Succession was a show about many things: money, power, destiny. It was also a show about clothes—and namely, how the wealthiest people in the world wear them. The Roy family’s collective wardrobe has been brilliantly thought up by Succession’s costume designer Michelle Matland, with the direct intent of expressing the soft power of the show’s lead characters. Matland’s are clothes that afford the money-motivated weirdos who wear them a subtle potency; the ability to convey status and supremacy without needing to say a word – though, invariably, there's always plenty to say. It doesn't end with Kendall's birthday party breakdown: much of Kendall's character resonates with young women. Within a few more minutes, he’s quoting acting inspiration he gleaned from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, Hamlet, Cy Twombly, Chekhov and “Dustin Hoffman quoting Jacques Cousteau – I think about this quote all the time: You have to know how far to go to go too far.” (I think this is actually a version of an Eliot quote: “I do not see how anyone can go very far … who is not ready to risk complete failure.” But who am I to argue with Strong, Hoffman and Cousteau?) “I remember things that are instructive. They are like northern lights for me,” Strong says. They only finished shooting two weeks before we speak, and I ask Strong how long it takes for him to get Kendall out of his system. “I don’t think he does leave me,” he says. “I don’t really feel like an actor much any more; I feel as if I’m me for half the year and I’m Kendall for half the year. I think when you live with a role for long enough, like Mark Rylance playing Rooster in Jerusalem, then it’s in you.”

The way Kendall is posted about in these circles is similar to the way in which online culture has fixated on certain discontent, complex, female characters like Fleabag, Sally Rooney protagonists, and the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, among others. It's kind of fun to watch a powerful man have the same sort of demeaning experiences that you've had. There have been times when it has felt really hard, but if the character is going through an ordeal, and you want the audience to experience that, then you can’t spare yourself. I have a belief – and this may be a fallacious belief – that it has to cost you something,” he says. Then he adds something that could be both Kendall’s personal mantra and a description of Strong’s work ethic: “I need it to be difficult.” Jeremy Strong wears blazer, by Geoffrey B Small, from bluemountain.school. Jewellery throughout, Jeremy’s own. Main image: suit, paulsmith.com; shirt, by Dries Van Noten, from selfridges.com. Photography: Simon Webb. Styling: Helen Seamons It’s easy to forget that when we first meet Shiv (Sarah Snook) in season 1, she was dressing (and behaving) with an entirely different set of motivations. She’s a political advisor for a left-leaning Democratic candidate who, as Matland reminds us, “does not want to be seen as a Roy.”

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He has many of them. Everybody buys them for him for his birthday and Christmas and he has a closet full. He probably has his four favorites,” she says. “And they’re just to say, ‘I’m home. I’m off.’ He has no pretense because he has nothing to prove to anyone…He’s the king at home. He can take the crown off.” 12. Kendall’s Lanvin sneakers (season 1, episode 8) I ask if it’s hard for him to maintain a distance from Cox off camera, given how friendly he is in real life. When Sorkin cast him in The Trial of the Chicago 7 as Jerry Rubin, the countercultural activist, Strong prepared by “taking all these gummies [edible cannabis], going to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and listening to the Grateful Dead. It was a palate cleanser after Kendall.” During the courtroom scene, in which Rubin, fellow activist Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and others were accused of crossing state lines to incite anti-Vietnam riots, Strong, in the spirit of Rubin, brought an “assortment of period noisemakers” to disrupt proceedings. After Sorkin irritably asked him to please stop clanging his cowbell, he slipped a fart machine on the chair of Judge Julius Hoffman, played by Frank Langella, who was less than amused when he sat on it.

When Smart-Denson watched the pilot episode, in which Kendall has a silent, complete meltdown in the bathroom during a family lunch, she was sold. I ask him if it’s possible that he does too much for his work. Does he really have to take on all of a drug addict’s pain to play a drug addict? Oh no! Laughter isn’t even on the cards – it couldn’t be! Because the rap was sincere, it’s committed. I don’t feel as if I’m doing a scene for Brian Cox, I feel as if I’m rapping for my dad,” he says. We've adopted him," Fola, another young female Kendall fan, tells Mashable. "A lot of his tendencies are relatable to young women," the 23-year-old New York City grad student explains. She points to his 40th birthday party as an example, a Season 3 episode in which he meticulously plans the event only to end up crying and miserable. Crying on your birthday is a common trope of disaffected womanhood. There's just so much in Kendall Roy, that very oddly relates to those extreme highs and lows and strong feelings you have when you're a young girl," Julia Riggieri, a 21-year-old promotions assistant in Massachusetts, tells Mashable.Smart-Denson echoes Loftus: "Kendall's experiences of being passed over for opportunities that he's very deserving of, or being given authority and then set up to fail and undermined, are things that a lot of women have experienced professionally. It's kind of fun to watch a powerful man have the same sort of demeaning experiences that you've had."

Strong looked at pictures of plane crashes to put himself ‘in the right place’ for the scenes about the financial crash in The Big Short. Photograph: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Naomi Pierce (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) is Succession’s “It” girl. She is the show’s most objectively stylish character, with a socialite’s wardrobe full of monochromatic pieces from brands like Tom Ford, The Row, and Proenza Schouler—the latter of whom made this perfect white loungewear set Naomi wears while a spiraling Kendall preps for his doomed 40th birthday bash. (The strapless gold-buttoned top she wears to the actual party is also Proenza.)

Strong was born and raised in Boston. His mother was a hospice nurse and his father works in juvenile justice, “so I couldn’t have been further away from the world of Succession”. As a child, he says, “I never felt able to take up space in the room.” But when he was on stage, he was liberated: “It was just this abracadabra where you’re free from your inhibitions, the way you’re perceived by others and even the way you perceive yourself. I think acting, for me, was a way to disappear from my normal social self and also a way to appear more forcefully. Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do without acting.” Strong doesn’t just think about his character – he fully commits to him. “I feel a great responsibility to understand his pain and feel the weight that’s on him,” he says, and unfortunately for him, there’s a lot of weight on his character. Kendall is so painfully self-destructive that he ended season one attempting to buy drugs and inadvertently causing the death of a young man in the process, and season two cutting himself off from his own family. So it’s hard to imagine that things are going brilliantly for him in season three. Adrien Brody guest-starred in a single episode of Succession’s third season, playing the nouveau-beatnik billionaire shareholder Josh Aaronson, whose four-percent Waystar stake compels a feuding Logan and Kendall to pay a visit to Josh’s secluded island (which they fly to in separate PJs, of course). When the three gather for a seaside lobster lunch that inevitably goes uneaten, we get a closer look at Josh’s mind-bogglingly layered “chill guy” outfit: puffer vest, zip-up hoodie, cardigan, button-down shirt, cardigan, T-shirt, scarf, beanie. An eight-layer dip of gorpcore. Blazer and shirt, by Geoffrey B Small, from bluemountain.school. Photography: Simon Webb. Styling: Helen Seamons. Fire Specialist: Matt Strange. Grooming: Sam Cooper at Carol Hayes management using Kiehl’s. Photographer’s assistants: Sam Brown and Jake Newell. Stylist’s assistant: Peter Bevan In an effort to isolate the parts of Kendall they find relatable, young female viewers have created their own version of Kendall decontextualized from the show. They're forcing representation in a place it doesn't exist and consuming Succession in a way it isn't intended to be all in a tongue-in-cheek manner. And it's entertaining and subversive to contort a powerful, fictional man into a teenage girl.

There's popular Kendall merch: t-shirts and tote bags in the style of Twilight that read, "Team Kendall." One prevalent t-shirt displays Kendall's face framed in a heart with the bright pink text, "I can fix him."

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When he’s making Succession, Strong largely stays separate from the other cast members to maintain the dynamic of the show in which Kendall is emotionally disconnected from his family. “It’s not like I stay in character, but you need to believe in what you’re doing and take it seriously. I don’t know how you can do that without going all out. Also, for me, the creative self and social self are entirely separate. I have a lot of armour and anxieties in my social self, and I have to strip all that away to engage my creative self,” he says. Matland imagines that Ebba (Eili Harboe) does all of her boss’s shopping for him—just as she does most everything else as GoJo’s head of communications and Mattson’s sometimes-lover. If he needs clothes, he’ll send Ebba and a driver to the shops and she’ll return “with bags and bags of luxury items that look like you could get them at Walmart.” When you have young girls who are entering a society that doesn't want them to win, they see that in Kendall because his dad is never gonna let him have what he wants," Hayley Loftus, a 21-year-old film and marketing student in North Carolina and proud owner of a Kendall t-shirt that says "taking a break from feminism to serve my king," explains to Mashable.