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.”)