Every Single Outfit* Alicia Florrick Wears In Every Episode Of “The Good Wife”
There are a lot of reasons The Good Wife is the greatest television show of all time, I’m sure you know most of them already, but let’s just talk about one key element today: the clothes. Every character has their own fairly distinctive wardrobe within the limited parameters of what we consider “lawyer style.” You know, blazers, skirts, pants, button-down shirts, etc. Kalinda Sharma favors leather jackets, pencil skirts, knee-high boots; Diane Lockhart loves a statement necklace; Eli Gold owns some truly well-tailored suits. The wardrobes of all the supporting characters have stayed more or less constant over the entire arc of the show.
Alicia, on the other hand, has a wardrobe that changes with her character; she starts off with that iconic “stand by your man” look at her disgraced husband’s press conference, all pearls and tasteful half-ponytail, and then heads back to work with all the hallmarks of a new job wardrobe bought in a hurry: clothes that look more like what she probably thought a lawyer should wear rather than what she actually wanted to wear. There’s one grey vest with a white button-down shirt that is particularly painful for me, and that tan blazer with the black stitching is just. Like. Why.
When you watch this video — which I already have about twenty times, it’s addictive, you’ll love it — you’ll see that Alicia’s personality has always been present in her clothes but that the way she dresses is a reflection of how she feels about her place in the world, not necessarily a representation of how she actually wants to be in the world, do you know what I mean? The central conflict of The Good Wife has always been the extremely blurred lines between right and wrong. This is the wardrobe of someone who always knows what the “right” thing to do is but might still do the wrong thing regardless; the wardrobe of someone who knows how a lawyer is supposed to look, but still has to balance all the public expectations of being a mother, a politician’s wife, and then later, a politician herself. As she becomes more powerful, the buttons on her blazers come and go and gradually become replaced by zippers, lapels become exaggerated or non-existent, trends (peplums!) pop up, grey tweeds and accented piping start appearing on her skirt suits. The palette stays more or less the same: neutrals, primarily, but a surprising amount of purple and red (royalty and power, I would say if I was the kind of person who believed in color theory, which maybe I am, who knows!!), and one green blazer that sticks out because it is just so wrong. When she’s not working she likes hoodies and wrap cardigans, which I’m assuming are cashmere, because Alicia Florrick knows how to treat herself well.
Even if you haven’t watched the show — and if you haven’t I’ll just send you my Canadian Netflix password where the entire series is available, literally the only good thing about Canada — you could trace exactly what kind of person Alicia was at the start of the show and who she is going into the last episode of this seasons. Girl has been through a lot. But she is more confident, more herself, more in control. She doesn’t need to wear some kind of lawyer uniform to feel like people will take her seriously. She just needs to wear (and do) whatever feels right to her.
*with the exception of the upcoming season finale, duh, that hasn’t even aired yet.
