Louis Vuitton, Gucci by the pool: what The White Lotus characters’ clothes say about who we are as people when we’re on holiday

Holiday clothes – especially the kind chosen specifically to be on-theme with the kind of holiday and life you want to lead – tell us much about who we are

What the characters on HBO’s The White Lotus wear reveals a lot about them, from a woman who tries too hard to look rich to a man for whom status is everything

Reading Time:4 minutes

The characters on The White Lotus (like Nicole, played by Connie Britton) may be on holiday, but what they wear on the show says a lot about each of them. Photo: Mario Perez

Published: 4:15am, 17 Aug 2021Updated: 3:49pm, 19 Aug 2021

It is almost certainly true that obnoxious behaviour is exponentially worse when done in a garish Hawaiian shirt. Or maybe that’s just the default setting for people, especially very rich, entitled (and white) ones, when they are on all-inclusive holidays in tropical locales.

Welcome to The White Lotus resort – Hawaiian setting for the eponymous HBO series – where your worries, self-absorption and obsession with status and attention will stay with you even when you have absolutely everything, and everyone, at your disposal to make them all melt away.

Mike White, creator of the critically acclaimed series Enlightened, is back with another squirm-inducing examination of class, race, gender, ambition and – the spikiest of all – privilege.

The White Lotus is a six-part series and follows an assortment of rich American tourists and the staff employed to serve and coddle them.

Murray Bartlett, as resort manager Armond, and Jolene Purdy in The White Lotus. Photo: Mario Perez

The show begins with real estate bro and mummy’s boy Shane (played by Jack Lacy), who had been honeymooning at the hotel with his new wife, Rachel (played by Alexandra Daddario), at an airport watching a box on which “human remains” is written being loaded onto a plane. So we are left to try and work out who’s in the box. But, really, it is the claustrophobic atmosphere in which rich people move, and their rich people problems and poor people with other problems interacting at the resort, that is the most interesting. Biting satire has perhaps never had such an inviting setting.