Who Is Shane Hollander’s Stylist?

For Puley—who also costumed the first season of Benito Skinner’s coming-out college comedy, Overcompensating—dressing Shane was about highlighting his insecurity. “There’s just so much discomfort in the character himself, in the world outside of being an athlete. Like, Hudson is doing that great,” she added with a laugh, alluding to the actor’s outgoing personality IRL. “Hudson and Shane are very different people.”

Because the thing is, in this scene, Shane Hollander also looks sort of terrible. His beige suit is stiff and boring, the thick fabric isn’t right for the balmy Florida weather, and he still looks like he’d rather be wearing a Nike warm-up. The show’s vigilant viewership picked up on this, too.

“I love that he needed a personal stylist for this look when he could have walked into any random European Zara and grabbed the same outfit off the mannequin,” went one tweet.

“We’re going for like, a Steve Jobs kind of vibe,” cracked a TikToker cosplaying as Shane. “We went to this amazing store—it’s called Banana Republic, have you heard of it?”

This was, of course, Puley’s intention. “Costume designing is fun because you don’t always have to make people look really good. You just need to make them feel real,” she explained. “For me, this show is not something to showcase my design abilities. It’s more of an observational thing. I was trying to create really grounded, really real characters because the story is one that can easily get lost in fantasy, and it kind of is fantastical, imagining these private lives of hockey players. I think that if I had gone too fashion with it, it would’ve made it a little bit too out of reach.” (Last year, fashion critic Cathy Horyn made a similar argument regarding Taylor Swift.)

In this scene, Puley noted, Shane is “still masking. Even when he’s getting the stylist and he’s coming out [to his brief actress-girlfriend Rose Landry, and then later Ilya] for the first time, he’s still masking his true identity, who he really is. I think people get used to carrying that weight, and it takes that as a hard nut to crack. At his essence, he’s still kind of just a boring dresser.”

That said, if Puley were actually Shane’s stylist? In her wildest dreams, he would be “leaning into color and showing body more publicly.” Give him a few years, and he might even feel confident pulling up to the ESPYs in a no-shirt suit.

Dreaming big about Hollander’s new styled chapter, I couldn’t help but imagine a cursed HBO Max crossover with actor/one-time Heated Rivalry antagonist Jordan Firstman’s WeHo-dwelling celebrity stylist character Charlie Cohen from I Love LA. (Would Charlie convince Shane to wear that shaggy pink ERL coat?) But for good measure, I also DM’d a few stylists and fashion publicists to find out how they wanted the character’s fashion trajectory to progress.