Unintended Style Inspiration: Gone Girl

This will probably be one of the odder things I ever confess here, but I have a strange fondness (not in a scary, "I'm secretly a vengeful murderess" way, I swear!) for Gone Girl, both book and movie. It's the kind of fondness that leads to having the film on as "comforting" background noise sometimes when doing household tasks or answering emails. In my defense, outside of a certain extremely violent scene, the film is generally relatively sedate in terms of the audio track, soundtrack, and even color palette, if not the subject matter.

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I've also ended up having some of movie-Amy's outfits as common features on the fashion inspiration board in my head. I've refrained from putting any screenshots on my actual Pinterest board, as that may come across too strange, whether with or without context.

Amy Dunne's outfits in the movie were, according to the movie's costume designer herself in this InStyle interview, specifically designed not to stand out, so maybe a lot of my reaction is more to do with how good, how magnetic and always slightly menacing Rosamund Pike was in the role, rather than with the clothes. As the costume designer explained, Amy and Nick were supposed to be "really real and really authentic," with looks emphasizing "simple clothing" that seemed "like everyday life, like the people who shop at the mall and order things online." Amy, in particular, or "cool girl" Amy was kept in "simple classic pieces" for a look that was "not overwhelmed by fashion and clothing." Looking at the screenshots, the costume designer did an excellent job getting that across, I thought,

As a result of this entirely unintended source of fashion inspiration, I've been vaguely in the market for a gray and white fair isle sweater for several years now, specifically because of the film and the brief scene in which she wears it (pictured upper right, above). There's never been one that quite fit the bill, that had the spirit of the look I remembered from that scene and was in my general price range. I may try this Loft snowflake sweater to satisfy that urge (it's not actually visually similar to Amy's sweater). This Club Monaco Sarahfina fair isle sweater was the previous "best fit" (it too, is not visually similar) though too pricey, even with their semi-frequent additional 30% off clearance sales. Everyone else in the world must agree regarding the price, because it's never sold out in the years I keep seeing it in stock. The costume designer's take on Amy's (classic, leaning minimalist) approach to jewelry has also been influential to my own changing approach to jewelry, in terms of wanting fewer pieces that are closer to fine jewelry than costume jewelry. As someone who did watch this film quite a few times, often paying an unusual amount of attention to what Amy wore, I can vouch for the jewelry being subtle. Only when I looked for screenshots for this post did I really notice any of it. 

To get too much into why Gone Girl holds a certain deep-down appeal runs the risk of making me sound like a lunatic. Instead, I'll point to my favorite review of the film, a New Yorker article, "Marriage is an Abduction,"which identifies both Gone Girl and We Need to Talk About Kevin as movies that speak, with exaggerated and fictional darkness, about one theme that holds a tiny grain of truth: When it comes to what contemporary American society expects of women, there is a sense out there, coming from at least some (not insignificant) segments of society, that we and our achievements may never be seen as enough without the crowning achievement of marriage and a family.