The Bleakness of Victoria’s Caftans In The White Lotus

These days, there is a growing cultural obsession with watching well-dressed wealthy people do bad, bad things. Shiv Roy’s sterile separates spoke volumes in Succession. Whitney’s measured workwear felt comically performative in The Curse. And now, The White Lotus season 3 has given us a new moneyed archetype with a can’t-look-away aesthetic. It is Parker Posey’s Victoria, and her uniform of choice is the floral caftan.

The third instalment of HBO’s anthology is set in Thailand, and — as with each season — it casts a sardonic lens on the poorly-behaved privileged people vacationing there. Among them is Posey’s Victoria Ratliff, mom of three and wife to a seedy financier. From the moment we meet her, Victoria seems…far away. She pops prescription pills, floating through the resort in a vaguely medicated state. She speaks with a lethargic Southern drawl, dragging out each word at a lagging pace. She swaths herself in billowing muumuus and is often staring, eyes glazed over, into nothingness.

Above all, she has an undeniably out-of-touch vibe, embodying the ethnocentric American stereotype as she turns her nose up to the luxury Thai resort. “We usually stay at the Caribbean,” she tells a worker, as if that is a hotel name and not a vast region comprising 13 countries. In this introductory scene, she is fresh off a private boat ride in an olive green Banana Republic tunic dress. It’s a pretty standard vacationwear staple. But her accessories — Rolex watch, Gucci Bamboo bag — give her ruling class status away.

As she settles onto the resort, we see her sporting a specific kind of beach-side loungewear, courtesy of costume designer Alex Bovaird. Her expensive-looking caftans are often two-toned, with some sort of paisley pattern or floral embellishment. The sleeves are loose, the shape is flowy, and the lightweight, airy silhouette envelops her in a manufactured cloud of Lilly-Pulitzer-esque bliss. Her face-covering frames add to her detached demeanour, as does the sterile smile perpetually plastered on her face. Not caring about the place she’s visiting or the people who live there, her intentional aloofness is both horrifying and compelling.

Victoria thinks everyone is jealous of her family, when they are in fact the predators in most situations. Her son objectifies every woman he sees (including his sister). Her husband scream-whispers into the phone about a money laundering scheme he’s embroiled in. And when she is recognized by another American tourist — they spent a weekend together years ago at a mutual friend’s baby shower — she stares blankly at the woman, unwilling to scrape together a spec of small talk.

The run-in is uncomfortable for everyone except Victoria, who seems delighted in having orchestrated such a deeply awkward encounter. “What does she want from me?" she says to her kids once the woman walks away. “I don’t know her.” Sporting a pink-and-green caftan, round orange-tint sunglasses, and a deep side part, her laissez-faire tropical ensemble is a thin veil for her individualistic meanness.

“Most people don’t have good values!” she declares at dinner one night, after laughing at her son’s transphobic joke. She drones on, lecturing her kids in a partially sedated tone about protecting their peace. “You’re all gorgeous and you come from money. So you have to be hypervigilant.” The irony of this moment — the rich victimizing themselves while surrounded by working-class waitstaff — is materialized in her floral-festooned ocean-blue tunic. It feels forced.

Perhaps the most troubling part of Parker Posey’s Victoria in The White Lotus is her disinterest in how awful she and her family really are. She feigns ignorance — of her privilege, of her eldest son’s egregious behaviour, of her husband’s white-collar crimes — and her caftans represent that kind of absent-minded entitlement. Fluid, unconcerned, and somewhat performative, her vacation-ready wardrobe is a bastion of her unawareness.