My Favorite Part of ‘The Hunting Wives’? The Women’s Deceptive Southern-Sweetheart Style

This story contains spoilers for Season 1 of Netflix’s The Hunting Wives.

I will obviously watch any show with even a hint of girl-meets-girl intrigue (not for nothing did I struggle through the entirety of The L Word: Generation Q), but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the murderous-Republican-bisexual antics in The Hunting Wives, Netflix’s new drama based on the novel by May Cobb.

Not only do Brittany Snow’s shy, troubled, East Coast lib Sophie and Malin Akerman’s small-town Texas bad girl and aspiring politician’s wife Margo have genuine sexual chemistry (who would have expected Sophie to be the top?), but the story—about the murder of a football star’s cheerleader girlfriend in a wealthy East Texas community—has me obsessed in a way that I haven’t been since I turned the final page of my last Gillian Flynn novel.

Photo: Kent Smith

Obviously, the whodunit aspect of the show—which is sort of like a cross between Duck Dynasty and Sharp Objects—is its main hook. But ever since I started watching The Hunting Wives, I’ve been equally compelled by something else: the way its women dress (or, more crucially, don’t).

When we first meet Margo in the bathroom of an NRA fundraiser, she’s shimmying her way out of a shimmering green mermaid gown, peacocking in Sophie’s direction with the old, “Hon, do you mind zippin’ me up?” trick. (From there, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to Sophie and Margo sharing a Xanax, and then a whole lot more.) She’s the ringleader of a clique of gun-toting, loudly God-fearing, privately party-hopping, good ol’ Texas girls who are as skinny, straight-coded, and (with one exception) white as you might imagine, and while one of them—Scandal star Katie Lowes as perfect-as-pie preacher’s wife Jill—dresses more or less exactly like Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons, in buttoned-up florals and floor-swishing skirts, the rest bedeck themselves in Vegas-ready animal prints and cleavage-baring cuts that make them seem ready to celebrate Trump’s second presidential win at the drop of a hat. (I did actually live in Texas for about a year and a half, but I was in bluer-than-blue Austin, so for all I know, maybe it’s normal to go hyperfemme while hunting boar.)