned dressing-gown to lounge around in after a sordid, loveless tryst, and I'm almost certain this was on purpose.

At the start of this week's episode (1x09) Nolan is wearing a fairly everyday ensemble: top half normal-looking, bottom half douchey prepster. (Tragically, you can't see the white dress shoes he's wearing to go with the white jeans and white belt. But rest-assured they are very white and shiny.) 

This is his "I'm not going to be hanging around anyone important today so who cares" outfit, the one he wears to do minor household tasks such as purring threats into the ears of people in bars at 11am, and spying on murderous identity-thieving strippers. (I know, right? This show is amazing.) However, later on he's invited to a party full of financial types, there to invest in the probably-corrupt company of his part-time-rentboy fuckbuddy. Aside from the show's protagonist and the aforementioned part-time-rentboy financial advisor, he's the youngest person at the party by about 20 years. So he wears this:

INSPIRED. He's dressed like a 70-year-old banker! But in a bow-tie, because he's at a party! White contrast collar on a striped coloured shirt? PERFECTION. Hyper-masculine Republican power-dressing with an ironic twist, because his main aim is to blackmail his scheming not-boyfriend. Plus matching maroon paisley tie and maroon pocket-square. This is what my brother refers to as a "William Shatner shirt" because it's what William Shatner's aging conservative lawyer character wears in Boston Legal:

IT'S LIKE EXACTLY THE SAME OUTFIT.

NOLAN ROSS IS IN COSTUME AS AN OLD-FASHIONED MILLIONAIRE INVESTOR. Once again, Nolan Ross pairs his Hamptons parody outfit perfectly with the situation. Let's look at it in motion, shall we?

.gif from http://hollowglances.tumblr.com/

DIVINE. That tie really brings out the colour of your dastardly smirk, Nolan.

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New style crush: Nolan Ross in REVEEEENNNGGE.

Following multiple recommendations from The Oncoming Hope, I watched the first episode of Revenge. And then I promptly watched the other four episodes, because it's freaking awesome. It's like a cross between Gossip Girl and Veronica Mars, with the protagonist -- Emily -- seeking REVEEEENNNGE (this in fact is the correct pronunciation of the title -- for best effect, drawl it with the confidence and malicious delight of the truly evil) on the super-rich beautiful people who got her father framed as a treasonous terrorist. There are endless dastardly takedowns and almost every scene involves terrifying society matriarchs smiling charmingly while secretly wishing each other a painful death, but it quite never tips over into the preposterousness of Gossip Girl because the protagonist is so wonderfully dead-eyed and machiavellian. But I'm not here to tell you about the many ways the heroine of REVEEEENNNGE Count-Of-Monte-Cristo's her way around the Hamptons. I'm here to talk about NOLAN ROSS.

Nolan Ross is the only person on the show who knows about Emily's revenge plan. He's a dotcom billionaire with no friends, unlimited funds and free time at his disposal, and a serendipitous desire to help Emily ruin the lives of the rich and evil. He's a very entertaining character, and has marvellously awful dress sense. The rest of the costumes on Revenge are fairly run-of-the-mill "rich attractive people go to social galas" outfits as seen in Gossip Girl, Dirty Sexy Money, etc, but Nolan's costumes are a magnificent ode to candy colours and popped collars.

This is what he looks like when he first appears on the show. My immediate assumption was, "this character is evidently going to be an unbearable caricature", since he's wearing a captain's hat at a marina, despite the fact that he can't sail and doesn't own a boat. He has tiny whales embroidered onto his trousers, and I suspect that the belt may well be somehow nautical in theme. But you know what? He's actually brilliant. He doesn't fall under the tired stereotype of "computer nerd with no social skills" that plagues so many google-detective "hacker" characters on TV -- in fact, he often expresses far more genuine emotion than most of the other characters in the show.

THE POPPED COLLARS. You know, there's a wealth of douchey fratboys in Revenge, but nary a popped collar in sight. They're all too classy. (And all the other males over thirty are, of course, wearing suits at all times except when playing golf or in bed with their mistresses.) But Nolan pops his collars like a mofo. This isn't some college kid flipping up his collar to look "cool", this is evidence of commitment. He will put on two polo shirts of complementary colours, and then pop them both. CLEARLY HE HAS THOUGHT THIS LOOK THROUGH, IS WHAT I AM SAYING.

HE'S WEARING A POPPED COLLAR UNDER A BUTTON-DOWN SHIRT. AND A POCKET-SQUARE THAT MATCHES THE SHIRT, BECAUSE IT'S A FORMAL EVENT. Apparently in the character notes he's described as having bad dress-sense, but do you know what? I don't think this is bad dressing. Thought has gone into this. And he's working it.

Nolan has a whole thing going on with his jackets. He's got several suit jackets, but they're always wrinkled and he always has the sleeves pushed up, like Miami Vice or something. I theorise that back when he was still a n00b of the business world, someone told him he had to start dressing like an adult and this was his interpretation of what that meant. Then, we finally got to see a flashback of what he looked like ten years ago:

This? Is what people expect the "computer nerd character" to look like. It's the Mark Zuckerberg look, the "I've been wearing these clothes for three days because I never matured past age fifteen and it doesn't matter anyway because I invented Google/Twitter/the internet" look. I love that this is what he used to look like, because it gives a whole new insight into Nolan's slightly baffling clothing choices in the present day. I think that all the popped collars and candy-colours and the highlighted surfer-dude hair are almost Nolan's parody of what he thinks a Hamptonite should look like. When we first see Nolan, he's already an established figure on the super-rich social scene -- so rich, in fact, that he can pretty much do whatever he wants. I think at some point he started dressing like this in an attempt to fit in with all the charity-gala Hamptons families, but soon realised that that was never going to happen so he might as well just take the piss. As I mentioned: he can get away with it.

A camel sweater tied around the shoulders? Plus the double popped-collar? TELL ME THAT ISN'T PURE PARODY, NOLAN. I DARE YOU. Which is why this next picture amuses me. That is what Nolan wears when he's by himself, and later going into the city to, uh, break into someone's house and retrieve some blackmail info. A far more subdued outfit -- the hoodie + suit + sneakers look, in fact, that practically screams "dotcom CEO".

And finally, a picture of Nolan looking fantastic in a super-tacky golfing shirt... because he's followed Emily to a golf course in an attempt to witness some exciting REVEEENNNGE action, not because he actually plays golf. Like many of his clothing choices, it shouldn't work but it does. The shirt flatters his colouring, and despite the fact that it's an orange, diamond-patterned polo shirt, buttoned up to the neck, he's still managing to work it with panache.

BEAUTIFUL.

Continued in: REVENNNGE: Nolan Ross costume analysis RETURNS.

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