What Succession’s Final-Season Fashion Means for Shiv, Kendall, and Roman

Succession’s costumes have provided a four-season-long symphony of neutrals and fine materials, courtesy of Emmy-nominated designer Michelle Matland. For the most part, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Shiv (Sarah Snook) have neglected bold colors and showy designs—instead choosing “quiet luxury” looks in black, navy, gray, cream, and khaki to tastefully complement their journey through a Logan Roy–constructed ring of hell. 

Despite those design parameters, Matland has had some fun throughout the series—dressing Shiv in head-to-toe white for her mother Caroline’s wedding as a fashion-choice F.U., for example. This season, when the Waystar team made a last-minute trek to Norway for the GoJo summit, Matland figured that Shiv wouldn’t have had time to properly pack—and put her in a belted Mackage trench coat with Dorito-orange puffer lining. (“There was something kind of funny about her not looking exactly like Shiv and it being a little inappropriate,” Matland told HuffPo.) For Logan’s funeral, in last week’s “Church and State” episode, Matland had Logan’s wives and mistresses all wear various pieces of emerald jewelry—bits and bobs the billionaire had gifted them over the years, denoting their years in service like stripes on a uniform.

In a phone call with VF ahead of the series finale, Matland says that, in spite of his rapid-fire jokes, Roman actually has “no humor in his clothes.” In “Church and State,” audiences get a peek at the racks of suits in his walk-in-closet as he prepares for the eulogy that never was. Matland says, “I think Roman’s closet hasn’t changed since he was 17.” Roman is the one sibling who pays sartorial homage to Logan this season, she says, by wearing the patriarch’s go-to at one point: a sweater. “I don’t think anyone else in the script is trying to emulate their dad,” she says. “They identify with him in a big way, but not through costumes.”