Some people learn about Watergate in history class, others from listening to relatives’ long-winded accounts of how cool the ’70s were. But I’m proud to say that almost everything I know about the scandal that engulfed and ultimately ended Richard Nixon’s presidency I learned from Dick (and I’m not alone.) Andrew Fleming’s 1999 comedy about two giggly 15-year-old girls—played to perfection by the all-star duo of Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams—who stumble across Nixon’s secrets isn’t necessarily the most sophisticated movie in the world, but rewatching it recently I was struck by something I never really clocked when I first saw the movie as a teen myself: the style.
There was an alternate way that Dick’s costume designer Deborah Everton could have had it: period-appropriate outfits, like the retro, semi-frumpy good-girl clothes the two main characters wear at the film’s outset. Instead, she let the characters express their teenybopperish fixation via colorful knee socks and cringey ’90s hair accessories. (Remember when it seemed extremely okay and cool for white girls to wear hair chopsticks?) The result is an homage to all that’s silly and hilarious and fun about teenage girlhood—in the ’70s, the ’90s, and even now—without making the girls themselves the butt of the joke.
I’m always fascinated by the fashion in period pieces. (There’s a reason I’ve watched Atonement more times than I can count, and it’s 100% Keira Knightley’s green dress from the library sex scene.) But watching Dick as an adult made me realize just how pitch-perfect the film’s ‘70s-through-a-’90s style prism was. Yes, the chokers and midriff-baring tops that Dunst and Williams’s sweet, gullible characters, Betsy and Arlene, sport as they get drawn deeper into Nixon’s nefarious web are anachronistic. But this isn’t realism; these aren’t pure ’70s costumes. The movie’s deeply fin de millennium sensibility creates the kind of fashion mash-up that wouldn’t look out of place on a runway today. (What’s more now than ’90s revival?)
In terms of its fashion, Dick functions as a kind of grab bag of different looks from the past century. But it’s an exaggerated version: beehive hairdos and cute-bordering-on-silly hats reflect the film’s frequent forays into sheer ridiculousness. I don’t want to give the plot of the film away for any who might not have happened upon it yet, but let me just say that there’s one particularly patriotic red, white, and blue look at the end of Dick that seems to sum up the movie’s ethos: When in doubt, go big.
“While some of the Watergate references might go over a modern teen’s pierced, tattooed, green, bald or braided head,” wrote a reviewer in The Washington Post in 1999, “those who’ve seen All the President’s Men will know enough to recognize the caricatures of ‘Woodstein’ and the plumbers.” On behalf of ’90s kids everywhere, I’m offended! Personally, I think we’re more than capable of dyeing our hair or shaving our heads and still recognizing a political allegory. And it might just be that our attention to self-expression makes us especially attuned to the sartorial delights of this classic film.
