What does Succession’s fashion say about wealth?

Stealth wealth is back in fashion as the Roys return for a stylistically rich fourth season.

Nicholas Braun, left, as Greg and Matthew Macfadyen as Tom in the fourth season of Succession.

How much is a baseball cap worth? If you’re Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), the damaged and needling son of Logan Roy and once-­almost-heir to the Waystar-Royco empire, this question is more of a hypothetical one.

Ask yourself, rather, how much could a baseball cap cost? The answer is in triple figures, in US dollars. And not even on the lower end of that spectrum.

Wildly popular HBO series Succession has returned for a fourth (and final) season, and with it so are its bland and obscene signifiers of ultra-wealth. And nowhere are they more obvious than in the world of fashion. The Roys have more money than they know what to do with, but what they decide to spend it on boggles the mind.

Unbranded $US850 ($1270) navy baseball caps by Loro Piana, the brand known for its proliferation of “quiet luxury”. Ralph Lauren tailoring that blends in with everything else in the monotonal room. The Row, on repeat.

“I think ultimately, the fact that the Roys are the most understated of the people around them is really … we’re trying to say something with that,” the show’s costume designer, Michelle Matland, told Vogue Australia last year. For the Roys, who have always been wealthy, and for whom their privilege is an immovable fact, rather than a situation, there is no need to shout about their circumstances.

Where the water gets murky is with the outsiders who find their way in, by force or by happenstance. Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) has married into the family, and the Roys don’t miss an opportunity to remind him of it. Especially when his clothes make the point for him. “Nice vest, Wambsgans,” the Roys’ youngest son, Roman (Kieran Culkin), says with a nod. “It’s so puffy. What’s it stuffed with, your hopes and dreams?” For Roman, the puffiness of the vest is, of course, only a symbol of the outsider-ness of Tom.

Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy in Succession.

“Where do you buy your suits?” Roman asks him at one point. “Maybe that’s why I’m not moving as fast as you, I just don’t have that corporate, boxy look. Right? I mean, I’m sorry but, like, what the f..k? You look like a Transformer.” By season four, as alliances continue to shift, Tomdevelops his own sharp sartorial tongue.

In contrast, the Roys-by-birth are interested only in clothing that signals wealth without fanfare. Neutral tones rendered in sharp tailoring. Brunello Cucinelli cashmere that is so undoubtedly soft on the wearer’s skin, but unrecognisable for what it is to anyone else.

Logan Roy, the family’s ruthless patriarch, often wears bespoke suits by Savile Row-trained New York tailor Leonard Logsdail.

And Shiv Roy (Australian actor Sarah Snook), Logan’s only daughter and often the woman trying to assert herself in a room full of men, is the best example of a fashion evolution: in season one she was floaty and feminine, as she tried to build a career independent of her family. Soon, as that path crumbles and she finds herself as much in the fold as any of them, tailoring becomes her armour. A way of hiding herself in sharp shoulders, of holding her cards close to her (Armani-suited) chest.

Money doesn’t buy style, it goes without saying. But it does make your suit fit so perfectly that you look not like a Transformer, but like it was poured on to your body. And that might make all the difference – at least in the Roys’ world.