Is the Film Unfaithful the Key to Sensual Dressing?

How simple wardrobe pieces can become the most erotic of them all.

Unfaithful (2002) is in my top 13 favorite movies. It brilliantly shows the fantasy playground of an early millennium New York City and the clothes that were made to live in it. Unfaithful falls into what I like to term “Everyday Aspirational” dressing. Here, I explore how the simple clothes of Connie Sumner transform into an erotic wardrobe. I also spoke a bit with the film’s costume designer Ellen Mirojnick who blew my mind.

I have been on a relentless mission to find a specific shirt from the film Unfaithful (2002). It’s a black long sleeve top with a wide scoop neck, which is relatively basic in its silhouette and shape. Yet, there is something alluring about how the classic piece louchely sits on Connie Sumner (Diane Lane) as she cheats on her nice Westchester husband Ed (Richard Gere) with gorgeous Frenchman Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez) in a SoHo café. We see a culmination of emotions erupt through Connie’s shirt as her paramour slips his hand into the back of her jeans. The shirt doesn’t reveal anything overtly sexual but its modest neckline seems to dip with each of Connie’s both bashful and insatiable squirms. There’s a bit more shoulder than we should see and a flicker of a bra strap. The shirt seems to move not on her, but with her. This is perhaps the most seductive look from a film that is known for being packed with sex scenes and crumpled panties. And yet, the shirt is so ordinary; boring, if you will. So, how is that so much sensuality is packed into a cotton long sleeve presumably plucked from a department store discount rack? 

For background, Unfaithful zeroes in on Connie, a mother of one who is happily married to Ed. One afternoon when Connie is running errands in New York City, she is suddenly blinded by a windstorm on a SoHo street. In her teetering black pumps, she tumbles into French antique book dealer Paul. Of course, she conveniently falls on top of him, and that is that. Things get hairy; people cheat; someone gets murdered. It’s a steamy, tantalizing sex-fantasy thriller by director Adrian Lyne, who was responsible for an array of tense erotic films, including 9 ½ Weeks (1986) and Fatal Attraction (1987). 

The costume designer of Unfaithful is Ellen Mirojnick. She’s also worked on Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, the Instagram-beloved A Perfect Murder (1999) with Gwyneth Paltrow, and most recently Oppenheimer (2023). Mirojnick’s costuming style hinges on eagle-eye subtleties that reflect lifestyle and unearth emotion. The looks themselves are never fashion but are instead relatively attainable in their composition. These are clothes that are made to live in but chicly. (See: Everyday Aspirational.) Like in many of Mirojnick’s films, the wardrobe of Connie feels almost simple but there is an all-consuming magic in how she wears her clothes throughout this whole fuck-me-in-my-cardigan affair. 

The beginning of the film when we see Connie’s underwear when the wind blows her trench up!

Mirojnick is a master of world building by channeling a character’s inner conflict through how their body interacts with whatever they are wearing. This entails incredible attention to cut and silhouette; the quest for the quintessential fit. Her method has never been surface-based in a “Look 16 from Celine” type of way but rather she unearths the “essence” of the actor and character, and realizes their fusion through the clothing; a vessel of expression. Many times when Mirojnick was costuming, she didn’t buy from brands, but rather had pieces custom-made for the actor. “It’s how the clothes move on her body. Not necessarily even ‘what are the clothes?’ It is, ‘How does her body move? What does her body say? What would be best? To basically drape around her body to make it appear to be seamless, subtle, give her an identity, but it’s not obvious?’” says Mirojnick. “You have to get to know the person from the inside.”

This precise dance between one’s emotions and how they translate through the body’s movements, coupled with styling and cut, rings true especially in a film like Unfaithful in which we can track the stages of an affair through the sensitive shifts of how Connie wears her clothes. Fit is crucial when actors must express themselves convincingly, especially in the most intimate scenes. A tug in the pants there, or a snag on a shirt there can throw off the actor’s axis. This is something to remember for our own wardrobes, too.

So, how does the perfect cut allow a person to fully emote? I’d like to think it comes down to comfort, which can help lead us to express our most honest feelings. We can always spot someone who is both stylish and comfortable from a mile away because we know they aren’t playing dress up; they are carrying themselves with ease. They know their closet. “The key to the design was, ‘Who is the woman from inside out and how do the fabrics and the pieces of clothing appear around her body? Not on her body, around her body,’” says Mirojnick. This is the same basic concept of “don’t let the clothes wear you.”

Connie’s wardrobe most likely consists of capsule pieces that she bought from Saks when she lived in Manhattan 15 years ago. This is a woman who over time has gotten to understand her wardrobe well. In an industry in which trends are being churned out at a breakneck pace, the confidence that comes with learned intimacy between the wearer and their wardrobe feels like it’s becoming more rare. Where’s the room for sensuality in a fleeting -core?

For the most part, Connie is having an affair within the confines of her closet. This sort of foreplay is translated through styling choices that cause Connie’s oversized sweaters to inch towards climax territory; a pair of lived-in Levi’s typically worn to the grocery store that beckon a man’s hand slipping into them. There’s some incredible Freudian peekaboo when Connie’s hiked up skirt reveals her scraped knees as she calls her son, a moment of which Paul catches a glimpse and then is hooked. Even in her most dowdy sweater or day dress, the result is a form of sartorial edging in which the clothes are never flagrantly sexual at their core but they almost get there through how the mind-body reacts in them, how they fall, and what is consequently revealed. Mirojnick made a mountain of orgasms out of the molehill of a suburban mommy’s dependable wardrobe based on how much shoulder is shown. 

The importance of feeling dictating trajectory rears its head in Mirojnick’s storyboarding. What does Connie’s arc first feel like, and only after then, what does it look like? Mirojnick’s visuals for Unfaithful were not specific clothes, but nebulous situations and how Connie’s clothes would fit into them. The costume designer gives the example of a photo on her storyboard of a woman tangled up in the sheets with her legs exposed and a crumpled dress next to her. “You looked at it in a way that kind of moved through an environment. What is this black dress that was crumpled up around her?” says Mirojnick. “You didn’t say, ‘Whose dress is that?’” Mirojnick has a point. After all, there’s never brand-pushing when it comes to torrential passion and no man is asking “who makes your dress?” as he rips it off. 

This eye for observation, a gut knowledge of how women operate while they want to be heard physically, and the art of seduction merge in the most stunning and devastating scene in Unfaithful. The pivotal moment comes down to two shoes: a slingback and a pump. Connie’s husband Ed knows there has been something off about her behavior and is trying to catch her in a lie. He can’t quite get there, but he looks down at her shoes as she is getting ready and he sees her pumps and slingbacks side by side. At that moment, Ed understands that Connie has been, well, unfaithful. This scene was the inspiration for an article I wrote for Vogue about the tempting slingback. 

“Ed casts his gaze downward next to the floor and sees two shoes that Connie has set aside next to a chair: a rumpled standard black pump and then a Dolce & Gabbana black slingback with a leopard-print insole. At that moment, Ed knows that Connie is en route to have a steamy affair. A few scenes later, like clockwork, Connie has sex with Paul in the bathroom of the now-closed Café Noir.” 

It’s incredible to see Ed hovering between worlds, a proper pump and a lascivious slingback by Dolce & Gabbana with a leopard print sole. (An astute commenter on my Instagram noted that there were footpads in the Dolce slingback! We love a woman who wears her shoes.) It’s the tale of two cities within a this-or-that shoe selection; a strappy moment of reckoning and betrayal. Who would know that a slingback would be the clickity-clack oracle of an affair? 

There are multitudes within Connie’s very real, very simple wardrobe. It’s restrained but at the same time, it’s incredibly expressive in Connie’s seemingly minute, conscious or unconscious decisions to expose. Sure, there are bouts of obvious ride-me sex, like cutting tags off of her new lingerie, but mostly, her closet is akin to longing by way of a hand grazing the shoulder. Her style transformations throughout the affair are small; a slow-burn reveal that can easily be a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, like a bare knee or a slingback. These details, or rather choices, are an incredible lesson in seduction. We want to keep coming back to Connie, as Paul does, and her wardrobe is a reflection of this urge. 

Bonus Fact: One of the detectives names in the later part of the film has the surname “Mirojnick”. A really fab wink from Lyne to Mirojnick.

Bonus Thought: There’s another genius stroke of clothing styling here. My husband, who I have forced to watch Unfaithful with me multiple times pointed out a moment that always perplexed me: Ed’s ugly sweater. After Connie visits Paul for the second time, she toys with having an affair with him but doesn’t go through with it. She leaves and goes out to buy a sweater for her husband who has some sort of firm in the city. When he plucks it from the bag, it’s the most grating shade of cornflower blue and the piece manages to transform a hunky Gere into a bottom of the barrel Sears model. Why on earth would any woman present her husband with such a heinous piece of clothing? One theory is that Connie wants to render her husband as completely unfuckable and, well, this sweater acts as visual birth control. Ultimately, the unsexy sweater makes Ed unsexy and therefore, Connie’s idea of having an affair with Paul becomes that much easier.

As always, watch NEVERWORNS. New season coming soon.