What do you do when you’re struggling to fall asleep at night? Count sheep? Drink warm milk? Play frog sounds on some embarrassingly retro Sharper Image machine? I think about the moment in Veep when Selina Meyer tells Congresswoman Nickerson that she looks like “a hair-sprayed asshole in her 1980s mother-of-the-bride dress”. Or the scene from Hacks where Deborah Vance asks Ava why she’s dressed “like Rachel Maddow’s mechanic”. Or the point in Arrested Development when Lucille Bluth spots her daughter Lindsay wearing a spaghetti-strap top and offers a pearl of unsolicited maternal wisdom: “Before I go, I just have one word for you: sleeves.”
Or at least I did, until Succession returned to screens last month, and delivered the most sublime fashion insult within 20 minutes of its season four premiere: Tom Wambsgans’s dressing down of Cousin Greg’s date, “Bridget Randomfuck”, and her ostentatiously tartan Burberry handbag, a soliloquy I have been turning over in my mind now for approximately 336 hours and counting. It’s superfluous to repeat Tom’s exact wording at this point, but here it is in all its searing, classist glory: “She brought a ludicrously capacious bag. What’s even in there? Huh? Flat shoes for the subway? Her lunch pail? I mean, Greg, it’s monstrous. It’s gargantuan. You could take it camping. You could slide it across the floor after a bank job.”
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What is it that makes the evisceration of some poor soul’s sartorial choices so uniquely compelling to watch? Millennium culture, in particular, revelled in this delicious form of awfulness. “Don’t stomp your little last-season Prada shoes at at me, honey,” is, perhaps, the most quoted line in Legally Blonde, a film costarring the world’s most meme-able human Jennifer Coolidge. I will sometimes, unbidden, hear Regina George uttering the immortal words: “That is the ugliest effing skirt I’ve ever seen.” I recall not one syllable that came out of Anne Hathaway’s mouth in The Devil Wears Prada, but I will remember Emily Blunt’s delivery of the line “I’m sorry, do you have some prior commitment? Some hideous skirt convention you have to go to?” until my dying breath. (Generally it was safer to avoid skirts altogether in the Noughties.) Karen Walker, too, terrorised Grace Adler with her criticisms of her wardrobe (“Grace, I thought we talked about the beret – Patty Hearst couldn’t even pull one off, and she had money and a gun”), and Cher Horowitz evolved from airhead to acid-tongued critic when posing the rhetorical question: “Do you prefer fashion victim or ensembly challenged?” And then, of course, there’s Ab Fab’s Eddie and Patsy – who walked so Schitt’s Creek’s Moira Rose could run. “Saffy, why does everything you wear look like it’s bearing a grudge, darling? You’ve got a wardrobe full of little murderers.”
Reader, I loved every minute of it. Does this make me sound like a bit of a monster? Maybe. Fashion is nice now, after all – although you wouldn’t know it from the number of ludicrously capacious memes circulating on Twitter. But here’s the thing: anyone who levies a fashion insult – who truly believes that their taste in knitwear makes them superior to someone else on any real level – has already betrayed themselves as kind of a slime puppy, and a person you should discard from your life as quickly as Kendall threw out those Lanvin sneakers. Nothing you could put on your body could be as embarrassing as someone actively trying to cultivate a “stealth wealth” wardrobe – a term so comically problematic I don’t have the space or energy to dissect it here – then feigning disdain for other people whose clothes feature a logo of some variety. To paraphrase Logan: “I love you, would-be fashion critics, but you are not serious people.”
Which brings me back to Tom. Even amongst the nest of vipers that is the Roy family, Wambsgans is particularly vicious in his style critiques. Please recall his dressing down of Greg’s footwear during the latter’s first week at Waystar Royco: “Forgive me, but are we talking to each other on the poop deck of a majestic schooner? Is the salty brine stinging my weather-beaten face? No? Then why the fuck are you wearing a pair of deck shoes, man?” And that’s, of course, because Tom has been through the therapy-necessitating wringer himself – has been told, on various occasions, that he looks like “a divorce attorney from the Twin Cities” in his Zegna suits, and that his Moncler puffer might as well have been “stuffed with his hopes and dreams”. He may now have a closet full of Ralph Lauren cashmere and his eye on the C-suite, but he’s still the same person who gave Logan an “it’s, uh, Patek Philippe” watch in the series premiere. I’ll save you the YouTube search: the timepiece was monstrous, it was gargantuan. And surely that tells you everything you need to know?
