In Defence Of Ugly Betty, A Belated Fashion Icon

A colleague of mine is sandwiching his feet into a pair of MM6 Maison Margiela ballet flats, bright pink and with a boxed toe that extends far beyond the natural length of the foot. He has decided this might be an appropriate shoe to wear with some red socks, micro-check swimming trunks, and a camel sweater draped over the shoulders of a bank teller-blue shirt. The effect – much like the outfits that Betty Suarez would put together – feels like the onset of a cluster migraine. But perhaps one which results in a swift and pleasurable crackle through the synapses. At both Mode Towers and Vogue House, there is at least one person whose clothes inspire confusion (if not retinal detachment).

That is where the similarities between the Mode of 2007 and the Vogue of 2023 begin and end. The advent and eventual omnipresence of social media has caused such a tectonic shift in people’s relationship to clothing that Betty’s ensembles would no longer register as offensive or hideous. She’d be considered a Frazzled Cluttercore Academic and she’d probably do numbers on TikTok. Much of this is because Betty’s clothing was never that bad in the first place (it was a pantomime version of bad taste), but it’s also because lots of people are now taught to approach personal style as character design, dressing as if they are also in some instantly legible costume.

Online, fashion often feels like an enactment of the thing it’s trying to be – a cottage-dwelling housewife, a Noughties football fan, a French coquette – rather than being a genuine, organic expression of the thing itself. In the same way that Betty looked like she was in a different series to her peers, so too do most people on the internet, where there’s little aesthetic consensus but lots of different characters to role play as. More often than not, these are visually-arresting styles that do well on the feed – bright colours, clashing patterns, an unusual mish-mash of genres – and have helped to shape what mainstream culture considers stylish. In her ruffled collared shirts and plaid skirts and stout heels, Betty was doing TikTok couture long before the pandemic brought people onto the For You page.

It means that when new viewers discover the show – which has just been added to Netflix in the US – they might be a little more forgiving towards Betty’s haphazard outfits. They will not see a dweeb in lumpy cardigans and off-hue tights, but Prada spring/summer 1996 and Alessandro Michele’s Gucci and Miu Miu autumn/winter 2023 and Chopova Lowena and Cormio. All of which dovetail with the “unflattering” looks that Patricia Field conceived for Betty in the ’00s. Even Dilara Findikoglu would reproduce the protagonist’s “B” necklace (although admittedly she was referencing a 16th-century portrait of Anne Boleyn), which became part of Bella Hadid’s personal wardrobe in 2021.

If anything, Betty Suarez was an uncannily accurate depiction of an ascendant fashion journalist. All wizard shoes and pantaloons and mismatched press gifts, style writers are some of the strangest dressers in the world. But I guess God gives his toughest battles to his harshest critics? It is unlikely that any of them – unless they are me, writing about my colleague’s ballet shoes – would ask Betty if she had accidentally eaten her Guadalajara poncho as Wilhelmina Slater once did. Now, there is generally an acceptance – and celebration – of people’s decisions to dress in divergent ways. After all, the comments directed towards Betty’s clothes were often veiled attacks on her race, class, and perceived fatness.

That still exists, but fashion people tend to wear their prejudices on the inside these days. Much of that is because the hierarchies that Mode magazine once perpetuated are no longer as robust. Social media sent a riptide through fashion’s traditional cabal of tastemakers (designers, editors, stylists), and their opinions hold less and less sway over how people dress. “It doesn’t matter if it’s valuable,” as Betty says towards the end of episode seven in the show’s final series. “It’s about what it means to you.” She’s talking about her necklace, but could just as feasibly be referencing the relative freedom that people can dress with in 2023, experimenting with what they’ve seen online and what ultimately feels like “them”. That’s the good thing about everything trending at once, even distended-toe ballet pumps and tourist trash ponchos.