The X-Files Friday Feature: Fashion

I've been trying to think about exactly how to structure this blog, and I've arrived at something I think both works for myself and will do justice to a show that I know an awful lot of people feel very strongly about.

I'm going to try to do this thing where I write about one episode each day Monday through Thursday (I've mostly given up on the idea of grouping episodes and only highlighting certain ones - it makes it too hard to plan - so yes, just individual episodes each day, with the possible exception of two part episodes, which I don't want to split in half).

And then I get to dedicate Fridays to other things about The X-Files that I want to talk about but that doesn't really 'belong to' a single episode. Because there's a lot of that, too, and the more of the show I watch, the more I'll discover that I want to write about.

And in this case, as I approach the end of the first season, I feel like I just have to say something about the clothes. Because come ON.

I'm not exactly up on fashion now, and as a nerdy high-schooler in 1993, I was even less up on it, so maybe I just don't remember that well what people were wearing at the time and all of this was normal?

I looked through my high school yearbooks, and apparently women's vests actually were a Thing back then, so Scully was just being stylish in those cases, I guess. (It wasn't even just her, I think. There were other vests that look kind of ridiculous by today's standards - and I'm pretty sure that's all I'm noticing, and if I'd watched this when it aired, the vests would have seemed perfectly reasonable.)

But the real point is, were clothes that were two sizes too big also a Thing in the 90s and I just didn't notice? Or are Scully's outfits really just not at all the right size for her? It was primarily the suit jackets (or in some cases, some weird hybrid jacket/vest thing), but also frequently very large overcoats. But at least overcoats are supposed to be large. Suit jackets and vests are definitely not. Nor are pants, for that matter, and she's worn more than a few pairs that might have been borrowed from the MC Hammer collection.

I think part of the issue is that the styles of the time clearly favoured lots and lots of material anyway, even when things were sized properly, so the fact that everything is already too big makes them stand out even more. And the fact that in 2013, we're generally used to people wearing less material - both thinner and more compact - does give the show a very dated look.

To be fair, this isn't Scully's look one hundred per cent of the time. Some of her clothes are perfectly normal. At least in terms of their size. Though when the size is acceptable, that's frequently when the colour-coordination goes off the rails.

I mean, OK, she looks good, regardless. She's Gillian Anderson, so she'd have to actually try pretty damn hard to not look good. (Well, that and she's Dana Scully, and is therefore awesome anyway.) But I do sometimes wonder what the costume people were thinking.

But Scully isn't the only character guilty of these kinds fashion miscues.

The twins in 'Eve' were also wearing extremely large suit jackets*, but they were supposed to be creepy, so maybe at least that was intentional. The red certainly was, but those jackets were ginormous.

And then there was that bizarre mooseknuckle sheriff in 'Miracle Man', too, whose pants clearly didn't fit properly, and apparently neither he nor anyone else noticed or cared. But once I noticed it, it became distracting.

Apparently, other people have also made some of these observations, too, with screencaps.

Maybe it's strange to be doing this so early - maybe the clothes will get even more ridiculous as the series progresses and I haven't seen the most absurd one yet.

Or maybe I should plan on another post at the very end of the series about how the styles changed, assuming they even do and look better as the show reaches the 21st century.

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*Extremely Large Suit Jackets is the name of my Talking Heads cover band.