

But, unlike Eliza’s, Fran’s taste doesn’t change. Sheffield, completing her trajectory as an outer-borough Eliza Doolittle. By the end of the series, she marries Mr. She dispenses wisdom, such as suggesting that the privileged children in her care might benefit, as she did, from a summer farming on a kibbutz. Sheffield’s conniving, Waspy business partner, C. C. (The show often pits Fran’s fashion obsession against the theatrical ambitions of her boss, a Broadway producer who is engaged in an endless rivalry with Andrew Lloyd Webber.) But much of the show’s humor comes from subverting the viewer’s assumptions. She is a shopaholic striver with a mountain of credit-card debt, a profligate clotheshorse who, the viewer assumes, cares more about materialist trends than timeless art. Fran Fine, with her Skittles-colored couture, unruly bouffant, and honking voice, is supposed to read as baseborn. But the resurgence of Fran Fine’s style is something different, a shorthand for a brash kind of femininity that commands respect without ever quite fitting in.įrom its inception, “The Nanny” was a show about class.

A lot of these recycled trends seem designed to recapture nineties youth culture-the teen-agers of today don’t look much different from those who graced the pages of Delia’s catalogues in 1995.
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Fast-fashion stores like Forever 21 and H&M are now full of crushed velvet, small round sunglasses, combat boots, and lace choker necklaces. In February, the famous yellow plaid that Alicia Silverstone wore as the Beverly Hills princess Cher Horowitz in “Clueless” appeared on the Versace runway. The return of “Nanny”-wear is part of a larger cloud of nineties nostalgia that seems to have enveloped the fashion world in recent years.
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All these items could have been plucked straight from the closet of Drescher’s Fran Fine-the Jewish-American cosmetics salesgirl from Flushing, Queens, who, through a series of lucky breaks, becomes the nanny to the children of Maxwell Sheffield, a wealthy British widower in Manhattan. Rosetta Getty and Roland Mouret are both pushing skin-tight pencil skirts in glazed black leather. We11Done has a line of zebra-print micro-miniskirts, while Balmain is selling nip-waist patent-leather blazers with trapezoidal shoulder pads. A few weeks ago, I began to notice that many of the Fall 2018 styles had something in common: they looked like things that Fran Drescher would have worn in the nineties CBS sitcom “The Nanny.” There are tight, leopard-print trenchcoats from Victoria Beckham and fuzzy, neon-green cropped sweaters from Balenciaga.

If you stare long enough at designer clothing in the wee hours of the morning, strange patterns begin to emerge. The style made famous by Fran Drescher in “The Nanny” represents a brash kind of femininity that commands respect without ever quite fitting in.
