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The Wardrobe, Decoded
Chess, built into the clothes.
Gabriele Binder designed the series around the game itself — "All the shapes we have in chess — everything geometric and contrasting — we can find in the costumes" — and used colour with the same precision. On the greens: "The color is present a lot after the car crash. We decided on this color to show a bit of fragility since it is a connection to her mother."
Why we can't let it go
Beth Harmon has the most intellectually satisfying wardrobe on this site. Binder didn't just dress a period — she encoded the game into it. Checks, black-and-white contrast, hard geometric shapes, and a silhouette that gets more armoured the better Beth gets.
The arc is visible without a word of dialogue. She starts in institutional hand-me-downs, moves through borrowed sixties glamour, and ends in the white coat and hat — dressed, finally, as the piece she's been playing.
And the green is the best detail in it. It only appears after the crash, tied to her mother, and once you know that you can't unsee it. That's costume design doing something a script can't.
01
The Tournaments
Playing, and winning
Geometry and contrast — the board, translated into cloth.
01Sixties Shift DressStraight from the shoulder, no waist, at or above the knee. The base shape of the whole wardrobe.BudgetSplurge
Think in shapes, not prints. A colour-blocked dress, a checkerboard knit, a geometric collar. Binder's whole method was contrast and geometry, and a floral would kill it instantly.
The sixties silhouette is a shift: straight from the shoulder, ending at or above the knee, with no waist definition. That single shape covers most of the wardrobe.
Stay in a tight palette — black, white, camel, mustard, olive. Add green only if you want the reference to land properly.
And finish at the head. A hat, a headband or a sharp collar. Beth's outfits are always closed at the top, which is what makes them read as composed rather than merely retro.
Written and edited by
Narek Avdalyan
· Updated 16 August 2026
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