'Industry' Season 4 Cements Harper Stern as TV’s Best-Dressed Anti-Hero
The scrappy, self-made, capitalist shark has a new, more expensive look. Costume designer Laura K. Smith breaks down the details.
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“I support women's rights and wrongs” has become the internet's favorite catchphrase for Industry’s Harper Stern, played by Myha'la.
For three seasons, viewers have watched the Black American, twenty-something financial trader at the core of the HBO series muscle her way through a world run by wealthy, white British men. Like all great anti-heroes, she’s complex and walks the line between morally ambiguous (faking a college degree, breaking girl code) and illegal (copious drug use, insider trading). She’s a scrappy, self-made, capitalist shark in a poly-blend blazer and business slacks—or, rather, she was. Now, she wears custom suits and Cartier.
We first see Harper in Industry season 4 power-walking into her office in a three-piece skirt suit; the thigh-high slit, boxy shape, and a draped neckline feel more aligned with Paris Fashion Week runways than London’s financial district. A stiff wool trench sits on her shoulders. She wears Saint Laurent stilettos on her feet and carries a chain-link Chanel 2.55 bag in her hand.
Harper's entrance in Industry season 4 in a bespoke Savile Row suit and newfound designer status symbols.
“Harper’s look at the beginning of the season needed to have gravity,” says Laura K. Smith, Industry’s costume designer. “She’s dangerous and has a different agency now. In that first scene, I wanted that Chanel bag to mirror the wrecking ball Harper is: She swings it on its chain the same way she swings her intellect through the financial district and her world.”
In that sharp-shoulder suit designed by Smith and custom-made on Savile Row, brandishing a designer handbag like a weapon, Harper is at her peak. “She’s spent a long time as an outsider in London, her face pressed up against the glass like The Little Match Girl," says Smith. "But she’s on the inside now, officially a fully paid-up adult, the person in the room who makes the call."
This season, Harper links up with her former Pierpoint boss, Eric Tao (Ken Leung) to co-run a short-only fund at an asset-management company. Naturally, her wardrobe needed to reflect her new, bigger bank account.
A closer look at the custom-made, crisscrossing top from Harper’s bespoke suit.
Harper’s style evolution also stems from studying people in the upper echelon, both those born into it and her fellow interlopers.
“I thought a lot about inheritance this season—what's the information that's been passed down to you, and how do you wear it?," Smith says. "Eric is Harper’s mentor, and he only wears suits on the trading floor. Harper has never worn high heels because she hasn't had the license or the luxury to do so, but she's seen Yasmin (Marisa Abela) wear them and taken note. Now, Harper understands there’s cachet in a bag, a great watch, and a pair of shoes. She gets that certain garments are signifiers and buy you passports into spaces.”
Throughout the season, you’ll see a Cartier Tank Must (“Yasmin’s Cartier Tank Louis would’ve inspired her,” per Smith) and a Tag Heuer Date Link on Harper’s wrist. You'll also clock her in vintage YSL and Alaïa blazers when she’s out causing chaos in public, or Nili Lotan barrel jeans and kinky garter-clip tops from Fleur du Mal when she’s scheming from the shadows in her office. Each piece reflects Harper’s overall arc of the season: She’s in the know now.
Big, baggy jeans and tops that reflect her psychosexual nature are Harper’s new go-tos for casual settings.
As are items that emphasize a boxy shoulder shape.
“So much of Industry’s narrative is breathing reality into an idea until it becomes physical,” Smith says. “There's a similar feedback loop when you choose certain clothing: Are you a powerful person because you wear that garment, or does the garment make you powerful? I imagined Harper in Selfridges—rather, having a personal stylist bring her things—and picking pieces that say, I'm in control.”
Beefed-up power shoulders were another motif Smith used to signal Harper’s ascension. “In the time of Elizabeth I and Henry VIII, that triangular silhouette of a massive shoulder and smaller waist was specifically designed to command power,” she says.
Harper rewearing her now-signature gray skit suit in episode 6.
We see Harper wear the very same bespoke skirt suit from the premiere again in episode 6, when she hijacks the stage at the Web Horizon Conference and exposes Tender’s fraud publicly. She's a pulled-herself-up-by-her-bootstraps pragmatist, so an outfit repeat makes sense.
“Harper has experienced what it's like to have no money,” Smith says. "These investment funds live on a knife’s edge and can easily blow up. You need clothing that can last in case you need to reinvent yourself."
Mostly, the suit call-back was symbolic, referencing Martin Bell, a member of the British Parliament in the ‘90s who was known for wearing white suits. “[Bell] was elected on the basis of hunting down sleaze and wrongdoing," Smith says. "Harper sees her fund as one that shorts and roots out bad companies. Giving her a silhouette that makes her undeniable, a uniform that commands visibility, was important.”
Harper in yet another edgy, fashion-y top in season 4.
Despite Harper’s newfound affinity for designer labels and custom wardrobing, this is still the same character we love to hate and hate to love. In episode one, dressed in a peaked-shoulder blazer dress and Roger Vivier leather thigh-high boots, we watch Harper shred a birthday card from her estranged mother and then mock a client into having a stroke.
But Industry’s fourth season also presents Harper at her most raw and vulnerable. Episode 5 starts with Harper learning of her estranged mother’s death. She initially takes her grief out on Eric—“You think if you leave your girls some money, they’re going to love you,” she snaps—only to eventually soften and confide in her co-founder and mentor. Fittingly, she’s wearing a simple black V-neck cardigan and ultra-baggy carpenter jeans in the most tender scene we’ve seen from the two. It’s a more well-rounded, human version of Harper.
For an intimate, informal scene with Harper and Eric, Smith relaxed their costumes to match the mood.
Like her wardrobe, the emotionally troubled woman has grown. After all, depth and interiority are the two key components that make all the best anti-heroes so compelling.
“I really, really love Harper,” Smith says, with a soft smile. “Yes, she does some scurrilous things, but she always has her reasons. The things that people praise in men, they disparage in her; she’s exceptional in her field, both reading and creating the financial weather around her. She works in ways people don’t understand, and we haven't ever had a woman like Harper represented on screen. It’s really fun to watch—and it’s a lot of fun to dress her."
As all the best villains do, Harper now has a signature, legible look. Tony Soprano had his bowling shirts and bathrobes. Don Draper has his penguin suits. And Harper Stern has her power shoulder blazers and knife stilettos.
