Move over, Hollywood. These days, we're looking elsewhere for style inspiration, and it's television stars who are leading the way
Fashion has moved with the times, and Hollywood glamour is getting left behind. Television is the on-screen catwalk that really matters. The pomp and bombast of silver-screen style – Scarlett O'Hara's Gone With The Wind ballgown, Ursula Andress's belted Bond-girl bikini– feel as overblown as a 1990s mobile phone. Saturday nights are spent on the sofa, watching a character wearing the same sweater she wore last week.
The new generation of screen goddesses aren't goddesses at all, but real women. It is probably significant that almost all the small-screen style icons who matter are in complicated, multi-episode programmes, rather than in one-off dramas. Their lives have ups and downs and contradictions. They have talents; they have faults. They have love lives in which the narrative loops well beyond "fall in love, negotiate adorable/dramatic mishap, get married, the end" – and their wardrobes reflect this. The world didn't fall in love with Sarah Lund's Faroe Islands jumper in The Killing the first time she wore it. Only when it became a recurring theme – a part of the character – did it develop a cult following. As the actor who plays her, Sofie Gråbøl, explained to the Guardian, the jumper is "perfect because it tells so many stories. It tells of a person who doesn't use her sexuality – that's a big point. Lund's so sure of herself, she doesn't have to wear a suit."
In less than two decades, the fashion industry has been transformed beyond all recognition by new technology. Fifteen years ago, designer catwalk shows were open only to a couple of hundred people, and all images were kept under tight central control. Now, by contrast, shows are livestreamed with the aim of reaching a global audience immediately. (Burberry, with its Tweetwalk, made it a point of pride that the looks debuted on Twitter a few seconds before they appeared on the catwalk; those watching on their laptops had the news before the front row did.) The price-tag hierarchy of fashion has also been upended by the phenomenon of the designer-to-high-street collaboration. H&M has taken the mass appetite for fashion and used it to persuade Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney, Martin Margiela and Isabel Marant to dance to its tune. Designers are now expected to serve the new, informed fashion consumer. Any online retailer finding that, say, "jumpsuit" is becoming a popular search term is now in the habit of telling designers that they need to make more jumpsuits.
Hollywood style has displayed a fatal reluctance to move with the times. It is striking how often "old-school glamour" is referenced in descriptions of red-carpet dressing. Today, we like our icons a little more real. The style crush on Carrie Mathison in Homeland, played by Claire Danes, or on Stella Gibson in The Fall, played by Gillian Anderson, has quite a bit in common with our running obsession with the wardrobes of Michelle Obama and the Duchess of Cambridge. (Note, for instance, how the duchess "recycling" a dress for a second outing is a news story that gets more hits, these days, than her wearing a new one.)
Small-screen style icons capture our imagination because clothes are part of character. These wardrobes are about a sense of self, not about adhering to trends. Real style is intimate, psychological and complex – just like good TV.