Gravitas: you either have it or you don’t. Claire Underwood, played by Robin Wright in Netflix’s award winning drama, House of Cards, has it by the truckload. She pulls you in; wherever she is on screen - background or foreground - she draws your eye, holding your attention as tightly as those heavily-corseted cocktail dresses hug her incredible figure.

It’s her angles (that bone structure!). It’s the way she carries herself. It’s the clipped way she delivers her lines. And it’s her enviable wardrobe, which is just like the woman herself: structured and severe. Purposeful and understated. Tasteful and sexy.

Ok, on paper the whole thing actually sounds pretty run-of-the-mill. It’s shift dress after shift dress, pencil skirt after pencil skirt, shirt after shirt. She almost never wears colour. Hers is a strict palette of black, navy and grey. There’s the occasional flash of white, camel or ‘shirt’ blue, but nothing on paper that makes you sit up and take notice.

But if you’ve seen the show then you know that Claire really can dress, and that you do sit up and take notice. Her wardrobe has an almost hypnotic quality to it;  even if it’s not true to your personal style, it whispers: ‘If you wore this in the office instead of your ‘smart jeans’ you would have been promoted to Queen of Everything by now’. Next thing you know, you’re dual-screening Net-a-Porter on the tablet, frantically adding L’Wren Scott pencil skirts to your basket (and when it comes to pencil skirts, Claire’s all about L’Wren and Dolce & Gabbana).

Boiling it down to rigid categories like ‘shift dress’ and ‘oxford shirt’ does  Claire’s wardrobe a terrible disservice; it makes it sound boring when in reality it’s anything but.

The outfit below is a case in point. At first glance it’s just a black dress, but then you look again and it’s clear that this isn’t just something she picked up at Target. The way the seams contour the body, the way the sleeves dip and mirror the neckline, that little flourish at the hem…

wearing Zac Posen

You quickly come to the conclusion that it’s expensive, and you’re right of course. It’s Zac Posen, a designer that Claire wears a lot. That beautiful belt is pricey too: it’s Antonio Berardi, another brand she favours. In fact, it turns out she’s pretty loyal when it comes to labels.

For workwear her go-tos are Banana Republic (more on that shortly!), Theory, Akris, The Row, and L’Wren Scott.  

When it comes to evening wear it’s Narciso Rodriguez, Armani, Ralph Lauren, Gucci and Calvin Klein all the way.

She looks sensational in all of it. It’s testament to the pieces themselves of course, but it’s also the fit. Everything she wears floats perfectly on her lean frame because each piece has been hand-tailored to Robin Wrights’s exact measurements. The dress pictured below from The Row is a good example of this hand-tailoring in action. It’s enough to finally inspire that visit to the dry cleaners to find out alteration costs, no?

That The Row dress is also a great example of another trend  in Claire’s wardrobe: a discreet design detail.

Woman knows a good neckline when she sees one.

And a good zip.

We’ve talked about her eye for beautiful seams already.

Then there’s her fondness for a contrast panel (but only in black or grey, obvs).  

These little details are to be expected, given the brands she wears tend to be on the luxurious end of the spectrum. But she also has this knack of making everything - including highstreet pieces - look phenomenally expensive. Those shirts she’s so keen on are actually from Banana Republic (they’re the ‘oxford shirt’), and they cost less than £40 each. Really.

That incredibly chic sportswear she wears running is more often than not Nike (though not the boxing boots; alas, we don’t know where those beauties are from).

Then there’s her glasses, which as opticals go are also pretty reasonably priced. They’re Ray Ban New Wayfarers and they cost around £110 (without lenses).

Unfortunately her other accessories aren’t quite as affordable. Day-to-day she’s seen in a pair of black classic Louboutins (though on Sundays she likes to bust out a Chanel boot, natch).

And she totes her daily essentials around in one of two bags: an Yves Saint Laurent Muse.

Or an a Mulberry Bayswater. 

The Muse in particular gets a lot of action.

That’s one of the things that makes her wardrobe so interesting and inspiring, actually. The fact that she does repeat, and she does it often. Those pieces that she returns to time and again give her wardrobe a grounding in the real (and bonus: they  make us feel justified in dropping a bomb on a bag!).

Frank Underwood, Claire’s husband in House of Cards, says of his wife: ‘I love that woman more than sharks love blood’. Well, we feel the same about her wardrobe.

Image credits: Netflix