I recently watched Twin Peaks: The Return, which this post is not about. (Sorry.) What it is about is that every time Naomi Watts’s character, Janey-E, popped up, I found myself saying “they did such a great job with her clothes.” In 2017, all her clothes are just a little off trend and also kind of clearly the mass produced, “TJ Maxx” version of whatever that trend originally was. Janey-E wears a lot of ballet flats, even though I’d personally put the colorful ballet flat imperial phase as ending around 2015. There’s often a sort of residual post-Modcloth, post-Anthropologie twee to her looks.
See, for instance, the blouse in this scene. And the ballet flats:
As the scene also makes very clear: of course she dresses this way. She is scraping by, she has a kid to raise and a job at the bank, and her husband is a gambling addict. As she says in this scene, she is one of the people who drives “cheap, terrible cars.” Her respectability is white-knuckled. But also, earned. She is a nice woman who wants to look like a nice, put-together woman, and, within her means, she is.1 She doesn’t want to look like a fashion plate. Looking about two years off trend is fine by her.
The original Twin Peaks had a lot of iconic clothes, but to me it’s always seemed like those looks are deliberately retro. (I will however concede to being a toddler for much of its original air time—maybe they read differently in the nineties.) The girls and their plaid skirts and huge sweaters and nude lipstick; the boys and their leather biker outfits. Even though it takes place at a specific time, it feels like it could take place in some vague past.2
Janey-E, by contrast, is pretty squarely of her time and only of her time. You can date her look quite easily both by what its referencing and by the way it feels a little off. And unlike the men, she can’t wear a suit as a uniform. She has to get up and get dressed every day and look nice for her job at the bank. So she does.
Anyway. I was thinking about this for two reasons.
One was the genuinely bizarre Twitter kerfuffle over a not-particularly-attractive sundress put out by Evie, allegedly (?) Peter Thiel’s women’s magazine… that ended with people more or less saying if you did not like this dress it was probably because you were the opposite of this tweet:
Within this discourse there were some shots fired (on both sides) at the TJ Maxxes and Marshalls and Targets and Old Navys of the world (i.e. some saying it looked like a dress from a bargain bin and some saying “well go shop at Target, you old sad hags” more or less), which rather pained me. I feel the honor of Janey-E is being maligned and I want to defend her, even though she’s definitely unhappy and probably older than 34.
Obviously, you would not see Janey-E in this dress. Because while she might be fine buying cheap clothes, she might be fine with rayon and polyester, but she’s not going to buy something with that unflattering waistline for that amount of money. The filtered-down version of a higher-end sundress that you’d see on Janey-E would be totally different and probably cost about $40 at most.3 Now is that good in some wider, general, the ecosystem / labor sense, probably not, but Janey-E can’t help that.
The more fundamental problem here, to me, is that what Janey-E, everywoman, is wearing is essentially various styles diluted down into “business casual,” which is part of how it contributes to her looking nice and put together. But this dress is not business casual—it’s obviously designed to be unsafe for work as it were—so it just looks kind of cheap. If you ask yourself where you’re actually going to wear it the answer (for me) is just “Instagram.” Which is not a place.
But also, it was three am (when I was writing this, more like five am now) and I could not sleep, so recently I found myself scrolling Poshmark to see if I could find a thrifted version of a much-missed sweater of mine,4 because I received, as a present, the higher-end thing the sweater was to some degree copying. Though the search also revealed to me that this sweater was a wool-acrylic blend,5 I nevertheless continue to pine for it.
The answer seems to be that the sweater is listed in sizes that are probably not my size, but in the course of looking for it I realized I was scrolling through a kind of Janey-E vision board. Many, many discarded twee polyblend sweaters, or sweaters cut in that generous way that means they never really work as “oversized” but instead just look like they don’t fit you.6 I was like, hm. Would Janey-E wear my much lamented sweater? I think no… but only because she lives in Las Vegas.
To me, an interesting question is if a character would be produced with a look that dates them so precisely to right now. I genuinely feel like women’s clothing went insane a few years ago, during COVID shutdowns, and now nobody knows what’s in or not. That’s probably less true when it comes to colors—right now there’s a certain pale green I see around that I feel will age quickly. But otherwise, I’m not sure. I am forever waiting for tiered maxi skirts to bite the bullet, because I hate how they look on me, but they’ve been holding steady since I was in high school and I think they are here to stay.
None of the above describes much of my own approach to clothes. I don’t care about looking on trend and buy most things second hand, but I do shop at Everlane and Quince and other online millennial basics brands. (But I also don’t have to go into an office; if I did, I’d probably adjust.) My most fundamental belief when it comes to clothes is that if something makes you happy when you put it on you’ll look good in it and if not, not. Even an otherwise unflattering dress. For all her troubles, Janey-E never looks bad, after all.
I found her clothes tended to “rhyme” for me with whatever Laura Dern’s Diane was wearing in any given episode, with Diane wearing the high end version of a look or a cut or a color. Of course later it turns out there’s a reason. And Diane, unlike Janey-E, is an extravagant disaster.
This quality is used to great effect in the last episode of The Return.
I am pretty sure, though not positive, that I gave it away because it stopped fitting me.
Definitely thought it was cotton for some reason.
That second one might just be a me problem.
this is an amazing post
i love the time-displaced quality of the first run of Twin Peaks, which is very much an attempt to make a be-strange-ified version of the melodramas of Lynch's youth. i was young when it came out but to my memory it did feel time-displaced in a deliberate way, BUT so much of 1980s culture was about Boomer nostalgia for the 1950s/early 1960s that it's of its era in a weird way. but it also has that sort of David Lynch kabuki/commedia del arte thing where it's performing genre for the cheap seats, big gestures to outline the tropes it's playing with.
the Return is a damn masterpiece and even though i am not very attentive to clothes/styling/fashion trends it doesn't surprise me to know that costuming is a thoughtful, intentional piece of craft within it.
Lynch! i think about his work a lot