Succession Season 4 Episode 7's Best Fashion Moments: 'Tailgate Party'

Matsson's jacket made him look like he was doing a sardonic impression of an American going to a party.

There’s nothing like the slate gray bedsheets and severe cityscapes of Succession to knock the images of King Charles’s coronation from your brain like a broom beating the dust off a rug. The funny thing about the royals is they put on the gilded horse and pony show, what, less than one percent of the time? And the rest of the time they kind of look like they’re attending a Wall Street Christmas party circa 2007: break out the festive pantsuit, because it’s time for unnecessarily spendy, highly stage-managed, scripted merriment!

It got me thinking: would a Roy ever opt for a festive anything? If you consider hand-sprinkling salt on the passed fries “festive,” sure? Here are the best fashion moments from season four’s seventh episode, “Tailgate Party.”

Shiv’s Jean-Georges-Colored Gray Suit

HBO’s courtesy photo doesn’t do the color justice!

This episode placed Shiv firmly in her gray era. If her life were an Instagram grid in 2017, its aesthetic would be gray. Her apartment is gray. The knit (cashmere?) loungewear she wears in her apartment is gray. The restaurant she visits, Jean-Georges, is gray. She and the restaurant probably have the same interior decorator because when you live in one of the world’s biggest cities but are among the richest people there, your world is actually quite small. Both Shiv and that decorator may have read about “Millennial pink” in New York magazine, but they don’t know her.

Shiv looks as sharp as she ever has, as though this is a sartorial reaction to Tom giving her the objectionable scorpion paperweight gift and calling himself “Father Sexmas” as he did (arguably the worst offense). The gray suit reads like she wants to be somehow better than the person who married a middle-class guy who gives her a tacky scorpion-in-resin as a gift because that’s how he sees her — like she’s the one with the poison stinger to strategically deploy in order to get them both to the top. Her gray suit and delicate necklace look like an almost studious reaction to what she sees as Tom’s tone-deaf tackiness.

Tom’s Swishy Suit

In this house the dinner bell may as well be a Katy Perry song, because it goes “swish swish.”

Shortly after we witness Shiv’s private chef placing individual chives across a breakfast of eggs she couldn’t be less interested in, we see Tom rush into the kitchen to ferry it to her. This is what passes for romance and chivalry when you and your partner are so wealthy that you never have to do anything annoying around the house if you don’t feel like it. In his rushing, the cinematographers offer a glimpse of swishy pant legs. Contrast his pant legs to Kendalls pant legs or Roman’s pant legs or, hell, even Connor’s pant legs. Has Roman ever remotely swished in anything? His clothes are arguably just a hair too tight but, if you really look closely, fit as closely as they can without anything puckering. Tom may be terrified of puckering or he may have been too busy striving to have gotten Hedi Slimane’s skinny suit memo circa 2000.

Rava’s “Cool Girl” Bag

The look of a woman who keeps up with fashion by reading Vogue.

Kendall’s ex-wife Rava summons him to Birch coffee for a tête-à-tête about their daughter, who has anxiety about the election. Kendall shows up looking slightly ridiculous on this gray winter day in his Loro Piana baseball hat and sunglasses, like he’s Leonardo DiCaprio trying to disguise himself at Casa Cipriani.