Chemistry and life – Style

“Kommersant Style” is about one of the most noteworthy TV series of the season.

The series Chemistry Lessons, based on the novel by Bonnie Garmus, was released on the Apple TV+ platform and tells the life story of a woman trying to make a scientific career in America in the middle of the last century. Starring: Brie Larson, Lewis Pullman, Aji Naomi King. The main character, the smart and talented Elizabeth Zott (played by Larson), is a research chemist by training, but her academic career is failing. We are shown the everyday life of an elite research institute, where male colleagues treat female scientists with contempt and suspicion, and women do not understand the desire of female colleagues to make a career and be seriously interested in something other than a successful marriage or having children. Independence and determination are perceived as a threat to established patriarchal orders and the usual flow of life.

As the story progresses, stubborn, “perpetually depressed” single mother (we’ll skip the details) Elizabeth Zott becomes the star of a cooking show for housewives called “Dinner at Six.” Although she takes a TV job to pay the bills after being fired from college, Elizabeth initiates a quiet revolution, using her show to speak directly to millions of housewives, answer their questions, help (no matter how pretentious it sounds) find yourself and your voice in a very muscular world. Her character, the show, and the Los Angeles television station that airs it are fictional, but they are inspired by the local broadcast culture, rooted in radio, that flourished in the 1950s and early 1960s across the country. This is a time when television had not yet come to Hollywood and local stations produced most of their own programming, conducted many experiments (all of which were broadcast live and that’s all – there was nothing else) and gave women ample opportunities to work both behind the camera and in front her.

Inspiring her fans to dream beyond the social standards of the early 1960s, Elisabeth Zott talks about cooking in literally scientific, evidence-based terminology and wears a lab coat with an accentuated waist, embellished with emerald sequins and sequins in the style of Dior’s New Look. It’s the final evolution of her bluestocking style, which began with the dark A-line skirts and conservative knitwear of a single female lab technician. The show’s costume designer, Mirren Gordon-Crosier, said that she deliberately chose a masculine, business-like aesthetic in her character’s early outfits to differentiate her from other female employees, secretaries, who were dressed in soft pastel colors with seemingly unoffice details, such as puffy ribbons, catchy accessories, frilly collars. As a result, Zott becomes closer in style to them, but gains masculine independence – an option that no one around her seems to even consider as possible.

The series has been nominated for the 2024 Golden Globe Award in several categories at once – and this is very expected. In the wake of The Queen’s Walk and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, interest in stories about women who have struggled to prove themselves in traditionally male-dominated areas of life has only increased.

Irina Kiriyenko