Spoilers for HBO’s Industry below.
Industry viewers tuning back into the dog-eat-dog world of HBO’s corporate-finance drama might be shocked upon seeing Harper Stern this season’s premiere. A conniving young striver, Stern, played by Myha’la, had scaled her way from lowly associate to indispensable client-broker, winning Pierpoint the business of the elusive billionaire Jesse Bloom (Jay Duplass). But ultimately, even his money couldn’t protect her from the consequences of her reckless scheming and ethical lapses. In a stunning coup de grâce, Eric Tao (Ken Leung), Harper’s boss and mentor, fired her for information he’d possessed the whole time: that she lied about graduating from college. Ejected from the pack, our wolfish heroine skulks out on her own, defanged.
In other words, in season three, Harper is no longer a high-intensity businesswoman pacing the trading floor in structured blouses and headsets. She’s hitched on to the socially conscious venture capitalist Anna Gearing (Elena Saurel) for a chance to remain within the Pierpoint universe. Now, she’s a deferential assistant padding around an “ethical” investing firm in warm neutrals and accommodating silhouettes. Her hair, once tightly sculpted into a bun, has been shorn into a pixie. In lieu of blazers, she wears sweater vests. When her co-worker berates her for improper recycling, Harper, once scowling and disobedient, only smiles politely.
To understand Harper’s new look, the Cut spoke with Industry costume designer Laura Smith about the character’s season-three style evolution.
You joined Industry this season — how were you conceptualizing Harper’s arc in seasons one and two?
Harper is an interesting character in that she reads the weather very well around her, then can anticipate how it might change. In season one, she was trying to gain entry to a system that she wasn’t part of. She goes to Eric and flatters him, but he knows that she doesn’t have a degree. In season two, she’s started to come into her own. She’s got a compensation package, and it’s massive and unexpected. So she starts to buy into the things that make her pass. When somebody is trusting you with that much money, like her clients, then they have to believe that they get you. She’s an autodidact. She starts wearing this camel coat that’s similar to something that Yasmin has.
In season three, she’s had this life shock. She’s been rejected from that system, and she doesn’t quite know where to go. What has changed is that Harper has been on a crash course on surviving in London outside Pierpoint’s specific codes, but she has replaced them with a different set of codes in Future Dawn — arguably the embodiment of the female-led workplace that Daria and Sara talk about in season one episode eight. So we were looking at ways of making her appear neutral, easy to get along with. Future Dawn has a very particular type of ethics that don’t chime with Harper, but it’s a job that’s close to what she was doing before. She’s still hungry.
When you read the script for season three, were there particular lines or scenes that jumped out and informed the way you styled Myha’la?
There’s a bit at the very beginning where she’s texting this guy Dave, and she’s trying to send him pictures of her masturbating, and he just wants to know about the MUBI subscription. It’s clear that she’s functioning on a different plane. He’s a raging left-wing guy, Labour supporter. And that’s not really her vibe. She’s more about circumstances and situations. The location of Robert’s house, where she’s staying, is in Tottenham, which is quite a party place. I discussed with Myha’la how when you walk around that area, there are a lot of warehouses, and very likely she met Dave walking into a party.
It felt like the way to start Harper’s look trajectory this season was to embrace business casual and play into the idea of a young woman gaining entrance to a whole different side of the city. Myha’la and I discussed dropping looks and pieces that no longer served her character — the Binghamton hoodie, the Pierpoint suiting.
I want to break down the first outfit that we see Harper in this season. She comes off much softer in her cream-colored knit vest and white blouse, but there are also a few edgier elements to her look — two piercings, a black motorcycle jacket, then of course her pixie cut.
I wanted to take her look at the end of season two — when she makes that last big spend with Eric — and continue it in a tonal sense. She sort of lost her confidence but not completely. In terms of the boots and the leather jacket, it was giving her something that she would never be able to wear at Pierpoint. It had to look as though she could feasibly go from the office then straight to the pub or straight to a party, and it wouldn’t look strange. A day-to-evening look, because at Pierpoint, she would have had to go home and change.
In this season, we move away from the harsh, gray atmosphere of investment banking to softer, allegedly more enlightened tech spaces. Harper is now working for an ESG firm. How were you thinking about dressing the Future Dawn staff?
In terms of the color tones, I was trying to make it very distinct from Pierpoint’s. So I used rust, creams, camels, chestnuts, and gingers; the graphic tone was navy blue rather than black. There were some grays, but much warmer than Pierpoint’s. It’s not the same as Lumi, which was much harder, more primary colors, like a giant playpen.
It was really important to think about the fact that Harper was probably out in Tottenham, whereas the women at Future Dawn were having nights out in West London and Notting Hill and Chelsea. West London is a bit more monied and conservative, very “I have a house in the Cotswolds. I go there on weekends, I walk the dog.” Anna and Petra are an uneasy alliance, and that’s very clear from the beginning. And that meant that there was something for Petra and Harper, in terms of their color tones, to overlap more clearly. Then there were things like fleece — this weird crossover between outdoor, country, and walking sports — which Harper and Petra would never wear. It’s that kind of almost normcore-y-ness.
How would you describe Harper’s co-worker Penny’s style in contrast to hers? When they have that awkward conversation about recycling, Penny is in a turtleneck and pendant.
It’s about the jewelry, because she’s got a signet ring, a giant engagement ring, this pendant, and these earrings. The color tones I describe as sort of “metro-Tory.” It was dressing her in the vein of this conservative-orientated political party, which is something that’s not Harper. Harper is curiously apolitical.
Can you tell me about the bikini Harper wears on Yasmin’s boat?
Every single situation is a networking opportunity for Harper. With the amount of money that she has left over from Pierpoint, she’s got to try to eke it out. She could meet anybody, and she needs to appear as something different. So she has a really beautiful Eres bikini. It’s a French brand. It’s the kind of thing that Yasmin might say, “That’s nice, you should get that.” And Harper would look and go hmmm and maybe look at something else, but do it.
Is her wardrobe synced up with Yasmin’s at certain points? Does she start to purchase the same brands?
It’s more the heritage pieces. I made sure that Harper and Yasmin had the same brand of watch, so by the end of the show she has a new version Cartier Tank watch. It spoke of what she was starting to do. Harper isn’t exactly fashion-y, but she’s alive to the power of optics. This season she understands that more from Petra.
What brands were you thinking about?
Well, Isabel Marant is great. We had some pieces from Eleventy and Cefinn, which is a very kind of business-orientated brand, but it has softer pieces for women that are quite feminine. We move through younger French brands like Sezane and she wears, I think, a pair of Celine trousers.
How can we expect Harper’s style to evolve as the season progresses?
Her style is linked to Petra. But then you can kind of see later, Harper is going to be something quite different. I was giving her accessories that were rare and beautiful, including a one-off piece by a designer called Melanie Georgacopoulos, which is a pearl that’s been cut in half and put back together, which is very hard to do technically. Only one of them exists. So she starts to acquire things that are indicative of her coming wealth, but they’re subtle. They’re things that people would look at and say, That’s interesting. That’s very beautiful. It’s like a conversation piece.
