'Succession' Is a Show About Jackets Now

By Eileen Cartter

For all his postmarked blood and danks memes, Lukas Mattsson's real superpower on the fourth and final season of HBO's Succession is the way he's moved the needle on jackets. Forget who's going to succeed titan-of-industry Logan Roy as the next CEO of Waystar Royco. Who's going to outdo the Swedish tech edgelord's inexplicable outerwear?

If the last three episodes are any indication, it's a toss-up: Days after their father's death, the Roy children skedaddle to Norway to meet Alexander Skarsgård's Mattsson, the would-be buyer of their family business, on his company retreat, setting up a showdown between Mattsson's "Scandinavian Evil Kermit" Fjällräven anorak and Shiv Roy's bonkers down-puffer-meets-plaid-trench-coat from Mackage. (Shiv won that round on stupefaction alone.) Then, Kendall Roy has custom Top Gun flight jackets made for him and his co-CEO brother Roman to wear during a big presentation at a tech conference in LA. Everyone seems to be dressing through it.

But in Sunday's episode seven, the whole gang gathers at Shiv and Tom's icy Tribeca triplex for an Election-Day-eve party, where Shiv advises Mattsson to come mingle with the various legacy-media doyens and political "thought leaders" in attendance. Mattsson, as the towering HR nightmare that he is, does not accept this invitation without protest: he enters the party—during a moment of silence for recently departed Logan Roy, no less—wearing the loudest, weirdest jacket imaginable.

It's hard to imagine Mattsson going into a store to buy anything, much less this weirdly plush, burnout velvet jacket from the Japanese streetwear brand Needles—it's more likely that he sent one of his cronies to Très Bien in Malmö with a mission to buy the silliest thing they could find. But as Skarsgård told The Hollywood Reporter, Mattsson's presence at the shindig needed to feel "like throwing a golden hand grenade into a room of gray suits. Hence the golden jacket." (That said, it wasn't all gray suits: Kendall was wearing one of his usual Tom Ford nappa leather numbers.)

"I wanted something eccentric and crazy when it came to the jacket, something that really stood out, because the Roys are always so understated," the actor also told Vulture, adding that he worked with costume designer Jonathan Schwartz to find just the right one. "It's that kind of classy, downplayed, very, very expensive, but no logos, nothing ostentatious because it's tacky. I wanted to give that a big ‘fuck you’ and walk in wearing something completely different."

(The fact that Mattsson paired this diabolical garment with a pair of Kyrie Irving Nikes feels…pointed.)

And if that wasn't enough outerwear for you, Shiv and Mattsson meet up later in the episode to conspire inside Shiv and Tom's converted coat room. Literally an entire room full of coats hung up on collapsible clothing racks! Apparently, if you are Roy-level wealthy, you can prevent your guests from committing the (widespread but grody) party sin of piling their outside clothes on someone else's bedspread.

Aside from the ubiquitous upscale corporate-bro vests, outerwear has played a weirdly outsized role these last few seasons of Succession. There's been a steady build ever since Adrien Brody's bonafide gorpcore stack in season three, which later brought us Kendall's Gucci-birthday-bomber double-header and Connor's refusal to remove his coat at said birthday. With three episodes left, there's bound to be another wacky jacket—or roomful of jackets—up those Roy sleeves.