When Meghann Fahy’s Devon arrives on the fictional island of Port Haven in the new Netflix series Sirens, she takes one look at the crowd and offers the following commentary: “What is this place, and why does everyone look like an Easter egg?”
It’s a funny line, but also a true one: surrounding her is a sea of bold printed dresses, madras shorts, and Nantucket reds. While black may be a staple color in Devon’s hometown of Buffalo (and, well everywhere else), it’s certainly not here.
If The Perfect Couple and The White Lotus aimed to subtly display class differences through style, Sirens aims to hit you over the head with them. The residents of Port Haven—based on exclusive New England vacation destinations like Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard—are so preppy it verges on camp. Women wear Lilly Pulitzer-style shift dresses and headbands en masse, while men wear colorful blazers embroidered with ducks or lobsters (as well as a lot of Brooks Brothers). Outsiders like Devon, on the other hand, are marked by their grungy combat boots, tattoos, and heavy eyeliner. The visual contrast makes it obvious: pastel means you’re in, black means you’re out.
“We took all those colors and those silhouettes that we all know as sort of that upper-crust, blue-blood, one-percenter summer aesthetic, and cranked the volume up extremely high,” costume designer Caroline Duncan tells Vogue.
When Duncan first read the script for Sirens—a limited series about an assistant, her sister, and a powerful billionaire couple that rule a moneyed summer enclave—Lilly Pulitzer was written into it. She then promptly ordered a copy of The Official Preppy Handbook, Lisa Birnbach’s classic 1980s survey of WASP codes and culture, for everyone in her department. They followed its tongue-in-cheek dress rules to a T, from the appropriate toe shapes of boater shoes (almond or square) to when one should wear a madras print versus windowpane. (“Madras is daytime—madras is to the country club,” Duncan explains, laughing. “Windowpane can traverse into evening.”)
She dressed Milly Alcock’s Simone, the eager assistant of Julianne Moore’s billionaire Michaela Kell, in a pink and white dress from Goop’s collaboration with Lilly Pulitzer. (Many of the background characters also wear Lilly-inspired shift dresses, which her department made themselves. “Pulitzer is a great visual. It’s so iconic, everyone understands,” Duncan says.) Meanwhile, as Fahy begins to dress more “Port Haven” herself, she tries on dresses by the likes of Carolina Herrera, Marchesa, and Alexa Maria.
In fact, there are only two significant characters who resist going full prep. The first is Moore’s Michaela, who wears flowing chiffon dresses from Chloé, cream silk sets, Fred Leighton jewelry, and other stealth-wealth hallmarks typical of the uber-rich. It is both an accurate choice—someone in the Kells’ income bracket doesn’t wear $200 flower-print shift dresses—and a symbolic one: “It was very intentional that she not wear the colors of her posse,” per Duncan.
The second? Kevin Bacon’s Peter Kell, the billionaire businessman who is the true master of this island universe. Duncan and her team studied old photos of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Robert Redford, and styled him in kind: While the rest of the men are wearing Nantucket red and madras shorts, he wears Brunello Cucinelli.
“Everything is incredibly curated,” Duncan says of the world of Sirens. “It feels extremely homogenous, overwhelmingly colorful, cult-like, and Stepford-like.” And wouldn’t you know it: She worked on the costumes for The Stepford Wives—another dark-preppy satire, too.
