Fashion in Strike
When were you last in a clothes shop?’ asked Somé, his wicked bulging eyes roving over Strike’s dark blue jacket. ‘What is that, anyway, your demob suit?’
The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith
Strike is a conventional dresser, and Robin does most of her investigative work in jeans and sweaters, but there are times when they must dress up, down, or just differently. So, what are some of the memorable outfits they’ve donned over the years?
‘You know how Baz Carmichael did a whole collection two seasons back called “Supergroupie”, and it was like, Bebe Buell and your mum were the whole inspiration? Maxi skirts and buttonless shirts and boots?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Strike.
The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith
Strike’s mother, Leda, might have been a trend-setter, with a collection called ‘supergroupie’ named in her honour, but Strike’s dress sense has always been conventional – an instinct honed by the sergeants’ mess while he was in the army. Robin thinks, the first time she sees him in a suit, he looks like a rugby player en route to an international: large, conventionally smart in his dark jacket and subdued tie.
The women Strike gets involved with though tend to be elegant dressers. Charlotte, his ex-fiancée, who always wears Shalimar perfume, favours monochrome colours, stark or classic designs, against which her remarkable beauty is thrown into relief. She wears a glittering silver floor length dress when she poses for Tatler, celebrating her engagement to Jago Ross. Strike knows her usual pared-back style, often praised by fashion magazines, is the result of careful deliberation and everything she wears is of high-quality. Robin happens to be wearing a blue dress, which she likes, when she meets Charlotte at the office during their investigations into the death of Edie Ledwell (The Ink Black Heart), but it feels like a dishcloth beside the quality of Charlotte’s clothes: every item Charlotte wears, Robin knows, will need specialist cleaning.
Lorelei, who Strike dates for some months after Robin gets married (Lethal White), wears jewel-bright colours and affects the style of a 1940s pin-up. As tall as Robin, she has glossy brunette hair that she wears over one eye like Veronica Lake. She also co-owns a vintage and theatrical clothing store on Chalk Farm Road. Madeline Courson-Miles, the jewellery designer Strike is seeing during the Edie Ledwell investigation (The Ink Black Heart), also looks wonderful every time they go out together. The ‘man-hungry’ lawyer, Bijou, though, who causes headaches for Strike after their brief encounter during the UHC investigation (The Running Grave) is not as stylish as dresser. Strike thinks his late Aunt Joan would have thought her pink dress inappropriate for a christening: a clinging wraparound with a low V neckline and a hemline that shows a lot of tanned leg.
The tailoring of the jacket made him look slimmer and fitter. He left the white shirt open at the throat.
The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith
Even when his business is failing and he is living in his office during his investigation into the death of Lula Landry, Strike has one good suit. Strike wears it the second time he goes to visit designer Guy Somé (The Cuckoo’s Calling); it’s an Italian number that Charlotte got him for his last birthday, and he never wore in their remaining months together. Guy comments on the improvement in his looks, and after Strike ends up spending that night with supermodel Ciara Porter, he thinks of it as his lucky suit.
He wears it several times after his night with Ciara – when he goes to Bond Street to question a jeweller for example, or when dining at the River Café with his half-brother Al during the investigation into the disappearance of writer Owen Quine (The Silkworm). Wearing it for an appointment with a lawyer connected with another case means he is exceptionally well-dressed when he confronts his detested stepfather, Jeff Whittaker, as he and Robin search for whoever delivered a severed leg to the office (Career of Evil). It’s a bit formal for the CORE meeting he happens into, as he tries to track down the disturbed man who visited the office with tales of a strangled child (Lethal White), but is perfect for his visit to Henry Drummond, an art dealer in St James’s Street when the investigation leads him there. As he leaves Drummond’s Gallery he is ambushed by Charlotte, though if she notices, as she forces him to escort her to Franco’s in Jermyn Street, that he is wearing the suit she bought him two years before, she doesn’t say so.
He also wears it when taking Robin for drinks after the successful conclusion of the Margot Bamborough case (Troubled Blood).
Robin, her wardrobe dictated by practicality and money, doesn’t dress like the women Strike gets involved with. She has personal and professional moments though where she abandons her usual look for something dramatically different.
The green dress was magically constructed to shrink her waist to nothingness, to carve her figure into flowing curves, to elongate her pale neck. She was a serpentine goddess in glittering viridian, and the assistants were all murmuring and gasping their appreciation.
The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith
Robin tries on a stunning emerald green dress while getting vital information out of the shop assistants at an upmarket boutique in Conduit Street during her first case with Strike (The Cuckoo’s Calling).
When the case finishes, Strike buys Robin the dress as a thank you, though he later regrets the purchase. Among other reasons, he believes it is one of the reasons Matt, Robin’s then fiancé, dislikes him so much. Robin bursts into tears when he gives the dress to her, but more at the prospect of leaving than in gratitude. Stunning as she looks in the dress, for Robin it’s a pair of old black shoes which take on the glamour of Cinderella’s slippers during their investigation into the death of Lula Landry. She wears them to pursue a line of enquiry while Strike sleeps off a horrific hangover. They might be her frumpiest footwear, selected for a day of walking (and because she can’t get the word ‘gumshoe’ out of her head), but she now associates them with her first investigative successes.
Robin gets to wear the green dress, by Roberto Cavalli, only once in public. She chooses it for the Paralympian Reception at Lancaster House which she attends as Venetia Hall while undercover at the House of Commons (Lethal White). Strike has time to register she looks stunning in it, but Jimmy Knight and his pregnant ex-fiancée, Charlotte, take all his attention. Matthew, who encouraged Robin not to wear the dress at their housewarming, preferring her looking pale in grey, tears it when she gets home.
Robin had gazed most covetously through the shoe-shop windows. Matthew did not like her to wear very high heels; defiantly, she had voiced a hankering for some five-inch spikes.
Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
Robin was supposed to be having a winter wedding, but her long-sleeved dress, loosely based on an Elie Saab model, has to be altered for July after the death of Matthews’s mother. Robin still looks stunning – the dressmaker hopes to have her photograph for the websit – but she wears cheap shoes rather than the Jimmy Choos she originally bought. She sold the more expensive footwear for cash when she decided to go against Strike’s orders and hire Shanker to help her intervene in an abusive household (Career of Evil). The decision almost costs her her job. She and Matthew make an extremely handsome couple on their wedding day, but sensing the atmosphere, the photographer doesn’t fancy the Cunnliffe’s chances.
‘Looks quite good on you,’ said Pat, casting a critical eye over Robin’s brunette wig, winged eyeliner, scarlet lipstick and black suede jacket.
The Ink Black Heart, Robert Galbraith
Robin spends most of her investigative career in jeans, but occasionally the job means dressing up in some way or another. She wears a figure-hugging blue dress to chat up a PA at a city bar when the agency is investigating the PA’s boss, Shifty, and wears it again when going out for drinks with Strike, this time with the opal pendant her parents have sent her for her thirtieth birthday.
She also has to alter her appearance for her undercover work, becoming a goth to get to know Jimmy Knights’s girlfriend (Lethal White), or wearing a ‘Blondie is a band’ T-shirt and black suede jacket when she is in character as Jessica Robins, bored marketing executive taking classes at the North Grove Art Collective (The Ink Black Heart).
When she convinces Strike she is the right person to go undercover as a recruit to the Universal Humanitarian Church (The Running Grave), Robin needs another look, posing as a rich young woman, Rowena Ellis, who is both vulnerable and has more money than sense. She begins with an expensive haircut – chin-length, with a long, graduated fringe, with the ends bleached and then dyed pale blue, but she can’t pick up the right clothes for ‘Rowena’ from charity shops. Strike suggests borrowing clothes from his half-sister, Prudence and they visit her Strawberry Hill home together, where Robin gets a warm welcome and an undercover wardrobe of Valentino, Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent. Once Robin joins the UHC however, the luxury clothes are left behind and she endures the weeks of psychological pressure at the Church’s base at Chapman Farm, dressed in an orange tracksuit, later a scarlet one as they enter the season of the Stolen Prophet, then white in the season of the Drowned Prophet. When she finally leaves, and changes into one of Strike’s T-shirts which is the length of a mini dress on her, she wishes she could burn the tracksuit at once.
With the agency going from strength to strength, and billionaires and Premier League Footballers begging for their services, Robin and Strike might be able to do more than window-shop in future, but as detectives they normally aim to pass unnoticed in the crowd. Robin with her beanie hat always ready to cover her strawberry blonde hair, and Strike walking wearily past clothing shops, finding solace in vastness and anonymity of the city.