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Like any Ryan Murphy show, All’s Fair, his campy new legal drama starring Kim Kardashian, operates outside our reality. In this world, Kardashian is a divorce lawyer named Allura Grant who runs a firm alongside Naomi Watts’s Liberty Ronson and Niecy Nash-Betts’s Emerald Greene. The names alone are enough to give you a sugar rush.
The women find a mentor in Dina Standish (Glenn Close) and a sparring partner in Carrington Lane (Sarah Paulson, who runs away with every scene). The “plot” is not really important here, but if you must know, each episode features a different famous guest star coming in with marriage problems that the women must solve by getting her a fat settlement. Meanwhile, Kardashian’s own marriage to a hot young NFL player is falling apart, as it turns out he has cheated on her with both someone she knows and a former sex worker. It’s a perfect Murphy mess.
If the show’s primary concern is women helping women by exposing their husbands’ misdeeds, its secondary concern is gloves. Everyone is wearing gloves all the time on this show. Daytime deposition? Gloves. Jewelry auction? Gloves. Visiting a sex dungeon run by Kate Berlant? Two different people wearing gloves.
Why gloves? Well, if we are going to try and apply some logic to a Ryan Murphy show, the gloves are a conscious decision for at least one character. In her Cut cover, Paulson explained that Murphy really wanted to put her in gloves, so she decided to make covering her arms part of Carrington’s backstory. That makes sense, sure. But it doesn’t explain why everyone else on this show is wearing gloves so often.
In case you might not believe me, here’s a roundup of just how many people are covering their hands in the first three episodes of All’s Fair:
Grace Gummer
Gummer is actually the first person to wear gloves in the whole show, so I’ve given her this top spot. When we meet her, Nash-Betts tells her, “Grace, I know you’re brokenhearted, but, girl, you look damn good. Come on, gloves!” We then see the gloves, in brown leather and elbow-length. Later, when she sees what exactly her husband (Steven Pasquale) was getting up to with a dominatrix, we see a new pair of gloves.
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Again, I say: Come on, gloves!
Kim Kardashian
Little white gloves for looking into evidence of her husband stepping out.
Red leather gloves for swinging by a sex dungeon.
You know what the “Hold Up” music video has always been missing? Long black gloves.
Sarah Paulson
As the real glove-wearer on the show, Paulson gets the showiest pairs. Take these big leather ones from a scene in which she calls Kardashian’s character a “poor discarded come rag.” (All of her lines are like that, if you’re curious.)
Later, she wears another pair of chunky leather gloves to face off with the ladies at an auction.
By the third episode, she opts for something more delicate.
Naomi Watts
Called to New York for a client (Judith Light) trying to leave her husband, Watts shows up to a Manhattan mansion dressed like this.
It’s cold on the East Coast, so you might think the gloves are warranted. Maybe, but she doesn’t take them off until she has the opportunity to try on a ring, at which point she makes a big show of it. Gloves are to this show what New York was to Sex and the City.
Glenn Close
Sadly, we see Close in gloves only when she’s hunting down Eddie Cibrian and trying to convince him to do right by his late ex-wife (Elizabeth Berkley), who earlier in the episode jumped to her death from the firm’s window. She looks fab despite the circumstances.
Judith Light
What better occasion for bicep-length black gloves than the auction to sell off all the jewelry your husband bought you over the course of your marriage?
Kate Berlant
These little red numbers really pull together her dominatrix look.
What gloves will we see next week? Only time will tell, but I have my predictions. Paulson will spit some truly foul insults in black latex gloves, a fun guest star will go for a fingerless look, and Kardashian will wear a snakeskin pair to the dentist.
