‘The Shards’ Is Fashion Porn For ’80s Fanatics

By Elio Iannacci

Oversized Ray-Bans. Tucked-in Oxford shirts. Hot pink lip gloss. Metallic hot pants. Gucci. Pucci. Fiorucci. That’s just a fraction of the mood board costume designers Lou Eyrich and Joshua Marsh had to assemble when they signed on to dress the cast of The Shards, Ryan Murphy’s fashionably unsettling television series, now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

Adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 novel, The Shards is a curated time capsule dedicated to late-’70s and early-’80s Los Angeles, a world of privilege, prep- and posh-stuffed wardrobes. Ellis, whose American Psycho and Less Than Zero inspired some of the most visually distinctive literary adaptations of their time, draws heavily from his own experiences in La La Land for The Shards as well. It’s a far cry from the sunshine sheen most Southern California epics dive into, as Ellis’s story is semi-autobiographical and lined with sinister yet stylish fictional scenes. 

The novel’s central mystery, woven into the series, revolves around a serial killer stalking Beverly Hills with a particular appetite for the city’s young and chic elite. The threat feels especially close to home for an ambitious, image-conscious group of private-school students navigating their final days of class before graduation.

The preppy crew includes the bookish Bret (Igby Rigney), class president Susan (Kaia Gerber), popular party girl-gone-wild Debbie (Hayes Warner), and clueless-yet-poreless jock Thom (Graham Campbell). Enter Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), a tall, dark, handsome, unhinged, and askew new student whose arrival throws the group off balance. 

As rumors swirl about a serial killer sweeping through the mansions and pool houses of Beverly Hills, the parties and the clothes get more and more lavish. So much so, the costumers had to hunt down clothes throughout the LA area, as Elle magazine reports, revisiting vintage stores from East Hollywood to Pasadena, just to scrouge up a massive pull of 80s-appropriate racks for the cast. 

The series begins in subdued, cool looks, with the friends wearing slightly reconfigured versions of their high school uniforms, outfits that look ripped right out of an ’80s Ralph Lauren ad while they’re hanging out and bumming smokes at lunch. Crisp white shirts, penny loafers, and polos in Easter-egg hues dominate the early episodes. The costumers not only understood the assignment for Bret, Thom, and Robert’s menswear looks, they literally followed the style guide Ellis wrote into the novel:

“It was the summer that fashions changed: all the boys in our class were wearing Ralph Lauren Polo shirts in bold Easter-egg colors, pink and blue and green and purple, something Thom Wright and I’d started, but now worn with the collar sticking up, and plaid shorts, and cardigan sweaters, and we wore dress shirts with the logo of the Armani eagle as part of our Buckley uniform, and Topsiders and penny loafers replaced the standard buckle-up and tennis shoe. The male fashion in that moment was still streamlined, preppie, at times vaguely Italian, more The Garden of the Finzi-Continis than The Lost Boys; we were a long way from shoulder pads and mullets and the clownish kitsch from the mid-1980s.”

During pivotal party scenes featuring blaring hits from The Go-Go’s and Duran Duran, the women in The Shards are far from buttoned up. A clear case of this is Debbie’s outfits are almost all inspired by Blondie frontwoman Deborah Harry. Debbie, the character, has a closet that chronicles the Deborah, the Blondie frontwoman’s own trajectory as the band’s sound and vision moved from punk to the club, rock to disco, and into what would later be defined as new wave. Debbie’s Shards scenes are pure Deborah Harry recreations, moments when the New York style icon was beginning to embrace fashions by cool Italian indie label Fiorucci (the very store where Debbie—the character—shops in the book) and, later, Stephen Sprouse, who was profoundly inspired by Fiorucci. The way Hayes Warner moves in her “Rapture”-fuelled pieces propels the blasts of colour, satin jumpsuits, slitted skirts, shiny kitten heels, and short shorts with such intensity. It’s a sexy, strategic kick away from what Ellis describes for what his Shards ladies are wearing his novel: “capri pants, bubble skirts, taffeta.”

The series then cools Debbie’s neon velocity into something sleeker and more controlled through Susan and Robert, played by Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere — the very pair currently fronting Vogue. 

In The Shards, Gerber is the epitome of ’80s quiet(er) luxury, donning subdued tones, including a stunning cherrywood-and-rust dress with white piping. Gere, meanwhile, wears Martin Margiela-designed trousers that are a half-step away from Giorgio Armani’s 1987 and 1988 menswear offerings, collections where leather trousers were par for the runway course.

Around the main cast, the secondary characters also sharpen the edges of the world further. Liz, Debbie’s mother, played by Evan Rachel Wood, appears in vintage Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel, with hair and makeup that serves as a stand-in for Michelle Pfeiffer’s role in Scarface. Steven, a minor yet creepy and exciting presence embodied by fashion acolyte Jordan Roth, pushes the palette somewhere stranger, wearing out-of-pocket, distinctively queer looks that reincarnate the late, great  American designer Claude Montana.

Like the ’80s themselves, The Shards’ wardrobe exudes a range that moves from cocaine-addled late nights on the dance floor to buttoned-up boardroom and power-lunch combos, all meant to distract us from what is coming next: a raging killer, yes, but also the real horror of the next decade — grunge and plaid!

The Shards premiered on August 5, 2026, with new episodes airing weekly on Wednesdays at 9:00pm ET / 6:00pm PT. It airs on FX and streams on Hulu in the U.S., and is available to stream in Canada via Disney+, with Episode 5 scheduled to drop on August 19, 2026.