The Tamesis
Jennifer Meyer’s engravable 18-karat gold nameplate necklace captured viewers’ attention despite being the punchline to a joke about unimaginative Valentine’s Day gifts. The designer said hundreds of units were sold after the episode aired, and confirmed it was not a paid placement but an organic placement because she and Foster have been friends for years.
“The whole point was to showcase Los Angeles in the way that we love this city,” said the show’s costume designer Negar Ali Kline, who has designed for brands including Elder Statesman, Amiri, Jesse Kamm, Reformation and Anita Ko. “I’ve had a lot of DMs,” she added, from brands eager to engage. “There was a time when people weren’t very interested in borrowing clothes to watch TV. But I think that’s changed.”
Fashion designers don’t just focus on what’s on the screen, they build relationships around it. “This is the new fashion show,” said Meritt Elliott of Los Angeles clothing brand The Great.
Last year, Elliott and her co-founder Emily Current hosted a cocktail party at their West Hollywood store. shrink Costume designer Alison Fanger and the cast.
“Alison contacted us and said people were talking about our work on the show, taking screenshots and so on, and said we really should talk about this because there’s not only a craft but a whole business behind it,” Elliott said. “It turned out to be a love fest… Now, she’s working with our team and we’re sharing samples with her so that the products can be purchased in stores as they appear on screen,” she explained, eliminating the pain point of viewers not being able to purchase their favorite shows due to traditional store-to-screen lag time.
Fashion designers, in turn, are becoming increasingly familiar with the fashion industry, analyzing looks on social media, launching ShopMy accounts, and turning their on-screen presence into modest but growing revenue streams through brand collaborations and capsule collections.
The impact is measurable. shrink Designer Fanger points to the rise of Liz — the show’s “cool 50-something LA mom” — whose slogan T-shirts paired with Greg Lauren cargo pants have made her an unlikely fashion star. After she wore Clare Vivier’s “Maman Je T’aime” sweatshirt, demand surged. “We remade the sweatshirt at a local factory and sold hundreds of units as soon as we got it back online,” Vivier said.
