Iconic Outfit / Live-Action TV

Iconic Outfit in Live-Action TV.

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• 24:
  • Jack Bauer has either a long or short-sleeved shirt, body armor, and optionally his CTU tactical jacket.
  • Tony Almeida is either remembered for his nice suits and soul patch beard or his leather jacket, shaved head, and Perma-Stubble look in the seventh season during his Face–Heel Turn period.
• Are You Being Served?: Captain Peacock's executive red carnation.
• Emma Peel of The Avengers: black leather Spy Catsuits. The thing is that they weren't very rugged and after any action scene all the seams would be ripped out, so after the first few episodes she stopped wearing them, but that is all that anybody remembers her wearing. Apart from the purple ones, of course.
• Number Six of Battlestar Galactica (2003) has a short red dress. While "Caprica Six" and "Head Six" have a wide variety of outfits that they wear over the course of the series, they are both — the latter especially — most associated with that red dress.
• Catwoman's leather catsuit from Batman (1966). It was so popular that many people assume that the comics version wore something similar all the time, whereas it wasn't introduced until Darwyn Cooke's redesign of her costume in the early 2000s. Post-Crisis she previously usually wore a purple catsuit, while her pre-Crisis version often wore dresses.
• Beakman's World: Beakman's fluorescent green labcoat.
• Bones: Booth's crazy socks and "Cocky" belt buckle
• Walter White from Breaking Bad has three outfits that are most associated with him:
  • His green shirt and white briefs from the first episode.
  • His Porkpie Hat from when he becomes Heisenberg.
  • The yellow contamination suit he, as well as Jesse, wears when cooking meth.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Spike's leather trench coat (which he took from the second Slayer he killed) combined with his bleached-blond hair made for a pretty distinctive look. His red unbuttoned shirt he wore underneath it is also often a siganture part of his look, in spite of the fact that he ditched it halfway through the fourth season, and only briefly wore it again during Season 6. Angel's own Badass Longcoat also took on this status in the spinoff show.
• Chespirito:
  • El Chapulín Colorado has his trademark red, full body suit with yellow trunks and sneakers, a yellow heart with the letters "CH" on the chest and his vinnyl antennae over his head.
  • El Chavo del ocho has iconic outfits for pretty much every single character. There's el Chavo's trademark green checkered cap, with a shirt with green horizontal stripes, and pants held by a couple of reds hanging from the same shoulder. Quico's sailor costume with a kiddie tri-color cap also counts. Don Ramón navy blue shirt, denim pants and blue hat are actually a special case, since Ramón Valdez would wear those as everyday clothes while not acting.
• Columbo has the good lieutenant's instantly recognisable rumpled beige raincoat over a cheap grey suit. Lampshaded in one episode, wherein he shows up wearing a new coat, purchased at his wife's long-suffering insistence; over the episode, it becomes progressively more battered and abused until it gradually looks no different to the old one.
• CSI: Grissom's often made fun of straw hat in the later part of his stint.
• Doctor Who: One of the most recognisable characteristics of each incarnation of the Doctor is their dress sense.
  • The Fourth Doctor's bohemian outfit with the long scarf and the Fifth's cricket outfit, with, um, decorative vegetable. The Sixth and Seventh Doctors were intentionally designed to be as iconic as possible (the former involving a profusion of colors, the latter a sweater vest with question marks on it and an umbrella carried in any weather), but weren't as successful as the subtler examples. The Fourth Doctor's scarf is probably the most iconic item of any Doctor's outfit, based at least partially on Toulouse-Lautrec's painting◊ of Aristide Bruant. This was lampshaded in the audio play "The Demon of Paris", where the story is started by the Doctor finding a version of the poster that was altered into a likeness of him.
  • Nine's leather jacket, identified by Jack as being the same type that's worn by U-Boat captains. Complete with black boots and slacks, the only indicator that he even changes his clothes is the color of his sweater.
  • Ten's penchant for wearing Converse sneakers with a brown pinstriped suit. The trenchcoat is also instantly recognizable. Beginning in Series 3, he also began sporting blue suits, and he began to vary up his choices of neckties.
  • Eleven's bowtie. Briefly, fezzes and a Stetson he wore for all of a minute. That was all it needed. Eleven clearly wanted the fez to become a regular part of his outfit, but River Song vaporized it with a laser gun because she thought it looked stupid. In the 50th Anniversary special, Eleven picks up a fez while walking to Elizabeth's Credentials, and Clara remarks that he "could never resist a fez", implying that he's tried multiple times to add it to his iconic outfit.^note There is apparently a bit of an inside joke here; according to Steven Moffat's Doctor Who Magazine column, the producer incredulously asked him "You're giving Matt a fez?" and he had to reassure her it would be destroyed before the actor got too attached to it.
  • While Twelve goes through numerous variations of dress, he is perhaps best known for his jacket's (usually red) colourful lining. His hoodie, holey jumper and sonic sunglasses also count.
  • Some of the companions share this trait as well.
    • Zoe is associated with the glittery catsuit that she wore in "The Mind Robber" and "The Invasion" much more than any of her other costumes.
    • Turlough only wore shorts in his final episode but it's become quite memorable among some followers, due to it being...rather short. His school uniform is also well known cause that was (almost) all he wore.
    • The tacky op-art dress that Dodo wears in "The Celestial Toymaker" is the outfit primarily associated with her, even though she only wears it in one story, all but one episode of which is missing. This was probably as the most recognisable visual depiction of her for pre-home-video fans was the cover of the novelisation, which depicts it. Steven is also associated strongly with the striped polo-neck he wears in the same story, which his actor Peter Purves expressed disappointment with in an interview on the "The Tenth Planet" DVD extras; he claimed it wasn't even cool in The '60s and wished that people associated him with the beautiful Renaissance clothes he got to wore in "The Massacre" instead.
    • Ace wouldn't be Ace without her badge-covered bomber jacket that she rocks in style.
• The Dukes of Hazzard: Daisy Duke's incredibly-high-cut tight jean short-shorts. So much that they were named after her.
• Family Matters: Urkel's outfit consisting of red glasses with a holder string, plaid or striped shirt, suspenders, and jeans with the bottoms rolled up.
• Filmation's Ghostbusters: In the live-action series, Kong wore an orange sweatshirt with "5" stenciled on it, a gray vest, green pants, and a porkpie hat. Spenser wore a blue zoot suit.
• Firefly:
  • Jayne's "cunning" homeknit hat — "A man walks down the street in that hat, you know he's not afraid of anything." (Besides, it was a gift from his mum.)
  • River's floaty skirts coupled with cycle shorts and big clompy boots... or barefoot, as the plot demands.
  • Mal Reynolds, Captain Tightpants and his Badass Longcoat, from which the Browncoats take their name.
  • Wash and his loud, tacky Hawaiian shirts.
  • Kaylee has two, her mechanic’s coveralls with the girly patches on them and her frilly pink dress from “Shindig”.
  • Simon always has his proper suit and vest despite having lost the rest of his fancy core-boy life.
• Sarah Lund's Faroe Isles woollen sweater in Forbrydelsen. It got so iconic that the Radio Times promoted the show's second season in the UK with a knitting pattern.
• Game of Thrones:
  • The Stark army tend to wear a common outfit of a brown leather brigandine over a green tunic when in the field. It's far more modest and showy than other armour seen elsewhere and the fact that it's worn by soldiers and commanders, regardless of rank, suggests the Frontline General ethos espoused and followed by Ned and imbibed by his kids.
  • Daenerys has more than a few:
    • Her Dothraki garb which she wears from Episode 3 onwards and which she wears again for most of Season 6.
    • The blue travelling outfit, which she wears during her conquest of Slaver's Bay and early rule is the outfit she wears for most of her appearances, and is more or less the main appearance used in promotion and fan-art.
    • The several white dresses she wears while ruling Meereen, along with the ornate dragon necklace she wears at the opening of Daznak's Pit, is also quite well known, but her last symbol of supposed purity power is covered in soot and rain in the following episodes, turning it sky blue.
    • Her dark, draconic dresses in Season 7 have become very recognizable, along with the winter dress she wears when she rescues Jon Snow and co. beyond the Wall.
• Glee:
  • Sue Sylvester's red track suit.
  • Will Schuester's sweater vests.
• The Goldbergs:
  • Beverly's bedazzled sweaters. They are based on the real Beverly Goldberg's sweaters, some of which are actually worn on the show.
  • Barry's orange Philadelphia Flyers shirt, which he calls Big Orange.
• Gossip Girl:
  • Chuck Bass' signature scarf.
  • Headbands hadn't been a trend for years when the show started. Blair is seldom seen without one. It's lampshaded quite a few times, and she even gives headbands to prospect minions, in college.
• Brazilian show A Grande Família had the character Agostinho Carrara become downright memetic through his never-ending showcase of◊ tacky shirts, more often than not with plaid pants.
• Hannah Montana:
  • Hannah Montana's blonde wigs. Her pink sparkly jacket and white jeans, maybe, too.
  • Lilly Truscott's "Lola Luftnagle" "anime hair" wigs may count as well.
• Happy Days: The Fonz in his iconic leather jacket, now hanging in the Smithsonian. Ironically, in his first few appearances he wore an ordinary windbreaker because the network that Happy Days was on wouldn't allow his character to be portrayed as a juvenile delinquent even though he was, but later allowed the jacket to be worn when the writers pointed out that it was legitimate safety equipment for a motorcycle rider.
• Hee Haw: Minnie Pearl's flowery straw hat with the price tag hanging from it.
• Heroes:
  • Claire was defined by the writers as "The Cheerleader" from day one, so they always have to find a way to show her in a cheerleader outfit, even when it stretches credibility, and everyone still refers to her as "The Cheerleader".
  • Mohinder's hot-pink shirt (with striped purple-and-yellow scarf). There are multiple crack fics starring it.
• Home Improvement: Al Borland's flannel shirts.
• How I Met Your Mother: Barney is very rarely seen without a suit and shows his love for them throughout the series, including a musical number dedicated to them in "Girls vs. Suits".
• I Dream of Jeannie:
  • Jeannie, of course, had her pink harem costume with exposed midriff (although her belly button was ordered concealed by network censors!)
  • To a much lesser extent, Major Nelson wore an air force uniform. Major Healey was the odd man out on the base with his green army uniform (in contrast to everyone else's blue air force uniforms).
• Jonathan Creek's duffel coat, which has apparently become an in-universe example judging by an episode where some of his fanclub show up. Jonathan finds this vaguely disturbing. When the series returned after a hiatus, with Jonathan now married and having taken on a more business-casual look, it was a pretty significant He's Back! moment when he finally took the duffel coat out of his wardrobe.
• Kamen Rider is known for his bug-eye lenses, antennae, silver mandible mouthpiece, Scarf of Asskicking (at least early on) and always, ALWAYS, the chunky belt buckle. Many of the Heisei Riders have a fairly set clothing style out of suit (for example, Shotaro and his fedoras and waistcoats, or his partner Philip and his far less common long-sleeved shirts and parkas) but special mention goes to Eiji Hino, whose Establishing Character Moment cemented his iconic Lack of an Outfit.
• Merlin's Neckerchiefs. Also, the Hat.
• Adrian Monk has a tidy, conservative appearance as one might guess. He wears tweed jackets and patterned dress shirts buttoned all the way up, albeit without a necktie.
• Mike Nesmith's green wool-knit hat in The Monkees. The Real Life Mike wore it to keep his hair out of his eyes when stopping in on a laundry run when he went in the audition, and was identified by the show's producers in his audition tapes via this hat. He was even nicknamed "Wool Hat" in the pilot.
• Although it wasn't uncommon for them to change clothes, the human/humanoid cast members of Mystery Science Theater 3000 had more or less iconic outfits to fall back on the other 90% of the time: Joel and Mike's boiler suits, Dr. Forrester's neon green lab coat, Frank's black smock, Observer's blue hooded cape (a constant across the evolution of his costume), and Bobo's purple blazer. Pearl had two iconic outfits: the Day-Glo shirt, vest and skirt she wore in her earliest appearances, and the olive-drab monogrammed jacket she adopted near the end of the show's run.
  • When they did make an obvious change, it was usually for a joke — like the Brain Bleach-inducing silver lamé outfit worn by Mike as part of a parody of Spanish-language kids' TV — or it would have some connection back to their iconic outfits, like the neon green tank top Dr. Forrester would change into for anything sports-related.
  • Pearl Forrester probably changed clothes more often than any of the other characters, but in the Sci-Fi Channel years she had an iconic hairstyle: regardless of what she was wearing, her hair was almost always pulled neatly back into a bun.
• Mork & Mindy Mork's rainbow braces/suspenders.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • Emma Swan has her red leather jacket. She doesn't wear it in every episode but it's considered synonymous with her character. A Season 5 episode "Firebird" even devotes a flashback to how she got it — explaining that it has some significance for her.
  • Regina in her Evil Queen persona is remembered for an elaborate black dress with a Navel-Deep Neckline. When the Evil Queen became a separate entity in Season 6, this is what she wore all the time.
• Peep Show has Jez's camo jacket. Technically, if you include the intro, he wears it in every episode.
• Person of Interest has John Reese and his nice suit. It took a while before Reese settled on his black suit/white shirt combo (though he'd worn other suits before), but he eventually becomes known as "The Man in the Suit". His rejection of the suit in "Lethe" and "Aletheia" is used to underscore his disillusionment with the cause and him deciding to pick up a new suit in "4C" heralds his return.
• Power Rangers/Super Sentai:
  • Out of the 40-plus seasons of Super Sentai and half as many Power Rangers, the most iconic outfits worldwide are those from Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger. For the simple reason that this was the first season of Super Sentai to be adapted into the very first Power Rangers, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Most everyone will be able to instantly recognize the Zyuranger suits even if they've never seen either show, because they're just that iconic as a result of the global popularity of Power Rangers.
  • In Power Rangers Wild Force, the previous season's Rangers came back during a teamup two-parter that the fandom remembers fondly. The fandom also fondly remembers the apocalyptic future-based black leather/PVC outfit◊ the Pink Ranger was dressed in during her first appearance in said episodes as she singly handedly saves everybody else in the cast.
  • There's also the cloak Andros wears in his Establishing Character Moment in Power Rangers in Space. Both times he's brought back for a crossover, he's shown wearing it.
  • The Ranger outfit itself is iconic enough to be recognised by non-fans — base color bodysuit & helmet, long white gloves, boots & belt, and large black eyepiece on helmet, hardly varying from one season to another. Making it easy enough to create Evil Twins for a Mirror Match, just color the white parts black. There was an understandable backlash over the Juken Sentai Gekiranger (later Power Rangers Jungle Fury) outfits for having short-cuff gloves, shoes and no belts, to say nothing of Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters for not using Spandex at all.
• Rod Roddy, the announcer on The Price Is Right from 1985 to 2003, almost always wore custom-made Thai silk suits. However, they weren't seen in the last couple of years of his tenure, as Rod had stopped appearing on camera for the most part.
• Number Six from The Prisoner (1967), with his white-piped black blazer, sweater, pale chinos and boat shoes. Most residents of The Village were dressed in a similar fashion.
• The Red Green Show: Red Green's red-and-green suspenders and plaid shirt.
• From Robin Hood: Much's hat. He wore it for three seasons straight.
• An in-universe example occurs in Sherlock when Sherlock grabs an unusual, completely-outside-his-usual-fashion-taste deerstalker hat in order to hide his face from paparazzi, with the result that he's photographed wearing the hat and his in-universe fandom assumes he wears it all the time. His fans routinely talk about it and one of the fake kiss-and-tell stories that his fake Honey Trapped girlfriend pulls on him has the headline "He made me wear the hat". This is, naturally, all spoofing the iconic nature of the deerstalker in adaptations despite it not initially appearing in the original stories. And, of course, this particular take on the character actually has an iconic outfit of his own, even if it's not the one he's known for in-universe: the well-fitted shirt, expertly tailored suit, slipknot blue scarf, and Belstaff greatcoat.
• The Six Million Dollar Man has Steve's oh-so-1970s leisure suit, and a red track suit often used for the toys.
• On Small Wonder, Vicki's usual outfit consists of a red dress with white pinafore, red hair ribbon, white socks and black patent shoes.
• Star Trek
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: The classic Starfleet uniforms, also seen in Star Trek: The Animated Series.
  • Star Trek: Picard: In Season 1, Elnor is exclusively associated with his Qowat Milat habit (both the long-sleeved and sleeveless versions) because it's the only thing he wears ^note with one exception in "Stardust City Rag".
• Stranger Things has a bunch of these for each major character:
  • Eddie's Hellfire Club T-shirt and denim jacket.
  • Chrissy's cheerleader outfit.
  • Eleven's yellow shirt, black trousers and American flag used as a blindfold in Season 3.
  • Nancy Wheeler has enough for an entire article, but the red corduroy jacket with fur lining from Season 1 is probably her most iconic, closely followed by her striped top and blue belt from Season 4.
  • The Scoops Ahoy sailor uniforms worn by Steve and Robin in Season 3. Utterly ridiculous for the stuff they get up to, but definitely memorable.
  • Max's blue jacket and jeans from Season 4, as worn in "Dear Billy", topped off with a blue scrunchie is a popular cosplay choice. Ironically, the costume designer felt the bright outfit was wrong for the depressed girl - her other outfits in that season are brown - but Covid restrictions meant it was the only thing they could get in the quantity needed. For one thing, it gets covered in blood, necessitating extra copies. Versions were also needed for the harness sequences and Sadie Sink's stunt double Michelle Adams. The officially licensed jacket sold by Quiksilver quickly sold out.
• Supernatural: Dean's leather jacket and amulet and, even more so, Castiel's trenchcoat (which is modelled on John Constantine's trenchcoat), suit, and backwards blue tie. In "The Rapture", it's pretty weird to see Jimmy in other clothes. On more of a thematic level, Sam (Dean wears it, too, and it's also sort of shorthand for hunters in general, but it's most strongly associated with Sam) and plaid.
• Teen Wolf: Stiles' red hoodies.
• Top Gear's James May, known for his taste in loud shirts. His most famous is a pink-and-purple striped jumper he has worn on many occasions. Joked about on his own series, James May's Man Lab, when he pulled it out of his vast and colorful shirt collection and claimed to have never even worn it.
• In Torchwood, Jack Harkness rocks his suspenders and especially his World War II Royal Air Force coat.
• Charlie Harper's bowling t-shirts in Two and a Half Men. So iconic that, during Charlie Sheen's (in)famous breakdown, when, among other things, he burned one of these in public and stated in interviews how he hated them, it was already sure that he wasn't going to come back to the series.
• Rod Serling's black or grey suits that he wore while introducing The Twilight Zone.
• Ugly Betty's Guadalajara! poncho.
• Kimmy Schmidt of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt wears a few different outfits over the course of the show, but her most famous is her default look in Season 1: pink pants, yellow jacket, white button-up shirt with a multicolored star pattern, and light-up sneakers.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?:
  • Ryan's Shoes.
  • Colin's "tacky shirt", though he only wears it for one taping (which spawned two episodes).
• Velvet: Ana's magenta dress, prominently featured in the opening credits, is closely associated hers and Alberto's love story.
• Wonder Woman: One of the reasons that the show succeeded is the return of the classic Wonder Woman outfit. At the time, there had been a failed TV movie/pilot that so botched the outfit that it bordered on In Name Only. The comics of the period also tried to move away from the outfit and failed spectacularly. Wonder Woman's outfit is so iconic that pretty much any woman — or man — wearing any outfit with a red top half and blue with white stars bottom half will be recognized as paying homage to Wonder Woman.
• Promotional materials for The X-Files almost invariably depict Mulder and Scully solving cases in matching black suits with their FBI name tags clipped to their breast pockets, even though in the show itself they wear a much wider variety of formalwear in the field and never wear their tags when outside of the FBI headquarters. The reason the black suits and tags are so iconic is likely that they instantly identify the pair as special agents and conjure up images of The Men in Black.

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