Industry Season 4: How Elevated Costumes Reflect Dizzying Stakes

In Season 4, Industry has a new look. No longer recent grads plodding around the Pierpoint trading floor, Harper Stern (Myha’la) is running her own book at Otto Mostyn’s hedge fund, while Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) is settling into her role as Lady Yasmin Muck. Of course, nothing is remotely perfect. Harper still squirms under management’s ever-watchful eye, and Yasmin faces some domestic challenges with her volatile husband, Sir Henry (Kit Harington). But neither of them has been quite so nicely set up until now. “They have more parity at the beginning of this season than they did last season,” says costume designer Laura K. Smith. “We had a few different, really interesting conversations about how good their bank balance would look at this point.” Harper’s ascendance is the most obvious. In her first scene in Season 4, she swaggers into her office in a custom gray three-piece skirt suit, replete with power shoulders (a recurring motif this season), a thigh-high slit, and a criss-crossing sleeveless top. Smith recalls how in Season 1, Harper’s colleague Robert (Harry Lawtey) had a bespoke suit gifted to him by his mentor, Clement. “Harper’s really great at reading the room and knowing what she should pick up and take,” Smith says. “[Robert] would’ve come back and talked about it. He’s that kind of guy. And Harper would’ve thought, ‘Ah, suit… get them made... Yeah, I can do that.’” Smith drew on Donna Karan’s Seven Easy Pieces for hers; Harper, ever the pragmatist, rewears parts of the set throughout the season. While the suit proved an important introductory moment, immediately—and wordlessly—letting the audience know where Harper landed after striking a deal with Otto at the end of Season 3, Smith wanted to ensure that the wunderkind banker lived up to the standard. “It is a big, big moment. But in reality, though, it’s her everyday at work,” she says. So she sought out other pieces that telegraphed the same power, sourcing vintage Alaïa and Mugler with an emphasis on strong shoulders. “You take up space differently. You’re undeniable in a space,” she says of the silhouette. But the real coup this season was Harper’s handbag—a total classic. “I just loved the image or the idea of Harper walking the street with a Chanel 2.55,” Smith says. “That was her wrecking ball.” Yasmin, like Harper, is in far better social and financial standing than she was last season. After spending Season 3 dealing with the consequences of her late father’s criminality, a strategic marriage to Sir Henry allowed Yas to claw her way back to the top. “It’s become so important to her to understand what it means to be in a major city without money, how devastating it is,” Smith says of Yasmin. Her marriage offers at least one certainty: “It was really [homing in] on the importance of the Net-A-Porter account.” As Yasmin straddles traditional aristocratic duties with playing a hand in Henry’s career, her wardrobe, in turn, mixes monogrammed button-ups, riding vests, Fair Isle sweaters, and silk headscarves worn for a drive in the convertible with I-mean-business suits (a white Lurline with ultra-padded shoulders is a standout). The most telling fashion moment of the season arrives in Episode 2, when Yasmin throws a Versailles-themed costume party for Henry’s 40th birthday. After dressing up as Princess Diana for Halloween in Season 1, Yasmin embodies another tragic figure in Marie Antoinette—wig and all. Smith, who had previously researched the late queen for her work on Mary Queen of Scots, drew parallels between Marie Antoinette’s portrayal in French media and Yasmin’s Season 3 arc. The Affair of the Necklace looms large in the party, with Lord Norton dressed as Cardinal de Rohan and Otto as Charles Alexandre de Calonne. But Harper characteristically takes things in a different direction: instead of turning to the costume houses for a period-friendly gown, Harper wears a David Koma dress with an 18th-century silhouette. “Some people say every seven years, you literally shed a skin. And this is almost where we are,” Smith says of our journey with Harper and Yasmin, from season one until now. “They’re coming out of a chrysalis and then turning into fabulous—or not so fabulous—butterflies.”