The third season of The White Lotus finishes on Monday, marking the end of group chats and column inches devoted to the Thai hotel and its super-rich guests.
While some of this chatter has been dedicated to theories of who kills who in the finale, or the alleged fallout between creator Mike White and composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, a lot is focused on something else – the fashion.
Some of this season’s most popular items include the Tombolo crocodile-printed shirt worn by Lochlan, the younger Ratliff brother, the Zimmermann printed halterneck dress worn by his sister, Piper, and the Hunza G green bikini worn by Chloe, the French-Canadian ex-model living on the island. All of these have sold out online.
Designers know very well that the TV show – which boasted a new high of 4.8 million viewers in the US for its seventh episode – can work as a platform to market their clothing. Simon Porte Jacquemus contacted costume designer Alex Bovaird on Instagram with a request to collaborate before the latest series began filming – a reversal of the typical process, where a costume designer will contact a brand to borrow clothes.
The result is two custom looks for Chloe, including a pink swimsuit and cover-up with brimmed hat for her to welcome guests on her partner’s superyacht in episode four. Bovaird says this is the first time that a designer as renowned as Jacquemus has contacted her. “White Lotus fills this specific niche of being quite cool,” says Bovaird. “People want to be involved with it.”
Bovaird has been the costume designer since the series began. She requests items to borrow from brands but also finds them in “a mix of flea markets, showrooms, charity shops, [and] we make some stuff. The unitard that Nadya [the partner of Aleksi] wears in the latest episode came from a market in Essex. There are bags from Hermès – and other things that cost £5.99, like that unitard.”
Part of the fashion appeal, she says, comes from the characters always being on holiday. “When you’re going on holiday, you’re dressing up, you’re not wearing your everyday clothes. With other contemporary shows, you’re nailing actuality. I get a chance to play dress up.”
Bovaird also collaborated on The White Lotus H&M collection, around half of which has already sold out at the high-street chain. “The idea was that not everyone can afford luxury hotel resorts but everyone can afford to be glamorous and have a bit of White Lotus in their wardrobe,” she says.
TV has a long history of boosting the sales of fashion brands. Sex and the City in the 90s made Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo household names – a Newsweek article from 2000 quotes a buyer for department store Neiman Marcus saying Blahnik’s sales tripled because of the show – and Mad Men characters such as Joan Holloway and Don Draper inspired countless designers during its seven seasons.
The White Lotus is not the first TV series to partner with a brand, either. In 2009, New York designer Anna Sui created a collection for Target that was inspired by the clothes of Gossip Girl, and Banana Republic worked with Mad Men in 2011 (and has also worked with The White Lotus this season).
More recent TV shows with fashion kudos include Euphoria, which influences twentysomethings with its eclectic thrifted style, Emily in Paris, with its ultra-fashion look, and Succession, which arguably contributed to the rise of the quiet luxury aesthetic and “finance bro” gilets. Apple TV’s office-based Severance, meanwhile, is a reference for the current return of workwear in fashion.
“We’ve seen TV and fashion intersecting for quite a while but in this current era of prestige TV, it’s dialled up to 11 in terms of the impact,” says Beth Bentley, the founder of brand strategy consultancy Tomorrowism. “Succession brought heat around brands that people maybe hadn’t encountered before – like Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli. It made people curious about those brands.”
Paul Flynn, who writes about TV for Grazia, says: “There’s an argument to be made somewhere that [Succession’s] Kendall Roy is the most influential menswear figure of the last decade.”
The love of these shows – and the discourse around them online – means fans will pore over the outfits, thinking of them as what’s known as “Easter eggs”, or clues to the plot. Bovaird says she does use outfits to plant clues – in an interview with Dazed, she revealed that a mannequin wore one character’s dress in series two that foreshadowed that character’s death at the end. “I know people have delved into the outfits and their meanings,” she says. “Some of it is true, definitely, I just couldn’t say what.”
Flynn praises the costume design in everything from EastEnders to Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, but he says the attention to what characters wear is also a sign of how TV is changing. “Wardrobe is one of the things that has started to make terrestrial TV look so 20th century, as opposed to the streamers,” he says. Bentley adds: “It’s a badge of honour within the industry to be able to say they got on [a show] before everyone else.”
The White Lotus has been on fashion’s radar since series one, where Sydney Sweeney’s sardonic teen character, Olivia, became a favourite. Haley Lu Richardson’s Portia in season two became the poster girl of gen Z “schlumpy” style.
While independent brands often don’t have the resources to lobby for their designs to be featured in these shows, they notice the impact when they are. Scooter LaForge created the T-shirts that Chloe and Chelsea wear for the full-moon party in the current series of The White Lotus. He says the response has been “overwhelmingly” positive. “My Instagram following has skyrocketed throughout season three.”
While LaForge hand-paints his T-shirts, meaning fans cannot buy the exact ones featured in the show, he sold similar designs at the Patricia Field ARTFashion Gallery in New York. “Sales have been strong,” he says. “I’ve been very busy, [even if] there’s no mass production or printing involved.”
Often, designers won’t know that their products have made it on the show before it’s aired – as was the case with the green Hunza G bikini worn by Chloe. “When I watched the episode, I saw [the bikini] at the same time as everybody else,” says the brand’s founder, Georgiana Huddart. “My phone went crazy.” The bikini sold out within a week.
Huddart says Hunza G has appeared in other TV shows, including Bad Sisters, but The White Lotus has a special status. “It [reaches] such a wide demographic of people.”
Bentley agrees the series has a unique place in culture, partly due to the fact that episodes are only released once a week. “There’s shared anticipation,” she says. “I was in a hairdresser in Somerset, and people were talking about it. It’s not just in media hotspots, or in city locations, or among gen Z – it’s everybody and their mum.”
If watching these shows is a relatively universal experience, the worlds and people they often depict are anything but. “If you look at Succession or The White Lotus characters, the writers of the shows are skewering the rich and poking fun at them – and yet, at the same time, we want to dress like them. There’s a crazy irony there.”
Despite this, Bentley believes the connection between TV and fashion brands isn’t going away. In fact, she predicts they will fuse even more. “[There will be] collabs and capsule collections, and also maybe brands digging in financially and funding original content to create moments that have more intention and more control, from the brand’s point of view,” she says.
As for costume designers’ work continuing to make a mark on consumers’ wardrobes, Bovaird – who is, admittedly, somewhat biased – argues that it’s a good thing.
“People should be influenced by experts in how they dress,” she says. “I’m not saying a TikTok influencer can’t influence, but we really are the experts. We think about clothes all the time.”