Fran Drescher Knows She’s an Instagram Fashion Icon
As she returns to the small screen with Indebted, the flashy girl from Flushing reflects on her TV legacy, beating cancer, and her famous wardrobe.
Fran Drescher looks dressed for breakfast at the Sheffield residence. There’s no snarky butler, privileged children, or thespian heartthrob in sight, but here’s Fran, glamorously cross-legged in a robe—signature morning attire for her iconic TV persona, Fran Fine of The Nanny. She extends a freshly manicured hand to shake mine; she introduces herself with that same iconic voice I grew up hearing on television.
It’s been more than 20 years since The Nanny aired its final episode in 1999, but its legacy lives on through the memory of Drescher’s nasally laughter and, among millennials, her kaleidoscopic wardrobe. It takes just a few scrolls to find an Instagram homage to her on-screen attire, and in an era when ’90s fashion is back in full swing, Fran’s sartorial sense is extremely on trend: miniskirts, coordinates with crop tops, turtlenecks under bright fur coats, miniature sunglasses, thick headbands, feathered collars and sleeves, oversized blazers, and a whole lot of leopard. (Or, as she says it on the set of her BAZAAR.com photo shoot, “Leh-puhd, bay-by!”)
Drescher, 62 years young with more than 315,000 Instagram followers, has seen the fashion tributes online. “It makes me happy,” she says. “I mean, it’s like, I don’t know if social media and the Internet didn’t explode right after The Nanny happened, would anyone still really be talking about it?”
Drescher created the hit sitcom with her then-husband and producer, Peter Jacobson (she refers to him as “my gay ex-husband”). The show—about a sassy woman from Flushing, Queens, who serendipitously becomes the nanny of a Broadway director’s three children—debuted on CBS in 1993 and ran for six seasons, catapulting Drescher into superstardom.
“We came from very humble beginnings and really didn’t have any connections,” she says of her and Jacobson’s brainchild. “It’s just, we had ambition and I came up with a good idea and we ran with it and now it’s just become such classic television.” She later added, “I mean, if I never did anything else in my career, just having done that would have been the bull’s-eye anyway.”
You can thank costume designer Brenda Cooper, who dressed on the short-lived sitcom Princesses, for the spectacle of Nanny Fine’s wardrobe. “She knew how to read a script and imagine how that could be beautifully articulated through clothes,” Drescher recalls. The pair would meet for weekly, three-hour sessions to hash out Fran’s outfits, and the pieces rarely stayed as is. “We’d modify things. We’d add buttons where there weren’t. We’d put trim on where there wasn’t.” Anything that makes the attire “more Nanny-ish.”
Today, Drescher can’t pick a favorite Fran Fine outfit. “The black turtleneck and the hot pants and high heels with the chain belt was a classic look, but then I wore so many gowns coming down the stairs, feeling like Audrey Hepburn,” she said. Other standouts were by Moschino or Dolce & Gabbana, ensembles with youthfulness and humor. “The thing about The Nanny was she was sexy, but she wasn’t slutty,” Drescher says. “That was a very fine line that we never crossed.”
Now, Drescher and Jacobson are turning the beloved series into a Broadway musical. They wrote the book, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rachel Bloom is composing, and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical’s Marc Bruni is directing. The production condenses six years of small-screen entertainment into two and a half hours onstage, but it’ll offer a more encompassing perspective of the Nanny world that the live studio set couldn’t accommodate, like Mr. Sheffield’s theater productions, his full household staff, and the townspeople of Flushing.
Drescher is quite the theater fan. She raves about recent productions she’s seen, like the Alanis Morissette jukebox musical, Jagged Little Pill—“I absolutely love that album”—and The Inheritance, a two-part, generation-spanning play about the gay experience in New York, which she watched with her pal Rosie O’Donnell the night before our chat. But has she seen the movie Cats? “No, sorry,” she chuckled.
The thing about The Nanny was she was sexy, but she wasn’t slutty. That was a very fine line that we never crossed.
On the Sunday after the shoot, Drescher phones me from her New York City apartment at noon. By then, she’s already had reflexology (“which I absolutely love”), DVR-ed CBS Sunday Morning (her weekend ritual), and texted her mom to learn that a girlfriend’s dog died the day before. “That’s the thing about dogs,” Drescher says, pulling food out of the fridge to munch on while we talk. “They’re like these little angels when they come into your life, but they don’t stay as long as you want them to.” The actress herself is a dog mom to a pint-sized fur ball and travel companion named Samson.
