When we first meet the guests of The White Lotus season three, pulling into the dock on lush Koh Samui, three of them are having the time of their li
When we first meet the guests 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 all over one another laughing on the boat ride over. They are all blond, they are all wrapped in luxury clothing (a Zimmerman maxi, a Paul Smith sundress, and an Alemais mini—a sales receipt equivalent to about $2,000), shielded by enormous designer sunglasses, and clutching various other IYKYK high-fashion items (vintage Chanel wedges, a Loewe Squeeze purse, a Valentino shoulder bag—the bags are another $8,000 or so together, and the shoes have been listed around $400 on resale sites). We can’t immediately differentiate between Leslie Bibb’s Kate, Carrie Coon’s Laurie, and Michelle Monaghan’s Jaclyn, but one glance tells us that these women aren’t just affluent—they’re affluent affluent.
Fabio Lovino/HBO
In a later episode, as a boozy dinner conversation turns to the election, and Jaclyn (made-in-Italy swimwear brand Pin-Up Stars) and Laurie (Bella Freud) ask Kate (Alemais again, with Polene earrings and, as always, two Cartier Love bracelets clanking on her wrist), with a dawning horror, whether she voted for Donald Trump.
Kate blows them off with a sip of rosé and a question of her own: “Are we really gonna talk about Trump tonight?”
We fire up our screens on Sunday evening and tune in to see the latest of White Lotus’s affluent people behaving poorly, swanning around in caftans that hide all manner of sins. It’s basic to explain our obsession with the show as an escapist pleasure, but in the Trump era, perhaps those LBHs (“losers back home,” in the show’s parlance) are familiar: A critical mass of wealthy and entitled people who want to communicate to you exactly how well-off they are, opting for a locale where everyone who isn’t a traveling companion is there expressly to serve. The noisy luxury of The White Lotus and the real world bears enough volume to drown out questions about who’s donning the outfits, such as: What do they say about the wearer?
In the era of Trump 2, do you know exactly who’s MAGA in your life? Are you sure? Fashion may hold the clues.
Alex Bovaird, the show’s costume designer, tells Vanity Fair that the homogeneity of the three friends’ looks, despite their hailing from different regions (New York, Texas, and California), purposefully gestures toward the assumptions we tend to make: that people who look like us are, in fact, like us.
“I wanted to keep them throughout as kind of still interchangeable, so that when they reveal themselves, it’s sort of subtle, and it starts to make you think, Oh yeah, they’re not all the same,” she says. “It’s not like Kate comes off the boat wearing a MAGA hat or anything.”
Bovaird drapes the show’s characters in brands meant to invoke exorbitant taste and the social background that can afford them, whether by way of generational wealth, marriage, long hours of white-collar work, or simply long hours of white-collar crime. They’re carelessly affluent: Jaclyn wears an open Chanel gown to the pool over a swimsuit, treating a $7,000-plus archival runway look as casually as a hotel robe. (Her Eres one-piece swimsuit retails at a friendlier $600.) Kate later dons a similarly elementary hot-pink tank suit; it’s by Valentino. Men are sockless in Gucci loafers; women are lounging in Loewe and pulling lip balm and lorazepam out of their capacious JW Anderson bags. Bovaird says she would have stacked “like 20” of the Cartier bracelets on Kate, had budget allowed (“like 20” would run around $147,000).
Fabio Lovino/HBO
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