Tight turtleneck. Magnificent mini skirt. Matte black tights. Suede heels. The staple ensemble—uniform, if you will—of Fran Drescher during her tenure as Fran Fine on The Nanny, which ran from November 1993 to June 1999. Thirty years later, the sitcom’s visual legacy remains one of the decade’s defining moments. But the looks transcend time: 1940s silhouettes paired with modern hemlines and a perennial sense of unabashed self-expression. As Drescher sauntered across screens with her striking looks on full display, she reminded us that there’s nothing more powerful than showing up as oneself.
“The show is just so enduring. And I think part of that is because it’s such visual eye candy,” Drescher tells me during our Zoom call last month. “Fran Fine had great taste and she didn’t need to dress like a nanny. When we shot the pilot, a note from the network was that a nanny would never come down to breakfast in her robe. And it’s like, Hello? That’s the show… This show is all about her expressing herself singularly.”
Thanks to Brenda Cooper, the show’s costume designer, Drescher wore about six fabulous outfits per episode. Six opportunities to wear the wrong thing in the wrong place—intentionally. The clothes didn’t need to fit the moment, or someone’s expectations. The clothes exuded self-assurance, commanding attention and respect, whatever the plot.
“Fashion isn’t superficial at all. No, never has been,” says Cooper, author of The Silhouette Solution, her book on capsule wardrobes, for which Drescher wrote the foreword. “I get tweaked when I hear people say this multi-billion-trillion dollar business is superficial. Fashion is self-expression. It’s a confidence builder.”
The Fran Fine Formula
Fran Fine from The Nanny
Getty Images / InStyle
Fashion is part of what made The Nanny an instant standout. Although it was nominated for 12 Emmy Awards during its run, it won just one—Outstanding Individual Achievement in Costume Design for a Series. The show introduced capital-F fashion to network television, changing the trajectory of the costuming industry.
“While costume design for television and film and the fashion industry have always been bedfellows, influencing each other since the dawn of these industries, the early 1990s was a pivotal moment in which fashion became not just a storytelling mechanism in film and television, but almost a character on its own,” says fashion historian Keren Ben-Horin. “The Nanny was pioneering in how cleverly it used contemporary fashion…We wouldn’t have the ridiculously fun wardrobe of Emily in Paris if it wasn’t for The Nanny.”
The show’s reinvented use of fashion was extremely deliberate. Drescher and Cooper met filming Princesses, a sitcom that ran for one season in 1991; Cooper was an assistant designer. “Fran said to me, ‘If I ever get my own show, Brenda, I want you to be my costume designer,’” recalls Cooper. “A year later, she picks up the phone, and says she’s doing the pilot for The Nanny…Back then, there were no [visually] dynamic TV shows. The only dynamic one was maybe Dynasty. When I got this opportunity, I thought, Okay, I’m going to make a difference. And Fran and I were a match made in style heaven.”
The style was solidified from the start. One of the show’s most memorable looks was from the top of episode four, when Fran orders Chinese food (after insisting that she’s more than capable of getting dinner on the table) while sporting a striped Moschino Cheap and Chic vest. “It’s sassy, it’s sexy. There’s a formality to it,” says Cooper. “Even though she’s the flashy girl from Flushing, I wanted to give her that underpinning of elegance.”
Cooper curated a visual identity for Fine that aligned with Drescher’s own personal style. Once Cooper collected the items for each episode, Dresher (and her then-husband and the show’s producer Peter Marc Jacobson) gave each look the final stamp of approval. “We never wanted her to look trashy, but we wanted her to look sexy in a way that was still sweet,” says Drescher. “She was very put together: hat, a purse, the shoes, the stockings. Everything worked together. Even a little really cute buttoned-up mini skirt suit was sexy, but it had a certain sophistication to it that made it seem more sweet.”
That balance of sweet, sexy, and sophisticated was achieved through clever styling and masterful sourcing. “I would find cocktail dresses, but she’s a nanny, so she can’t be walking around the house in a sequin cocktail dress in the middle of the day,” says Cooper. “So put a black turtleneck underneath it… and black opaque hose, a black suede shoe—very specific black suede because it doesn’t reflect the light. So you just see a silhouette…it would have had a different message if there wouldn’t have been black underneath it.”
The looks continue to resonate thanks to their timeless nature. “What you see on The Nanny from the ‘90s wasn’t necessarily what was really going on in fashion,” says Cooper. Ben-Horin explains that it was, in fact, a complete departure from what was happening at the time.
“In the early 1990s, when The Nanny first aired, fashion was moving away from the exaggerated, over-the-top glam of the 1980s into a more sober, sophisticated style—from the Japanese designers that revolutionized Paris fashion weeks, to quintessential American brands like Donna Karan and Calvin Klein, which were championing a kind of clean, monochrome modern urban style,” says Ben-Horin. “The Nanny’s wardrobe highlighted fashion brands that didn’t conform to the spirit of the time, like Moschino, a house known for its playfulness and sense of humor.”
As a result, we still see elements of Nanny-esque fashion on runways and in street style. Think: The confluence of whimsy and structure from Colin Locasico. Graphic lines and abbreviated hems from Balmain. Sweet and sexy sparkles from Wiederhoeft. “A lot of the designers themselves grew up watching The Nanny, so they want to put their own spin on it and express it their way,” says Drescher. More so than replicating the show’s looks, today’s designs embrace its archetypal refined maximalism.
Using Fashion as a Form of Self-Love
Fran Fine from the Nanny
Getty Images / InStyle
Fran Fine’s fashion legacy runs deeper than colorful sequins and bold patterns. “She was a true original and exuded a certain confidence,” says Drescher. “The global message of the show was: It doesn’t matter what you look like or sound like; it’s what’s in your heart that counts. And every single episode spoke to that.”
