Succession isn’t a show you can just turn off. Even after the click of your remote, the andante piano keys fill your ears, the one-liners rumble around your brain and timeline, and the characters stick with you like you half-expect to read about them in the news. The world of Succession doesn’t feel like it stops when we’re not watching, and that’s in part because, for some of the actors, there is little divide. (You’ve already seen the headlines about Jeremy Strong’s method acting.) But credit is also due to the show’s costume designer Michelle Matland, who enables the actors to fully sink into their characters — and makes watching the show such a visual feast.
In her tenure as Succession’s costume designer across its four seasons, Matland has created a fully dimensional world through wardrobe, and added terms like “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth” to the cultural lexicon as a result. She’s also responsible for bringing to life the “ludicrously capacious bag” that’s still meme fodder. (Although she thinks people missed another joke with the rest of Bridget’s costume.) Ahead of the last three episodes of Succession, Matland spoke to W about The Bag, Shiv’s pregnancy looks, and Kendall’s Loro Piana baseball cap she had to scour the country to find.
Are you tired of being asked about quiet luxury, at this point?
[Laughs] I’m not tired of being asked—I wish I knew more about it, as well as the ‘stealth wealth’ terminology. I’ve been meaning to look up when that term became popular, because I’m pretty sure it didn’t exist before we started the show.
How do you feel about the show being associated with it?
It was never anything that we really knew about. We certainly knew about the fact that certain kinds of wealth were not only not interested in a logo world, but were antithetical in feeling about it and not interested in being a part of it. There’s some disdain for the logo world—the Versace, overt color…
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