Cousins Beach Couture: The Insider’s Guide to The Summer I Turned Pretty
Spotted: Cousins Beach, where love triangles burn hotter than the sand and fashion never takes a holiday. As September is upon us, and the orange hues of fall threaten to replace the sun-soaked lens, leaving us nauseated with summer nostalgia let us dive into all things summer.
At first glance, The Summer I Turned Pretty appears to entrench itself within patriarchal discourse, its title inviting audiences to read female adolescence through the lens of male desirability. While the title amends itself to patriarchal discourse, the series itself resists such reduction. When the immersive blue of the ocean appears on the screen and the white title overlays it, I immediately imagined myself as Laura Mulvey – the feminist film theorist who decodes gender dynamics onscreen in her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ contained in the book The Sexual Subject. Mulvey’s formulation of the male gaze – where women are positioned as objects to be looked upon rather than agents of their own desire – lurks behind the phrase “turned pretty,” a wording that suggests transformation is validated only when witnessed and sanctioned by male spectatorship. In Section II: Pleasure in Looking / Fascination with the Human Form, Mulvey postulates:
‘In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.’
Though we might hope such notions are outdated, they continue to permeate cultural texts, including, superficially, this beloved series. The very phrasing “turned pretty” seems to echo this misogynistic cinematic logic, positioning Belly as spectacle, rendered a passive object to be looked at by both male spectator and male protagonist. Yet the show itself undoes this framing. Rather than merely confirming her value through visibility and male desire, The Summer I turned Pretty re-routes prettiness and femininity into something else entirely: a negotiation with memory, grief, and intergenerational legacy through clothing. By season 3, wardrobe functions not as ornament but as archive: garments become an embodied form of inheritance.
As Roland Barthes reminds us in The Fashion System, clothing is never mere fabric but a system of signs, carrying meaning beyond its material form, a language that encodes cultural meaning. Following this rhetoric, Belly’s adoption of Susannah’s wardrobe is a semiotic act: to wear her clothes is to speak Susannah’s presence, to inscribe memory on the body in fabric. If Mulvey diagnoses the limiting trap of women being positioned as passive spectacle, Barthes offers the counter: clothing as active discourse, as a text written on the body. Therefore, in donning Susannah’s wardrobe, Belly destabilises the patriarchal gaze embedded in the title and reclaims fashion as a mode of authorship, transforming the act of dressing into a grammar of memory and love.
On the surface, TSITP is marketed as pastel-tinted romance: beach houses, messy love triangles, and the ever-familiar pangs of adolescence. Yet beneath these breezy narratives, the series stages something far more profound. Fashion here is not decorative, but discursive. Clothing acts as a vessel of memory, a language of grief, and a site of intergenerational legacy. To watch the characters dress and redress themselves over the course of three seasons is to witness identity itself being negotiated, rewritten, and inherited through fabric.
Susannah as Style Matriarch:
Photos: Pinterest
At the centre of this sartorial discourse stands Susannah, the absent-yet-omnipresent fashion matriarch of Cousins Beach. Even in death, her presence threads through the lives of those she loved. In season 3, Belly’s decision to wear Susannah’s clothing operates as merely a simple stylistic choice; it is an act of memorialisation. As Harry Styles reminds us, “there’s a piece of you in how I dress.” For Belly, that piece is Susannah herself. Fashion becomes the means through which the living converse with the dead, holding onto what the world insists must be released.
Where early Season 2 Belly was utterly lost, consumed by denial after Susannah’s passing, Season 3 Belly is grown, mature and finally beginning to feel more at peace, slowly healing from the loss of one of her most significant mother figures. Indeed, her clothes function as insider trading on emotions. Fashion, here, becomes a vessel of memory, a way of inhabiting the presence of someone who has been lost. The textures of Susannah’s cardigans, dresses, and blouses carry with them the intimacy of shared summers, functioning as heirlooms that collapse the distance between past and present and dismantle the threshold between physical and spiritual. To wear these garments is to engage in a form of silent dialogue with Susannah, to hold her close through fabric when she can no longer be held in life. Clothing, in this sense, transcends its practical purpose and becomes a language of grief: each borrowed piece a reminder that love, once stitched into the fabric of everyday life, does not disappear but lingers in seams, hems, and silhouettes. Through Susannah’s wardrobe, Belly carries forward not only her memory but also her influence, her legacy, and the enduring bond that shaped her most formative summers. Fashion becomes a eulogy. A coping mechanism that allows Belly to come to terms and accept the unfair loss of a loved one.
Belly’s Wardrobe as Coming-of-Age Arc:
Photo: Pinterest
Belly’s wardrobe traces the trajectory of her coming-of-age. In Season 1, her aesthetic echoes the Abercrombie-style summer it-girl: sundresses, bright palettes. Her style communicates youth and the intoxication of first crushes. By Season 3, however, her clothing shifts towards heavier textures, muted tones, without losing her bright and cheerful mood, signalling both grief and maturity. Crucially, this evolution is not solely an inward development but a sartorial inheritance: by claiming Susannah’s wardrobe, Belly begins to embody her influence, morphing her personal style into an archive of memory. A transformation that marks a movement from self-presentation to self-possession, where “pretty” no longer signifies external approval but a lived expression of legacy.
Secrets may be buried in the sand, but clothing carries them on the surface. Ultimately, TSITP is not merely a story of who loves whom, or who Belly eventually decides to be with (although we both know The Fashion Stock Market is rooting for Connie Baby from day one), nor of who “turned pretty” in whose eyes. It is a study in how clothing mediates memory, legacy and grief. A trajectory in which Belly finally sees herself as “pretty” and, most importantly, whole and authentically herself in her own eyes. Susannah’s wardrobe endures as the connective tissue between past and present, life and loss, innocence and maturity.Through it, Belly discovers that fashion is not just self-expression but inheritance, an embodied archive that outlives its wearer. To dress, in this series, is not simply to be seen; It is to remember, to honour, and survive.
So for now, keep stealing hearts and scarves, and never forget: legacy looks best in linen. Until next time,
XOXO, The Fashion Stock Market
Cover Photo: Pinterest
Editor: Felicity Field
