What is it, says Hayley Maitland in Vogue, that makes the “evisceration of some poor soul’s sartorial choices” so uniquely compelling to watch? No scene in the most recent series of Succession has sparked more memes than the impeccably vicious Tom Wambsgans trashing a girl’s “ludicrously capacious” Burberry handbag. “What’s even in there? Huh? Flat shoes for the subway? Her lunch pail? I mean… it’s monstrous. It’s gargantuan. You could take it camping. You could slide it across the floor after a bank job.”
Sadly, “fashion is nice now” – but around the millennium this “delicious form of awfulness” was everywhere. “Don’t stomp your little last-season Prada shoes at me, honey,” is perhaps the most quoted line in Legally Blonde. I recall “not one syllable” that came out of Anne Hathaway’s mouth in The Devil Wears Prada, but I will remember until my dying day Emily Blunt’s magnificent put-down: “I’m sorry, do you have some prior commitment? Some hideous skirt convention you have to go to?” There was Will & Grace’s Karen Walker: “Grace, I thought we talked about the beret – Patty Hearst couldn’t even pull one off, and she had money and a gun.” Best of all, of course, were Ab Fab’s unsurpassable Eddie and Patsy. “Saffy, why does everything you wear look like it’s bearing a grudge, darling?” says Eddie to her daughter. “You’ve got a wardrobe full of little murderers.”