It’s easy to assume all bankers dress the same. (Once upon a time, the viral @midtownuniform Instagram account hilariously confirmed as much.) But pay closer attention and you just might start to notice the subtle markers of hierarchy. “It’s the small things that are really important in telling a story about your position within a company and how you relate to your peers,” says costume designer Laura Smith, who was tasked with upgrading the wardrobe on this season of Industry, HBO’s sleeper hit about a group of ambitious bankers navigating the cutthroat universe of high finance. “Everyone has little elements of status in their clothing.”
So what are these things? It could be a certain brand of Swiss watch or designer wingtip, sure, but those are obvious tells. What really matters in this world (and in many others) is having the right merch. The ones money can’t buy. The ones that only become available to those who reach a certain rung of the ladder, like a psychologically twisted version of unlocking new levels in Super Mario Bros.
It’s a concept Smith got to have a lot of fun with this season thanks to showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, who have brought us deeper into the inner sanctum of Pierpoint, the fictional London investment bank at the heart of the show. That the institution is also celebrating its 150th anniversary made the custom merch possibilities practically endless.
In the first episode, Eric Tao (played by Ken Leung), longtime company man and a managing director of the CPS desk, finally gets promoted to partner. His gift from his bosses: A pair of gold cufflinks bearing the Pierpoint logo, an original design Smith created from scratch exclusively for these scenes. “Then the merch grew out from there,” she tells T&C. “We built on the Pierpoint hoodies from earlier seasons and thought about the various types of merch packages each employee would receive.”
Which means the fleeces and quarter-zips given to Eric and, say, Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), another MD on the trading floor, would be noticeably different—and of higher quality—than the tees and sweatshirts given to Yasmin (Marisa Abela), Robert (Harry Lawtey), and their fellow associates. “The thinking behind it is that people will look at each other and say, ‘How did you get that?’” Smith says. “And that question becomes an instant jumping-off point for envy.” And then of course there are the gilets—and the glaring status distinctions that can be conveyed by one simple vest. “I was keen to make sure the gilets were always present,” she says, “from the standard ones that Robert would have, but probably wouldn’t wear, to the much finer ones with the Pierpoint logo for executives.”
Kit Harington plays the blue-blooded tech entrepreneur Henry Muck.
It’s all a vicious ecosystem, and that’s the point. And it isn’t long before Eric realizes the shiny new level he has just unlocked only leads to many more, for which he has yet to acquire the key. Or as Pierpoint CFO Wilhelmina Fassbinder (Georgina Rich) tells him more bluntly: “When you make partner they make it seem like you’re at the top of the ladder. But you’re actually just at the bottom of a new one.”
The Shopping Guide
The brilliance of season 3, which wraps on Sunday, is that it not only peels back the layers of Pierpoint, but also takes us out of the building and introduces us to a much richer tapestry (pun intended) of finance factions doing crazy things with crazy money. There is Lumi, for instance, the doomed tech startup founded by blue-blooded entrepreneur Henry Muck (played by Kit Harington), as well as Future Dawn, a woman-led hedge fund specializing in socially responsible investing. There is a peek, too, into the world of the British aristocracy, and the private clubs and country estates lorded over by these well-pedigreed titans of industry.
Sarah Goldberg as portfolio manager Petra Koenig.
For Smith, it was important to make a clear visual and sartorial distinction between each realm. “One of the ways we did that was through color,” she says. If Pierpoint’s palette is dictated by the requisite blues, navys, and grays of a banker’s wardrobe, the feminist portfolio managers of Future Dawn wear luxe separates in soft neutral shades of beige, olive, cream, and rust, while the tech bro energy of Lumi is characterized by saturated hues and a rainbow panoply of company t-shirts that serve as a pointed nod to Henry’s cult of personality—and short attention span. As for the Old Money Old Boys Club—represented by investor Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay) and media baron Lord Norton (Andrew Havill)—there is a pan-European flair to their looks. “There is a very different kind of coding in that world,” Smith says. “For Otto’s character, we went with a much slicker and more Italian styling.”
Roger Barclay as Otto and Myha’la as Harper.
Smith also played with subtle codes when dressing the women of Industry. You can see it in the way Yasmin, dealing with the fallout of her father’s embezzlement scandal and the evaporation of her trust fund, cloaks herself in oversized coats and hides from the paps in a baseball cap. Though naturally, the logo on said cap is so incredibly #IYKYK (“Cresta Run ’09 St. Moritz”) it speaks volumes more about her privilege than her Burberry coat or Van Cleef & Arpels pendant.
Harper, Petra, and Yasmin.
Then there is the ever power-hungry Harper (Myha’la). If last season we saw her quietly copying Yasmin’s season 1 camel coat, this season, with each passing episode, she seems to be dressing more like her new boss Petra (Sarah Goldberg), the virtuoso portfolio manager with a sharp wit and a Scandinavian-inspired wardrobe to match. And representing Gen Z, there is Pierpoint newcomer Sweetpea (Miriam Petche), who livestreams her first morning at work, keeps a ring light on her desk, and confidently bucks the banker dress code in little black dresses, lacy cardigans, and layers of gold jewelry.
So on a scale from rich to superrich to ultrarich, where do they all fall? Smith came up with her own metric for figuring out everyone’s place on the food chain. “I imagined each of the characters being in Burlington Arcade, which is a big shopping district in Mayfair, and I would wonder, ‘Would they ask for the price of something or not?’ That’s how I determined how they would buy their clothes and how they would dress,” she says. “That’s the dynamic playing out. It’s a world where Robert will always have to ask the price when he walks into a shop. And Otto never will.”
Leena Kim is an editor at Town & Country, where she covers travel, jewelry, education, weddings, and culture.