In the fourth episode of The Perfect Couple—the soapy Netflix murder mystery that takes place on the island of Nantucket—Dakota Fanning’s character, the snobby Abby Winbury, has some choice words about a revealing Missoni dress worn by Meghann Fahy’s Merritt Monaco. “That is not a dress,” she smirks. “She’s wearing a bathing suit.” (Abby’s wearing a demure, ankle-skimming maxi.) Fanning, with one swipe at an outfit, confirms to the viewer what the show has been hammering home for the past three episodes: Merritt isn’t one of them. The them, in this case, is old-money WASP. And in the setting of the show—a Monomoy mansion owned by the wealthy Winbury family—is a nest of them: people whose families have been vacationing in the exclusive enclave for generations, belonging to the same country clubs and attending the same private schools.
You’ve heard it before: The clothes make the man. Yet, in The Perfect Couple and pop culture, it’s never felt more relevant. Let’s dissect.
The most obvious outsider is Merritt, the mistress of family patriarch Tag Winbury. That Missoni dress—which she wears through pretty much the entire series—is, sure, expensive. Yet, it’s not the right kind of expensive. It looks like something someone would wear amid Don Julio 1942–popping partyers at a Miami pool rather than among the New England country-club set. There’s a general ingrained expectation of reserve in these places; such institutions often have strict dress codes that forbid showing shoulders and midriffs or wearing casual apparel, like denim and flip-flops. When another outsider, the middle-class Amelia Sacks, runs downstairs in her underwear, you can feel the entire Winbury family grimace, Where is her robe? “At least my wife matches the fucking wallpaper,” Tom Winbury sneers during a fight with his brother, Benji, who is set to marry Amelia the next day.