To the Latest Season of Love Island Wardrobe Team... I Have Thoughts
14th St and 11th Ave SW Mural - @itsxyz @shanearsenault
I, like every other thirsty adult, am hooked on watching Love Island. What is not to love? A new batch of fumbling barely adults bumbling their way through finding love on international streaming television. There’s one million episode a week, perfect for the dog days of summer.
My first exposure was summer 2020, aka, pre-vaccine, thick in the physically distancing lockdown phase of the pandemic, so I was totally up for any form of safe entertainment. New to me featuring a rotating cast of attractive twenty-something-year-olds showcasing their emotional cluelessness while trying to date another with their own set of emotional whatever? Yes please. Let me grab more popcorn.
While dishing about it last summer on a break on set - our version of water cooler chat - I remember asking my costume department colleagues, “But what is the clothing?” on many of the women. The contestants appear to go from swim suit to workout to evening. Except the evening is the same fabrics as swimsuits and workout just has shorts over the swim? My colleagues were like, “Duh, Sarah It’s Fashion Nova.” One quick Google and I got it. When I say I got it, I mean I acknowledges that Fashion Nova is a brand that sells these clothes and some people buy them.
While I understand the climate of the summer filming location is always hot – Las Vegas, Hawaii, Southern California – I don’t understand the appeal of these particular clothes. There is a whole category of fashion week presentations dedicated to this hot climate category: cruise and resort. With all the options out there, are these the clothes that you really want to wear? I see that the men have access to both pants and shirts so either there is a separate clothing sponsor for the men than the women or an unspoken dress code I’m unaware of.
Digging in, my “investigative brain mode” kicks in. From what I can see, contestants are asked to bring undergarments, two pairs of shoes, toiletries, and maybe a set of pajamas? The rest must be a sequence of off-camera wardrobe professionals providing racks and racks of clothing that the contestants choose from. Somehow new clothes keep getting placed into their tiny, assigned cubbies a couple days at a time? Because when the contestants are kicked off the island, the only thing we see them place into those production provided white suitcases is their toiletries and teddies, no? Or maybe they can keep the clothing that makes it on camera? Thinking on a brighter side, if it is just a series of synthetic stretch micro dresses, they likely don’t take up much room? Pack ‘em all! you’ll wear them back in South Dakota!
Hear me out. My dislike for the dresses and mesh pants is not that they are body-oddie forward. Show it and get it, folks. My issue is that the garments only work while standing impossibly still. Every time one of the gals gets up, walks, sits, basically breathes, they are honking at the hem, yanking up the bust, or schzujjing the waist. I know why: unstructured super stretch clothing only - aside from maybe downhill ski suits - sits well on mannequins. But this just in fashion friends, humans aren’t mannequins. Gasp. And I dry heave when thinking about the smell that gets trapped into these polyester nightmares. Those people are sweating a tonne and that is a fierce opponent for synthetic fabrics in general. I can’t imagine the smell amplification that is taking place in this hot location with horny young adults oozing hormones. It would be like opening up a sealed 3 day old gym bag after going to hot yoga with your bestie the morning after a bachelorette with a gal you kind of new in high school and are unsure if you still get on. Oooof.
Back to my core issue with some of the clothes, I will die standing by the notion that an ill-fitting garment is not an issue with the wearers body, no, it’s the garment that is bad. Get it off; it doesn’t deserve you. If a garment fits you well, you don’t have to honk at it all day – or Love Island summer night – long. I must sound like the out of touch, hating on the kids zany lady asking these hot young things to, “wear something that flatters you and is more versatile than for just one night,” but I don’t care. I know I’m right here.
Plus, they are wearing a new swimsuit, lounge, and evening outfit pretty much every day. The volume of items of clothing that “wear a new outfit” churn requires does not pass my cost per wear system even if it’s sponsored and free to the contestants.
Three outfits a day worn once x twelve contestants x 6 or 8 weeks is a lot of clothing. Getting into specifics, that’s over 250 outfits a week.
And we all know that an outfit is not just one clothing item: there’s shoes, and jewelry, and lashes, and pasties, and hair tracks, and I hope liberal sunscreen use. Continuing on my “It’s too much,” soap box, that doesn’t include the single use costumes we see in their challenges every other episode. There are millions of people watching them as a fantasy model to potentially aspire to for their own fall in love make-believe, “realness.” Meanwhile, I’m the nag sitting on her couch in the basement thinking that’s a ridiculous amount of clothing to whip through. And I haven’t even got to the bigger issue: knock, knock, who’s there? Earth.
Part of me knows I get too worked up over something I could simply not watch, while the other part of me goes, but, “What are these emotionally unintelligent low self-awareness babies going to get themselves into next?” And like, “What will they wear while doing it?”
Hook, line, and I’m a sinker.
