There is a tendency in film criticism to treat costume design as decoration rather than narration. We praise beautiful dresses in period dramas or iconic outfits that become Halloween costumes, but we rarely ask what clothes are actually doing inside a film. The best costume design is almost invisible. It does not call attention to itself. Instead, it quietly communicates everything the characters cannot or will not say aloud. Before dialogue has the chance to explain a person, their clothes already have.
Few films highlight the narrative power of the film wardrobe better than Steven Shainberg’s award-winning Secretary (2002), an adaptation of a short story by Mary Gaitskill. Though the film is typically remembered as a BDSM love story, reducing it to that singular conversation – as though the film’s entire identity begins and ends with its sexual politics, submission, dominance, power, and kink – overlooks one of its most compelling achievements. Beneath the surface, Secretary is a coming-of-age story about a woman who reaches adulthood a decade too late.
After a lifetime of never being allowed to become herself, but living as somebody else’s daughter, somebody else’s patient, somebody to be protected, managed, and fixed, lead protagonist Lee Holloway is finally given permission to become herself. Secretary is a film about authorship, about who gets to construct identity, define femininity, and decide what kind of woman someone is permitted to be, and in essence it is a film constructed around a character arc told through the colors and silhouettes at the heart of costume design as explored in visually in this companion video essay – When You Don’t Expect to Grow Up: Costume, Color, & Self-Actualization in Secretary (2002).
In an attempt to rebuild her life, she takes a job as a legal secretary for the eccentric attorney E. Edward Holloway (James Spader), and the two gradually develop an unconventional professional and personal relationship that challenges traditional boundaries. The question that quietly runs beneath every outfit and every scene is deceptively simple: Who (or what) dressed Lee today? Is she dressed by her family? By her trauma? By class expectations? By the men around her? When does she finally begin dressing herself? Once that question presents itself, the wardrobe by Marjorie Bowers ceases to be decoration and becomes the emotional architecture of the entire film.
Lee’s earliest costuming suggests someone without a coherent adult identity. She dresses simultaneously like a child and an old woman. Headbands, knee socks, floaties, and milkmaid braids evoke little girlhood, while oversized cable-knit sweaters, shapeless skirts, old-fashioned nightgowns, and practical shoes conjure the image of someone’s retired elementary school teacher. It is an uncanny combination because adolescence appears to have been skipped entirely. Lee seems to have moved directly from childhood into old age without ever inhabiting womanhood. There is almost no visual evidence that she exists as an adult, let alone as a sexual being. Instead, she appears suspended in a kind of developmental limbo, wearing clothes that feel inherited rather than chosen.
The silhouettes reinforce this impression. Nothing fits her body. Sweaters engulf her frame, skirts erase her waistline, collars climb toward her chin, and sleeves swallow her hands. Rather than inhabiting her clothes, she disappears inside them. The garments function almost as camouflage, obscuring not only her body but her identity. She dresses like someone who has learned that invisibility is safer than visibility, that taking up less space is a form of protection.
This tension extends beyond Lee herself into the domestic spaces she occupies. Her bedroom is saturated with pinks: sparkly stickers, childish decorations, matching linens, decorative flourishes that feel more appropriate for a twelve-year-old than a twenty-four-year-old woman. Whenever Lee’s family chooses for her, everything becomes sugary and infantilizing. Yet whenever Lee dresses herself, she swings violently in the opposite direction, embracing oversized sweaters and long skirts that age her decades beyond her years. It is as though she has no internal model of adult femininity – she has never been allowed to develop one.
As I write this, I realize I am not solely writing about clothes. I am writing about the use of color in the character’s wardrobe. In Secretary, costume functions less as fashion than as emotional cartography, mapping Lee’s psychological landscape through a remarkably consistent palette. Each character enters the film with a distinct visual language that reflects the way they move through the world. Lee is submerged in melancholy and passivity, her oversized blue clothing making her appear almost swallowed by her own existence.
Blue belongs to Lee. It dominates the first act through cerulean sweaters, navy socks, periwinkle raincoats, and heavy cool tones that seem to weigh her body toward the earth. Blue certainly carries connotations of melancholy, but here it signifies something broader: passivity. Blue waits. Blue obeys. It does not initiate. Even her clothing reflects a woman defined by inertia.
Pink, on the other hand, belongs to her family. It fills the wedding decorations, the bridesmaids’ dresses, her bedroom, the towels, and her mother’s impeccably tailored wardrobe. The Holloway household is so drenched in sweetness that it becomes suffocating. Their love for Lee is genuine, but it manifests as preservation rather than growth. She is not encouraged to become an adult woman because everyone around her continues to imagine her as a fragile little girl.
The wedding sequence captures this dynamic perfectly. Lee’s sister even appears in a tiara, visually coded as the princess of the family. She receives the fashionable sweetheart neckline, the blush satin, the sparkle, the attention. Lee, meanwhile, stands out in an outdated royal blue dress with puff sleeves and an oversized bow that already looked ten years behind the times in 2002. It almost looks like a forgotten prom dress, boxed in moth balls, until two hours before the wedding when the “broken” daughter returns from a would-rather-be-forgotten trip to the mental institution. She is like the greenery tucked between roses in a bouquet, technically necessary, but never the focal point. The contrast quietly establishes the hierarchy of the family before anyone speaks.
Blue belongs to Lee.
Pink belongs to her family.
Red belongs to Mr. Holloway.
Her family inhabits a world of sugary pinks, a palette that feels less feminine than infantilizing, trapping her in perpetual girlhood. Holloway, meanwhile, is repeatedly associated with restrained scarlets through his ties, his editing pen, the deep red walls of his office, and the shirt he wears while exercising. Traditionally the color symbolizes passion, desire, power, and vitality, but here it also carries the weight of compulsion. Exercise is Holloway’s socially acceptable form of self-punishment, his own ritualized attempt at control. Unlike Lee’s visible self-destruction, his pain is disciplined, hidden beneath polished suits and professional respectability.
As Lee and Holloway’s relationship develops, however, the film introduces a fourth color with increasing insistence: purple. At first it appears quietly in a violet gel pen, a lilac blouse, or the dusky periwinkle raincoat Lee wears to the office. Soon it spreads into the orchids, her lipstick, and eventually much of her wardrobe. Purple is literally the combination of blue and red, but within Secretary it becomes something more profound than the merging of two characters. It becomes the visual language of transformation. Lee is not healed by becoming Holloway, nor does Holloway become Lee. Instead, each contributes something essential to the creation of an entirely new identity.
Purple also carries centuries of cultural symbolism. Historically associated with royalty because of its extraordinary expense, it was reserved for those whose lives were considered valuable. Lee never occupies that role within her own family; her sister gets the tiara, the fashionable blush satin gown, and the spotlight. But through her own growth she creates another kind of royalty, one rooted not in birthright but in self-possession. Purple becomes the first color
in the film that belongs entirely to Lee. It is neither her family’s expectations nor Holloway’s influence but the color of a woman becoming herself.
Holloway’s orchids are one of the film’s most understated but revealing symbols. Orchids are famously difficult to cultivate. Many species require carefully controlled humidity, indirect light, specific temperatures, and years of patient attention before they ever bloom. They cannot be rushed, forced, or neglected into flowering; in fact, overwatering them is just as dangerous as ignoring them altogether. They demand balance. Lee is much the same. Her family has spent years trying to protect her, surrounding her with infantilizing sweetness and constant supervision, but in doing so they have stifled her growth. Society sees her as broken and in need of fixing, while Lee herself believes she is fundamentally damaged.
Mr. Holloway, however, treats her less like something to be repaired and more like something to be cultivated. Like his orchids, she does not blossom because someone changes her nature; she blossoms because she is finally given an environment where her nature can emerge. As their relationship develops, the visual parallels become increasingly striking. The orchids in his office bloom in vivid magentas and purples at the same time Lee’s wardrobe begins shifting from heavy blues into lilacs and violets, suggesting that both gardener and flower are participating in the same quiet process of growth. The orchids ultimately become a metaphor for Lee herself: not fragile because she is weak, but delicate becoming herself requires patience, intention, and exactly the right conditions. Like the orchids, Lee was never incapable of blooming. She could not thrive in her given conditions.
If color charts Lee’s emotional transformation, white marks her moments of reinvention. Typing class is one of the first significant turning points in the film, and appropriately she arrives in a crisp white blouse. I do not read white here as innocence. Secretary has little interest in innocence. White functions instead as a blank page. Every time Lee appears in white, she is beginning again: learning to type, starting work, discarding her self-harm tools, making an active choice about her future. She is literally learning to fill blank pages with words while metaphorically learning to author herself.
This connection becomes even richer when considered alongside the secretary aesthetic itself. Pencil skirts, tailored jackets, silk blouses, pearls, and neatly pinned hair evoke the visual language of mid-century office professionalism. Historically, secretarial work represented one of the first respectable pathways into white-collar adulthood for women. Lee’s office wardrobe is therefore not merely a stylistic shift but a socioeconomic one. She is not becoming fashionable. She is becoming legible as an adult. The office becomes the first environment in which she is permitted to construct an identity rather than inherit one.
One of the film’s most fascinating recurring motifs is the pearl. The first significant woman we encounter wearing pearls is the woman who confronts Mr. Holloway, presumably his ex-wife. Her tailored black suit and understated strand of pearls communicate quiet authority and self-possession.
Later, Lee appears on her date with Peter wearing a choker string of fake pearls alongside barrette clips and colorful hair accessories that recall suburban mall culture at the end of the 1990s. She is trying on adulthood the way children try on their mother’s heels. The pieces are technically correct, but they have not yet become part of her. From the neck up she resembles a high school student. From the neck down she looks like somebody’s aunt. She is assembling herself out of borrowed visual languages without fully inhabiting any of them.
Peter occupies an equally fascinating place within this visual language. Every time Lee appears beside him, she regresses, not emotionally, but aesthetically. Plaid dresses, butterfly clips, fake pearls, choker necklaces, hair bobbles, and mall fashion return with striking consistency. Peter represents a version of Lee that never changed. He knew her before the institution, before the job, before Mr. Holloway. In his presence, she dresses like the girl he remembers. Peter does not represent Lee’s future. He represents the last version of herself that everyone else was comfortable with.
The film itself seems to shift genres around Peter. Suddenly Secretary resembles a suburban coming-of-age movie that forgot to end. Mr. Holloway’s world, by contrast, is populated by tailored suits, wood paneling, orchids, muted jewel tones, and law books. It is unmistakably adult. Peter’s world is frozen adolescence. Lee oscillates between these two visual universes until she ultimately creates a third that belongs to neither.
The symbolism deepens further when one considers how pearls themselves are formed. Unlike gemstones, pearls emerge from irritation. An oyster surrounds a wound with layer upon layer until something beautiful exists where pain once lived. Few metaphors could better describe Lee’s development. She does not erase her suffering, she incorporates it. The pearls evolve exactly as she does, appearing first on women she observes, then as awkward imitation, then woven into her hair, and finally integrated so naturally into her wardrobe that they cease feeling like costume altogether. She moves from copying to experimenting to becoming.
Class quietly shapes every stage of Lee’s transformation. Her family appears comfortably 2000’s middle class, surrounded by coordinated interiors, carefully planned weddings, and matching household décor that projects stability and respectability. Yet Lee herself dresses as though she stopped buying clothes years earlier. Nothing feels current. Nothing feels intentional. Her wardrobe is composed of oversized sweaters, outdated dresses, long denim skirts, and garments that appear inherited rather than selected.
This suggests more than financial limitations. It suggests psychological stagnation. People living in survival mode often struggle to imagine future versions of themselves worthy of investment. You do not buy clothes for a woman you cannot picture surviving to become. Lee’s wardrobe reflects someone who has ceased imagining a future self altogether.
Employment changes that. She does not suddenly become glamorous or fashionable; she becomes professional. Her clothes become tailored rather than trendy, structured rather than shapeless. The secretary wardrobe functions as an entry point into a respectable middle-class identity, allowing Lee to participate in a version of womanhood that is built rather than inherited.
Peter’s presence, proposal, and their wedding reinforces this tension through Lee’s obviously secondhand dress, acknowledged by another guest as having belonged to her. Their vision of adulthood feels inherited and economically constrained. Holloway’s meticulously tailored suits project another kind of class performance: cultivated professionalism and control. Lee belongs fully to neither world. Her eventual transformation cannot be purchased or inherited. It must be authored, one increasingly intentional choice at a time.
Perhaps the most subtle transformation in Secretary has nothing to do with color at all. It has to do with tailoring. Early in the film, Lee’s clothes seem actively hostile to her body. Sweaters swallow her frame, skirts erase her waist, collars climb toward her chin, and sleeves consume her hands. She appears to disappear inside her own wardrobe, her silhouette communicating the same emotional withdrawal as her behavior. As the film progresses, however, the clothes begin to fit. Pencil skirts define her shape, fitted jackets acknowledge her posture, and structured blouses allow her body to exist without shame or apology. The transformation is so gradual that it is almost imperceptible, but it fundamentally changes the way Lee occupies the screen. She is no longer hiding inside her clothes. She is finally inhabiting them. In that sense, the tailoring becomes a visual record of selfhood itself: the more Lee becomes herself, the more comfortably she fits inside both her wardrobe and her own skin.
By the end of Secretary, the colors quiet. The oversized sweaters disappear. The bows disappear. The patterns fade. Purple gradually gives way to white, and symbolism itself begins to recede. The final image of Lee in a simple white tank top is remarkable because it is so unremarkable. She is no longer performing childhood, borrowing adulthood, or disappearing beneath fabric. She just… exists.
The film begins with a woman consumed by an oversized blue sweater and ends with one who finally fits inside her own skin. Somewhere between azure knits, fake pearls, orchids, violet light, and a bunch of fugly shoes, Secretary reveals that self-actualization is not a single revelation but a series of increasingly intentional choices. By the end, Lee is no longer dressed by her family, her trauma, or the expectations of others. For the first time in her life, she is dressed by herself.
Checkout Alexandra Wheat’s full YouTube companion video essay – When You Don’t Expect to Grow Up: Costume, Color, & Self-Actualization in Secretary (2002).
