Dany’s Wardrobe: Show vs. Books
This started as a comment on a reblog but then I decided to make it it’s own post.
As much as I love Dany’s wardrobe generally (unpopular opinion the belly button dress was ugly), its progression doesn’t make almost any sense.
In the books, fashion is a HUGE part of her plot line, from the first chapter where she wears Illyrio’s gift dress and the gold torc that thematically connect her to slavery (”even Khal Drogo’s slaves wear gold collars”). From there, she embraces her new peoples by sliding into their cultural skin: wearing Dothraki riding leathers and painted vests, putting on a Qartheen gown with the boob out, and eventually her “floppy ears” of a tokar. I’ve speculated before that Dany will embrace Westerosi fashion (or what little we know about it in the books) once she lands in the area, and again when she heads North. It makes the most sense based on her past progression, and tokars and sandsilk is going to essentially be useless in the cold terrain of the war for the dawn.
The show initially mirrors the books progression of adopting her new people’s clothing. She wears the light silks from Illyrio, the Dothraki clothes, and then the blue Qartheen dress that’s one of her most iconic. But then we don’t see that continue after season 2. In SOS, she wears various robes and her Dothraki clothes. When she gets to Meereen, she’s convinced to switch to a tokar to please her people. But in the show, her white dresses, beautiful as they may be, don’t reflect the people of Meereen. In fact, they make her stand out entirely.
Michelle Clapton did this on purpose, as she said in 2015:
“I wanted to give this rather untouchable [quality] to her. The idea behind the white and pale gray is the sense of removal, a removal from reality.”
But that’s not what her clothes in the books are doing. GRRM thinks these little details and symbolisms through, and he shows Dany embracing the people she’s among. IMO, this is in part because Dany doesn’t have a home and doesn’t yet know where she belongs. She remembers the house with the red door, but she doesn't really have a culture or homeland of her own. By adopting her new peoples’ cultures, she is trying to acclimate as a ruler but also trying to find the place she as an individual belongs.
At the same time, Dany doesn’t feel comfortable doing this all the time. She calls the tokar her “floppy ears” and recognizes thats it’s a performance and disguise she wears for other’s benefit. She seems to feel most at home among the Dothraki wardrobe, which she actively wears in Qarth as she leaves, rejecting a Qartheen gown:
If the Milk Men thought her such a savage, she would dress the part for them. When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest, and a curved dagger hung from her medallion belt.
This is one main reason I’m excited for her to return to the Dothraki. Unlike her return to Dragonstone and Westeros, this will be a thematic homecoming, a return to the first place she felt independence and power and strength in her short life. But I digress.
The show instead chooses to have her reject the fashion of the areas she’s in. She doesn’t dress like a Westerosi on her return to her birthplace, instead continuing the clothing that she’s worn in her other countries. Which begs another question: where do these clothes come from? If she picked up a seamstress in Meereen or Qarth or Astapor, wouldn’t that woman probably sew things for Dany based on her own knowledge, using those local cultures?
It would be one thing if Dany came to Westeros reflecting ‘foreign’ styles from the other places she’s been, but show!Dany continues to reflect the styles that are wholly her own. If that was the purpose, to thematically show her as ‘breaking the wheel’ and eviscerating the Master’s clothes, that would be one thing. But Michelle Clapton has clearly shown that wasn’t the purpose of that design, but rather to set her apart from everyone around her.
When Dany goes North, she continues to be “apart,” even as she adopts the furs that are necessary for survival in the North. The red-lined fur outfit from her arrival that mirror her previous styles while adopting the warmth of the North is probably one of the most true to book!Dany outfits that we’ve seen since Qarth. But I still think that we’re going to see her continuing to do what she’s done since the beginning and embrace the clothing of people that she joins, and that rather than setting her apart, the clothes may end up feeling more like home and belonging for the first time in her life.
