90’s Show Twin Peaks making it’s way back to the TV! In it’s return the 90’s style is in every fashion designers’ mood board!! Full Story.
The old show, Twin Peaks is back!
- The series, Twin Peaks is back again after almost three decades.
- Its first broadcast was in the year 1990.
- It became a cult classic and is celebrated by fans and TV scholars alike.
One of the reasons for this is its extraordinary use of costume. The original series’ strikingly distinctive style anticipated the way we dress now, making its revival especially timely.
So Let’s Find out more about the series!
Twin Peaks: The Return
When Showtime and Sky Atlantic announced back in January 2016 that a new series of Twin Peaks was in production, fans of the original series rejoiced. Over 600,000 images from the Nineties original have now been shared and relived on Instagram.
Designer!
The show’s original costume designer was an Emmy-winning designer, Patricia Norris.
Sara Markowitz took over for the series’ two-season run and adapted Norris’s ideas in new directions. Norris and Markowitz combined classic Americana (1950s-style leather jackets, plaid workwear, cheerleader uniforms) with the often tonally jarring looks of the late 1980s (oversized, patterned knits and scrunchies).
The look they created was simultaneously timeless, indicating the universality of American small-town life, and highly specific, conveying the distinctiveness of David Lynch’s vision.
Twin Peaks’ style is both very recognizable and intensely strange, mapping onto coordinates of what we think we know, yet at the same time upsetting them.
Christopher Laverty, the costume historian says,
“Twin Peaks was a weird world and weird is cool. If you look at television of the time we were ingesting endless variations on Jessica Fletcher and her patterned silk neck scarves in Murder She Wrote; TV needed to break some boundaries.”
Compared to anything else on the box in 1990, the activities in this surreal logging town and the inquest into the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer offered total escapism; a dreamland filled with oddball characters that were simultaneously abstract and relatable.
90’s show is still on fashion designers’ mood board
From the Log Lady and her kooky specs and ratty cardigans to high school coquette Audrey Horne in her kilts and twinsets, the figures presented were cool because of their uniqueness.
Bay Garnett, contributing fashion editor at British Vogue says it’s no wonder that fashion designers still riff off of the costumes when the entire industry is built on celebrating distinct characters and their looks. Bay says,
“Fashion is all about characters and Twin Peaks was all about its characters. The prom queen, the weirdos, the cherry pie cafe girl, the Fifties pin-up, there was something for everyone in this show and quite often the personalities were so strong that they were like caricatures.”
Adding,
“That originality is why designers still reference the show today, and David Lynch had such an original point of view. For me, and I’m sure many others, I remember it so vividly because it was my first year of A-Levels so I was the right age to be really influenced by something great when I tuned in at 9 pm on a Tuesday. Television generally wasn’t stylish and dark, but this programme was so not mainstream – we’d not seen anything like it before so we were obsessed.”
According to Laverty,
“It’s not like the clothes in Twin Peaks were outlandish. As in Lynch’s classic noir Blue Velvet, the costumes had an indeterminate period feel – sort of 1950s small town America. But then someone would wander onscreen in a very contemporary blouson leather jacket and break the illusion.”
