Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  Grande began with the white couch, which he envisioned as being inviting and familiar, the kind of sofa that a friend would happily sink into. He had come across a black-bordered hook rug with a flowered pattern that he saw as being something Monica’s grandmother might have left behind for her, along with a wood buffet that might have come out of a garage or storage unit. The dining area would be a similar mélange, with deliberately mismatched chairs and a table of the sort she might find at a Sunday swap meet.

  Grande found an antique 1930s hutch that he thought would be a perfect fit for Monica, and a religious tapestry that would go right over it. At the last moment, Grande’s superiors got cold feet about the tapestry, and he was left to scramble for a replacement. He flipped through a book about French circus history and came across a vintage poster of a creepy-looking child riding a horse while holding a bugle and toy clown that could make for a suitable replacement. He had the page copied and a poster-size blowup printed to occupy the wall above the hutch.

  Practically every New York apartment had a solid metal door, and Shaffner had resigned himself to a visually bland slab on his set. But then he began to think about New York living once more, and was reminded of the last-minute adjustments endemic to Manhattan life. Umbrellas would be grabbed off the door for a rainstorm, or bags for a trip to the store. Shaffner threw the question to Grande, and he came back a day or two later with something different. “I was thinking of putting this on the door,” Grande told Shaffner, and the art director was enormously pleased with Grande’s suggestion: an empty rectangular picture frame, to be hung from a hook on the back of the door.

  The frame was undoubtedly an extension of what Shaffner and Grande had come to develop as Monica’s style: a quirky, tongue-in-cheek décor by turns classy and jaunty. But there was symbolic heft to this find, which would end up becoming one of the show’s most iconic accent pieces.

  The frame, notably, was empty. There were no pictures of parents or lovers or children fitted into its contours, nor was the frame sitting atop a table or on a shelf, where we might have naturally expected it. The place of pride where one might honor the most important people in one’s life had no one inside of it. Moreover, it had been ironically subverted, removed from the piano or mantel, where it might have sat in the kind of middle-class home most of the show’s characters had grown up in, and flung up against a door. The markers of middle-class achievement had been undone and remade. This was a home whose residents did not yet have anyone they had pledged their lives, and picture frames, to.

  Nor, for that matter, did they have any interest, as of yet, in living in the kind of home that would make a point of inviting visitors to consider the bonds of love tying it together. This was a place where picture frames might flap in the breeze or rattle against a hastily closed door. This was a place where the fusty rules of the past—of courtship and marriage and child rearing—might be violated, or rewritten.

  * * *

  —

  Hairdressers everywhere were in agreement. No matter who asked, no matter how politely it was requested, they would not do it anymore. A success had become a fad, which had become a national mania, and it was time to call a halt to it. “I like to see a photo,” Reny Salamon, co-owner of the Los Angeles hair salon Estilo, which had been ground zero of the phenomenon, told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, “as long as it isn’t of Jennifer Aniston circa 1994. We’re way over that cut, and we won’t do it here anymore.” Rebecca Eckler of the National Post of Canada, interviewing the show’s hairstylist Richard Marin, had told Marin, “My own hairdresser said to me, ‘I will cut your hair any way you want. But I refuse to give you the Jennifer Aniston cut. So don’t even ask.’”

  What prompted this outburst of unexpected rudeness from the hairstylists of North America? Only the most popular new hairstyle for women since Farrah Fawcett’s curly blond locks swept the nation in the era of Charlie’s Angels.

  The Rachel began as an attempt to temper Jennifer Aniston’s unruly hair. Aniston had approached Chris McMillan, proprietor of a well-regarded Beverly Hills salon, during the first season of Friends. Her hair had always been kinky and long, and she was looking for something more elegant. When Friends premiered, Aniston had long hair, and a handful of episodes in, McMillan started to trim it. He came up with the idea of combining partial bangs with a layered look. He would trim it at the bottom, layer it, pin it, and then use a blow-dryer to give it a smooth finish.

  The result was a complex but eye-catching style that made it appear as if a stylist had grown bored at the last second with his work and decided to conjoin two different hairdos. (McMillan would later acknowledge that he was high when he created the Rachel.) The front half surrounded Aniston’s face, a side part with matching half-moons of hair that ran the spectrum from blond to dirty blond to brown. Aniston would sometimes wear it with a barrette, emphasizing the girlish quality of the look, like something the most popular girl in seventh grade might wear for the first day of school.

  The rear was back-combed, forming a puffy curl that ascended into a small wave before falling down to her shoulders. One could almost imagine Rachel as one of the auxiliary members of a less prominent sixties girl group, the rear portion of her hair staying dismayingly immobile as she swayed to her latest single. The result was an exceedingly careful coif that looked ever-so-slightly mussed, as if Aniston had just awoken after a brief nap in one of the chairs at Central Perk. It was a woman’s look that channeled a certain youthful appeal.

  Soon after Aniston debuted the look on the show, the phones at NBC began to ring regularly with requests for information about Aniston’s hairstyle. McMillan began to hear from women who would gladly pay top dollar for a turn in his chair if they would come out looking like Jennifer Aniston.

  Women flew from New York, from Chicago, and from Dallas to visit McMillan at his salon. “It’s crazy and ridiculous and they’re out of their minds,” McMillan told the Los Angeles Times in the summer of 1995. McMillan was booked four to six weeks ahead of time, but he was not the only Los Angeles hairstylist who was suddenly spending his working hours talking about the intricacies of Friends episodes.

  Even salons that had nothing to do with the creation of the Rachel found a hefty percentage of their work now coming from attempts to re-create it. Michael Okin told the Times that fifteen of the fifty visitors in a single week to his Melrose Avenue salon, Yutaka, had requested the Rachel. Forty percent of the patrons of the José Eber Salon in Beverly Hills asked for the Rachel. Stylists gladly accepted the business—at first.

  The success of the Rachel was a reflection of the triumph of television over its elder sibling, the movies. Time was, people had looked to movie stars to dictate their fashion choices. The American sales of men’s undershirts had famously collapsed after Clark Gable removed his button-down in 1934’s Best Picture–winning It Happened One Night to reveal bare skin. Audrey Hepburn’s fondness for the designs of Hubert de Givenchy had helped to make Givenchy a globally famous brand. Television, in comparison, was a more domestic aesthetic, inclined toward the mundane. It was a form crammed full of housewives and working stiffs in unprepossessing clothing, intentionally designed to reflect a clean-scrubbed version of white, middle-class, middle-American, middlebrow aesthetics.

  The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Moonlighting and Murphy Brown had paved the way, but it was Friends that would serve as the culmination of a trend toward uniting television and fashion. Audiences might have been charmed by a performer’s look in a favorite movie, but they would return to a favorite television show week after week. Familiarity bred a kind of hunger for imitation.

  The fashion triumph of Friends was not solely due to the Rachel. It was a product of what Vogue described as “the trendiest walk-in closet in America.” That closet belonged to Debra McGuire, the show’s costume designer. It was crammed full of pieces from Calvin Klein, BCBG Max Azria, True Grit, and Façonnable, not to mention end
less pairs of Birkenstocks and Dr. Martens. There was, Vogue reported after a visit to the closet, an entire wall that was “a jumble of funky, retro pocketbooks.”

  McGuire went in for her initial interview to be costume designer on Friends in an olive-green wool Versace suit jacket with hefty shoulder pads and a matching miniskirt, olive-green tights, and chocolate-brown suede Karl Lagerfeld shoes, all of which she had borrowed from a friend. At the end of the interview, Marta Kauffman turned to McGuire and told her that she loved her style and wanted to see something just like it on the show. McGuire chuckled to herself at the thought that someone else’s clothes had helped her win a job as costume designer.

  McGuire had been trained as an artist and had been running a jewelry company in New York when she first dabbled in costume design. For an avant-garde theater spectacle about the court of King Louis XIII, she had traveled to every store she could think of in New York, looking for white petticoats. She wound up with thousands of petticoats, purchased for ten cents apiece, and a sense of the combination of artistry and mass production that was costume design.

  A studio executive in Los Angeles had suggested she come west to see what film work might interest her, and after a PA stint on the Steve Martin film My Blue Heaven, she had fallen into a gig as a costume designer on network movies of the week. McGuire struggled with a sense of disbelief at the entertainment industry. Were people genuinely earning a living for doing this? It seemed far too amusing to be paid work.

  When McGuire was hired for Friends, she made an effort to differentiate its six protagonists by giving each of them a look of their own. Television, McGuire thought, was a two-dimensional medium and could be approached like a painting. It was all a matter of color and texture, and working in tandem with Greg Grande and John Shaffner, the screen could be decorated like a palette.

  Marta Kauffman’s initial impulse was to dress the show’s characters in jeans and move on. It would be a nod to realism—what more could these characters afford?—and to her own New York life. McGuire insisted otherwise.

  McGuire had spent much of the 1980s living in Japan, and what little she had seen of American television had offended her sensibilities. Everything was so drab and careful, designed not to stand out in any way. McGuire was looking to do something notably different. It was her idea that the clothing the show’s characters wore should be aspirational. McGuire wanted her characters to look glamorous more than she cared about their realistically portraying twentysomething style.

  For the pilot, McGuire had less than one week to dress her characters, and she searched the costume department at Warner Bros. for a wedding dress to introduce Rachel. McGuire’s daughter had been born on a Thursday, and on the following Monday morning, she was toting her around in a basket as she browsed the racks. She discovered a creamy, lacy confection that she thought might be perfect for a spoiled Long Island girl mapping out her dream wedding. (It would also show off Aniston’s shoulders to maximal effect.)

  Each character was assigned their own color and their own place on the preppy-to-hippie spectrum. The show was like a tableau, and McGuire wanted to dress the characters so that no matter who might be in a given scene, there would be an ebb and flow of patterns and colors and styles.

  Chandler would regularly wear sweater vests, along with a black button-down with a gray racing stripe that would come to be his early-season calling card. The shirt reminded McGuire of ones her father had worn when she was a child and had some of the retro flair she was hoping to associate with the show’s look. Joey was intended to be soft and huggable in sweaters, a deliberate reaction to the leather-jacketed player of the pilot. Ross would be dressed in corduroys and tweeds.

  The female characters were distinguished by their preferred colors. Rachel went with greens and blues; Monica leaned toward red, black, and gray. Phoebe preferred yellows and purples, mixed patterns, skirts, and unstructured pieces.

  The clothing was meant to be an essential part of the story, subtly reflecting the script. When Monica was unemployed, her clothing selections were intended to reflect both her diminished circumstances and her no longer needing to dress daily for work. The look was meant to be emulatable.

  At the start, McGuire made a significant portion of the clothing her characters would wear. Handcrafted clothing required numerous fittings to get the tailoring right, and as the show progressed, and the demands on the actors’ time swelled, the actors balked at the additional work required of them. In later seasons, McGuire would only make special items, like wedding dresses; everything else would be off-the-rack.

  She was invested in each of her characters’ looks, but the audience established its preferences early on. The boys were handsomely dressed but visually dull, and while Phoebe and Monica were appealing, it was Rachel Green who captivated a nation of young women looking for inspiration about what it meant to dress themselves fashionably. Only Rachel would eventually inspire Internet scholars to document and rank each of the 703 outfits she wore over Friends’ ten seasons.

  Why were fans so captivated by Rachel’s looks? Aniston was beautiful, to be sure, and, playing a fashionable character, was more likely to dress herself stylishly than her compatriots. But the fascination with Rachel’s look also spoke to something at the core of Friends’ appeal: its service as a manual to adulthood.

  Rachel was a role model for the aspiring adults of Generation X. Her life might occasionally have been a mess, her romantic instincts sometimes misguided, but she never looked anything less than stunning along the way. At times, Rachel came perilously close to the movie stereotype of the beautiful woman whose humanizing flaw is her relentless klutziness, but she was more than that. Rachel was our down-home Audrey Hepburn, our entry-level Grace Kelly.

  McGuire’s preference for rarely repeating an outfit emphasized a latent belief of Friends, and a part of its fashion allure: the notion that there was a right outfit for every occasion. The show may have begun as a portrait of postcollegiate “welcome to the real world” ennui, but it rapidly shifted gears toward encroaching maturity, and the clothing choices followed behind. We watched Rachel to see what we might look like as a woman in the workforce, or a woman in love, or a new mother, or a woman scorned, or a woman with a killer new job. To do so was to glance into a highly flattering mirror that showed us only from the right angle, in the right light.

  Marta Kauffman was invested in the selection of clothing for the show, and one of McGuire’s weekly tasks was to oversee the “rack check,” in which Kauffman ran through all the different costumes selected for the next episode. Kauffman generally approved of McGuire’s taste, but there were times when Kauffman worried that a particular outfit might be too distracting, pulling viewers’ attention away from the dialogue, and so a standout item might be replaced by something a bit more demure.

  Friends stuck fairly rigorously to a predetermined color palette for each character, and so it surprised McGuire when the actors approached her with last-minute requests. If something felt too tight or seemed unsuitable, they might ask for a replacement and wonder why they couldn’t wear something in black. McGuire, mentally wielding her carefully designed color fields, would point out that Monica was wearing black in the scene.

  She realized that even late in the show’s run, the actors remained blissfully unaware of the thought that had gone into the costume design. This was, perhaps, how it was intended to be; with few exceptions, and other than for the most carefully trained eye, the costumes were merely another silent expression of the characters’ personalities.

  McGuire and her team would visit thrift stores and consignment shops and mass-market retailers and designer emporiums in search of inspiration. Merely providing dozens of new costumes for Friends’ characters every week was an enormous undertaking.

  One notable, and entertaining, exception to the profusion of styles came with “The One Where No One’s Ready,” from the third season. Ross’s anxiet
y over shepherding his friends out the door for a work event spilled over into a dispute between Joey and Chandler. An escalating series of schemes leads to Chandler’s disposing of all of Joey’s underwear, forcing him to wear a rented tuxedo with nothing of his own to serve as protection. Joey swears revenge and comes back wearing all of Chandler’s clothes—and still without underwear.

  McGuire and her colleagues took everything from Chandler’s wardrobe and stitched together a Frankenstein’s-monster costume, layering the pieces until they were satisfied with the final result. Then they sewed it all together until it had become a kind of two-piece LeBlanc could step into. It was a quick change, coming as it did in the middle of a scene, and their stitch job made it a cinch for LeBlanc to pull off a hilarious adjustment.

  Friends was such a fashion phenomenon that fans would even take it upon themselves to request items they had only glimpsed. For “The One with the Lesbian Wedding,” McGuire had designed a wedding dress for Carol to wear. It was made from cream-colored raw silk, with a striking off-the-shoulder design that accentuated Jane Sibbett’s long, elegant neck. After the show aired, McGuire began getting calls from women hoping to order the wedding dress she had designed. McGuire worked with one bride who would fly in from Boston for dress fittings. Friends helped to make McGuire the kind of designer who could charge upward of $6,000 for a wedding gown and as much as $3,500 for a suit.