These Iconic Women Serve The Best Style In The Biz, And They’re All Over 40

Yeoh emotes with elegant economy in this story about an immigrant failing at life. Her main outfit is a sad-sack riff on Chinese Granny style: gilet over a forgettable floral button-down and plum colored pants, an outfit that feels like the washed out essence of the garments that cycle through her family’s laundromat. Eventually the clothes transcend their ordinariness to become the perfect combat gear.

As Mare, Winslet is rivetingly dysfunctional in a way reminiscent of that procedural darling ― the rogue male detective. Fetchingly haggard in heavy duty lumberjack-grade winter wear, her bare-faced performance may well inform the now-viral “Cold Girl” makeup look with its illusion of wind-whipped cheeks and lips with a touch of texture that mimics chapping.

Sensharma’s Bharti is queer and Dalit (the term used for the lowest stratum of India’s caste system), the lone woman at a factory owned and staffed by hostile upper caste men. Naturally she is a wound in a boiler suit. The narrative is familiar to many lower caste individuals routinely thwarted by India’s hidebound caste system. Bharti dresses in the vein of India’s vast male working class ― well-worn cotton shirts and off-brand jeans ― but the intentional tweaks that make these her’s are important: cuffing at the biceps, oil-drenched roots for neat, practical hair, heavy boots that make her antsy gait more pronounced. Indian cinematic productions tend to be stylistically overwrought, so her comfortable checked shirts, face scrubbed of makeup and natural textured hair with their overgrown, choppy ends are a radical departure.

Oh, who does the cuddly-caustic type well, gives us some great blazer moments in this gently funny take on collegiate intrigue. Her character, the first Asian chair of her department, observes the unsaid rule of it always being autumn in academia: neutrals like navy and russet dominate, tartan and Fair Isle add visual texture. But she makes the gig entirely her own with spunky gold jewelry and crisp buttoned-up collars, proving that professorial need not mean stuffy.

Jagannathan’s Nalini is the queen of the jewel tone. Her fluid, roomy wardrobe hints at a yearning for ease and softness after years of immigrant hustle and the paralyzing grief of losing a soulmate. Traditional gold jewelry from South India and Indian textile, motifs and embroidery anchor her visually to her roots.

This dramatization of pioneering Black entrepreneurship gives us delicious 1900s style steeped in Black sensibilities. As Madam CJ Walker, Spencer’s churchgoing millinery is a treat to behold. The idea of the Sunday best as a form of personal and cultural assertion is rooted in slavery; dehumanized through the week, slaves wore their best threads to service to feel whole and beautiful in their personhood. Walker was born on the same plantation her parents were formerly enslaved at and her style reflects her ambition and growing clout within the community. Her clothes are lavish and have inventive little touches meant to make an impression on investors and rivals alike. A great example is the all-black outfit worn to a pitching opportunity in a New York hotel: The bodice is embroidered with Chinoiserie-style motifs in glowing thread topping a sweeping lace skirt. A chiffon sash adds flair and brings the look together.

Terror and tenderness jostle on Shamshu’s face in “Darlings,” in which Shah plays a domestic abuse survivor watching her daughter fight the demons that crushed her spirit. Her hair is the real star of the show: romantic honeyed waves at odds with her cut-price salvaar kameezes paint woman determined to feel beautiful despite the ugliness she has endured.

We often see Dr. Jean Milburn in dishabille, browsing the paper in post-coital serenity and dispatching her one night stands with charming aloofness. Her morning-after uniform of negligee, kimono-ish robe and sleek black-rimmed glasses is so iconic it deserves Halloween costume status. Silk, velvet and linen in sensuous, sophisticated cuts form the building blocks of her everyday style, a lot of which feels vintage. As the plot moves, the wispy gold accents she favors reveal themselves to be the kintsugi glue to her air of put-togetherness and inviolability.

Football club owner and marriage survivor Rebecca Welton is giving, as Gen Z would say, repressed boardroom siren. Think exquisite tailoring: power blouses in silk, skirts that seem moulded on her form, trousers and trenches that fire up her stride. But it is Welton’s hair that catches your gaze: soft pinup-lite waves that foreshadow an appetite for mischief and joyous risk-taking.

K dramas are rife with tired takes on aging: doddering grannies, bitter divorcees, chaebol bitches who spy on their kids ― but sometimes you get refreshing complexity. Kim’s Sun Woo, a physician who discovers her husband’s infidelity and slides into self-destruction does all of her unraveling in luxe sleepwear and beautifully cut trenches worn over long skirts.

Davis may be lovingly roasted for her snotty on-screen crying, but it is really her uncanny mastery of the color wheel on and off the screen that needs to be homage-memed. As Agojie leader General Nanisca in this story of battle in 19th century Benin, a deep brown that should disappear into her skin, adds dimension and stature. Authentically dyed indigo wraps worn over knee-length pants, bronze ankle cuffs and a cowrie-embellished woven leather breastplate show off her gleaming, scarred limbs. Exposed skin is incredibly important to her arc: Hollywood has a documented history of not caring about how poorly Black skin photographs in standard lighting. The brief for the film’s makeup was natural, radiant and dewy skin with increasing scarring ― and Davis delivers beautifully.

Motherhood is an affliction and Moira Rose is its sparkling victim. The mood wigs, avant-garde outfits and woe-is-me theatricality conceal real warmth and vulnerability. Moira shows us that sequins, feathers and shoulder spikes can belong in a grocery store aisle, and that any challenge must be met with a fascinator, statement cuff and a swipe of red lipstick.

How iconic can a nun’s habit be, really? On Sister George Michael, it is. As chief disciplinarian of an all-girls’ school in a rural Irish outpost, she is allergic to earnest student musicals and wallows in sentimentality. There is nothing she can’t rock with her habit ― judo whites, flip-up shades, even a turquoise studded bolo tie. But she shows us that the best accessories are a glass of whiskey tinkling with ice and an eye roll.

Much like a thunderstorm, Chanel muse Mouglalis is both a visual and aural experience. She plays an ambitious politician on this cult French drama about the double lives of the powerful. Her style (chic, timeless, quintessentially French) is augmented by her gravelly register. Her signature side part is sweet validation for those of us horrified by Zoomer disdain for the style.