Ava’s cheugy wardrobe gets an upgrade — at least for a short time — in the third season.
Cancel the call to Stacy London: Hacks has narrowly averted a style disaster. The third season of HBO’s sometimes lovable, sometimes annoying buddy comedy opens with Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) riding the highs of her smash-success revelatory stand-up special released a year earlier. She’s a Time 100 Most Influential Person and the talk of the town; powerful institutions rush to present her with lifetime-achievement recognitions. Which means no one dares question her taste, not even her new celebrity stylists, whose only response to the bumblebee puff-sleeved monstrosity Deborah pulls for an awards ceremony is to slip her some matching Manolo Blahniks. No one except her honest-to-a-fault former assistant, Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), who stops by Deborah’s hotel room on her way to a party and spots the dress. “It’s fugly AF. It’s giving Big Bird,” says Ava. Deborah objects. She pages the front desk for a gay bellhop (played by Pat Regan), who squirms, then finally concedes, “It’s really ugly.”
So that’s settled. But where was Ava’s clarity the past several years, when she, a so-called arbiter of chic, woke up each morning and opened her own closet? When she rifled through her garments and thought, Surely, what today calls for is another dorky polo shirt? On Hacks, it’s natural to pay attention to Deborah, the vain diva who performs under the spotlight in caftans, cheetah prints, and head-to-toe sequins. But nothing has called for the fashion police like Ava’s dweeby outfits in the past two seasons.
I’ll start with the shirts. They were almost always high-necked, as if Ava were saving her visible collarbone for marriage. In addition to the polos, there were ribbed turtlenecks, button-up madrases, and a rotation of drab basic tees. (The notable exception was when she wore a bikini on a lesbian cruise, which counts as a special occasion.) When Ava’s tops weren’t solid-color, they boasted loud, hideous patterns, like a short-sleeved turtleneck with wide rainbow stripes and a blouse printed with postcards of tourist destinations. Ava is queer and sexually open, with a statistical advantage granted to her by bisexuality, so it was painful to see her combat this edge by dressing so … well, sorry, unfuckable. What’s so wrong with a little décolletage? Why stick to Catholic-schoolboy silhouettes when there are infinitely better ways to pull off androgyny?
Then there’s the bottom half. Ava’s job as a Gen-Z comedy writer requires her to be tapped into pop culture. Yet eons beyond the onset of the big-pants renaissance, she still went everywhere in high-waisted tapered jeans. “Everyone in L.A. has such good style. I can’t tell who’s HAIM and who’s three people,” she once raved about the musical patron saints of wide-leg trousers. And still. Her hemlines seemed to be in strained conversation with her footwear, displaying a discomfiting amount of sock and ankle. The hideousness of her presentation was well remarked by Deborah, who insulted Ava’s “chimney-sweep shoes” in their first encounter. They were lace-up Doc Martens, and I wouldn’t have minded them if they weren’t paired with some oddly professional checked mustard pants that flared out at the calves. Yeesh.
Of course, the problem really lies with the show’s writers, who are so obsessed with Deborah they have neglected to give her counterpart a consistent identity. Ava is scripted as a zoomer, but her tryhard energy and combat boots are obvious marks of a millennial. (She is also, somehow, a landlord.) Her distracting, dated attire doesn’t scan as a manifestation of a young person’s inner confusion but of the show’s sloppy point of view. As Vulture remarked last season, Ava is less a real character and more a “collection of quirks described in a ‘Shouts & Murmurs’ piece about the youth.” She’s a boomer’s caricature of under-30s as narcissistic softies who moralize about single-use plastic but never show up to a pipeline protest because of their self-diagnosed social anxiety. The most generous interpretation of her cheugy clothes is that she’s so eco-conscious she rescued the H&M clearance rack from a landfill.
But there’s hope! The third season offers some sartorial relief. In the first episode, Ava appears with an upgraded job and wardrobe, no longer resembling a smart-aleck middle-schooler on the verge of getting pushed into a locker. She’s now a writer on a late-night political news show, appearing at the hotel room in an outfit that stays consistent with her interest in menswear while showcasing an evolved maturity. Her slouchy, oversize blazer — “very writer,” her agent, Jimmy, says approvingly — gives her the appearance of being finally relaxed, and it’s paired with a T. rex graphic tee that looks like it was stolen from the little-boys’ section of Target but in a cool way. (The shirt is actually from Saint Laurent.) There’s not just one instance of relaxed-fit bottoms but multiple ones. This isn’t a full evolution: Ava eventually returns to write for Deborah, and her style regresses somewhat as she reverts to an ancillary role. The show is still condescending in its attitude toward young people, skimping on dimension for Ava and stereotyping undergrads in an overbearing campus-culture-war subplot that saddles the show. But I’ll take the minor progress. Fingers crossed that next season Ava will become famous enough to hire her own stylist. She needs it!
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