The fashion of Twin Peaks(0)

Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s iconic TV series, is returning to our screens after it went missing for almost three decades. First broadcast in 1990, the show became a cult classic and is celebrated by fans and TV scholars alike. One of the reasons for this is its extraordinary use of costume. The original series’ strikingly distinctive style anticipated the way we dress now, making its revival especially timely.

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The show’s original costume designer was Patricia Norris, who won an Emmy for her work on the pilot episode. Sara Markowitz took over for the series’ two-season run and adapted Norris’s ideas in new directions. Norris and Markowitz combined classic Americana (1950s-style leather jackets, plaid workwear, cheerleader uniforms) with the often tonally jarring looks of the late 1980s (oversized, patterned knits and scrunchies). The look they created was simultaneously timeless, indicating the universality of American small-town life, and highly specific, conveying the distinctiveness of David Lynch’s vision. Twin Peaks’ style is both very recognisable and intensely strange, mapping on to coordinates of what we think we know, yet at the same time upsetting them.

Part of the cult appeal of Twin Peaks is in the way it encourages its viewers to look for clues and to participate in the detective process, which gives rise to endless speculation. It is the original watercooler television. Clothes are no exception to this process. Why does the character of Audrey Horne change from sensible black and white saddle shoes to red kitten heels when she gets to school? The obvious answer is out of adolescent rebellion. However, the repeated close-ups on the shoes throughout the pilot episode draw attention to them and encourage the viewer to speculate on their meaning.

Their black, white and red colour scheme prefigures the zigzag floors and red curtains of the infamous red room sequence, in which detective Dale Cooper dreams that the murdered Laura Palmer tells him the name of her killer. Later in the series, a one-armed shoe salesman plays a significant role, while Bobby and Shelly find a tape of Laura’s therapy sessions hidden in Shelly’s husband Leo’s shoe. In Twin Peaks, material objects take on inflated significance. Everything and nothing is a clue.
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