Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston as co-hosts Bradley Jackson and Alex Levy in The Morning Show.
The TV show starring Jennifer Aniston and Reece Witherspoon is back — and with it a plethora of sheath dresses and trouser suits. Rebecca Myers speaks to the real-life newsreaders to find out why what they wear really matters.
Bradley Jackson loves a trouser suit. It’s the first outfit the fictional journalist, played by Reese Witherspoon in The Morning Show, tries on as part of her new anchorwoman wardrobe presenting breakfast news for a top US network. It is also the outfit that tells you the most about her character, says the show’s costume designer, Sophie de Rakoff. In the beginning it is a way for her to stay in touch with her true reporter background — in other words, not so different from the trousers and boots she would wear on the road.
In its third series, which started on Wednesday on Apple TV+, Bradley is the evening news anchor with her own show and a lot more power. “This is everything Bradley has always wanted,” says de Rakoff, who has worked with Witherspoon since the first Legally Blonde film. “She’s been in New York for a few years, she has money, she has confidence. It was a no-brainer — she’s going to go back to the pantsuit.” This time though? “It’s elevated.” Gone are the off-the-rack mall purchases of the character’s early days. “Her suits are custom-made by Lafayette 148. She’s wearing McQueen, Michael Kors. She’s moving into an aspirational sphere.”
As de Rakoff discovered, there is very much a female newsreader look. Preparing for her work on the show, she delved into the history of female news presenters — from the power suits and shoulder pads through to the launch of cable news and the ubiquitous block-colour sheath dresses and the rules about going sleeveless. “This is about gender politics as much as anything else. Female anchors came later in the game — they were entering a man’s world.”
It is a time Selina Scott remembers well. Now 72, Scott worked on ITN’s News at Ten before becoming the co-host of Britain’s first breakfast television show in 1983. “Women were trying to succeed in a man’s world at that stage and taking them on,” she says. A tailored presenting outfit, with a blazer, was the norm. “The jacket was part of the armour — part of the taking-no-prisoners approach.” Scott was never told what to wear by bosses, but there were clear parameters. “It would never have entered my mind to appear with a sleeveless top, nor very tight-fitting clothes.” Instead, her mantra was that the look of the presenter should never be a distraction from the news itself. “We were very conscious of the kind of image we had to put across — we took news extremely seriously. When I was on it was the Falklands war, so people were losing their lives. It had to not be in any way about me — the clothes I wore reflected the sombreness of the occasion.”
Spent the morning in Edinburgh with @mattforde for @BBCNewsnight tonight before hurtling down the East Coast. It was a blast! pic.twitter.com/x27faqXxwS
— Kirsty Wark (@KirstyWark) August 8, 2022
Many of those same rules still apply today, says Kirsty Wark, presenter of the BBC’s Newsnight. “My watchword is don’t be distracting,” she says. “The journalism, certainly on Newsnight, is first and foremost.” Wark describes her look for the show as “modern, elegant and a bit edgy”. The 68-year-old is known for her love of fashion — she reels off her favoured brands and the places she goes to hunt for bargains, including outlet stores and designer resale sites. She is friends with designers and goes to sample sales and catwalk shows. “Especially as I’ve got older, I’ve embraced the fashion I love,” she says. “If people don’t know I’m serious about my job by now, they’re not going to.”
In fact, Wark firmly believes that feeling comfortable and confident in the outfit she’s wearing enables her to do her best work. When she interviewed Margaret Thatcher in 1990, she wore a carefully considered “clean and sharp” cream Armani jacket. “You think about it and then you just get on with the job. There’s nothing worse than wearing something you don’t feel comfortable in, that rides up or doesn’t sit properly.”
“We’re all journalists, first and foremost, so we’re running around all day meeting contacts and doing interviews, and bringing stories in,” says Cathy Newman, presenter and investigations editor of Channel 4 News. “I tend to arrive in the morning wearing what I then go on air in.” If she has time, Newman says she uses a handheld steamer on her outfit before she goes on air — and indeed sometimes while still wearing it (don’t try this at home). “It gives my colleagues in make-up a bit of a panic attack — I have burnt myself a couple of times.”
When Newman, 49, first moved into television from newspapers in 2006, she was advised to wear block colours, no patterns — “and I suppose there was a bit of an expectation that you had to wear a jacket. It was quite a formal, traditional approach.” Now, she says, she has “totally relaxed into it” — her own style shows through a bit more, and she is less worried about what people, and the trolls, think of her. “I usually wear something patterned. I wear a lot of Paul Smith — I love the way he cuts clothes for women. You put them on and you feel immediately better. "
Heels, however, are the one area where Newman is still a traditionalist — even on Times Radio, where she presents the Friday drivetime show and nobody can see her feet. “Even if I’m doing a piece to camera and my feet are out of shot, I still put them on, because it makes me feel like I’m doing a bit of a performance. Psychologically it feels like I’m ready to go.”
This was a mindset that de Rakoff drew on for The Morning Show: “When the anchors are on air, their anchorwear [is] performative. They are in character as an anchor.” But a fictional TV show has a great advantage over real news: it is not actually broadcast live. Wark avoids super-high heels in the Newsnight studio as she has to move from standing pieces to camera to sitting interviews with guests. “I wear lower heels a lot more, and flats, because they look great with trousers. I don’t want to be caught teetering and tottering around the studio — it’s not a good look, falling over.”
“It’s a technical space, a studio, and you have to do what works,” says Ranvir Singh, a presenter on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. “If there’s a green screen you can’t wear green. A cowl neck will never work because it might look lovely but there is nowhere to put the microphone that doesn’t change the neckline. Some things look great when you’re standing up, but when you’re sitting down you might look a bit boxy. Ultimately you have to be comfortable because you have to sit for three hours of live TV.”
Scott remembers that dilemma when she planned her outfit for the first broadcast of breakfast television. For the evening news she had turned to designers like Bruce Oldfield, Jasper Conran and Catherine Walker, but morning television was an unknown frontier — no one had ever worn casual clothes to present news on British television. “I remember going to Margaret Howell and buying a grey, slim skirt with a little nipped-in top with a white collar — and everyone said I looked like a nanny,” she says. After that feedback she decided to “lighten up” a bit. “I branched out into things that were easy to wear because I was sitting on a sofa, and suits really didn’t work on a sofa. I wore cashmere a lot because it’s easy to pull on at 3 o’clock in the morning.”
Scott paid for her clothes herself — and this is still the case for presenters at the BBC, Wark says. “In news and current affairs and politics on the BBC, women get not a penny for clothes. I trawl for bargains a lot of the time and I use a lot of vintage. But it is an issue that women are expected to step up to the fashion plate in many ways, and the BBC, the licence fee, does not stretch to clothes for women.”
Other channels do have in-house budgets: Good Morning Britain, for example, has a show wardrobe and stylists, as well as clothes that brands lend for primetime exposure. At others, if budgets aren’t available, some presenters might negotiate for clothing expenditure to be a consideration in their salary.
When Singh arrives on set, a selection of outfits are hung on the back of the dressing room door for her. She tends to choose the one at the top of the pile, provided that it doesn’t clash with what her co-presenter Susanna Reid has chosen. Singh, 46, concedes that if she had it her way she would buy a jumpsuit in three sizes and wear it as a uniform every day (her favourite labels are Phase Eight, Never Fully Dressed and The Fold), but she is glad to have the creativity of the show’s stylists to push her to try new things. “There is a fine balance — you don’t want to be too fashion forward because it has got to be something that won’t distract the viewers too much,” Singh says. “But we know that particularly female viewers are getting ready for work in the morning and might think, ‘That’s a nice jacket, that’s a nice neckline.’”
When Singh is in newsreader mode, however, it’s back to plain, bold colours. “You could be talking at the drop of a hat about terrorism or Ukraine, so I always want to be mindful of that.”
Written by: Rebecca Myers
© The Times of London
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