15 times The X-Files’ Dana Scully was the best character on TV

Gillian Anderson in ‘The X-Files – The Movie.’ Via 20th Century Fox/Getty Images

11. Every time she put on a ’90s power suit

We’ve already touched on how the demands of femininity and television forced Scully (and therefore actress Gillian Anderson) into some impractical wardrobe choices. But, if we were to flip that concept, we’d find an interesting mirror version on the reverse: fashion as power.

It’s not a perfect concept. The whole idea of a “power suit” is to blend into the corporate culture of the 1980s and 1990s. And Scully was indeed more interested in becoming a master skeptic and logician rather than a fashionista. After all, it’s not like you ever see her going on a shopping spree. There are aliens and black ops government agents to contend with, after all.

Yet there’s no escaping her wardrobe, especially in the early days of the series. Scully has the sensible heels of a working woman, of course, though they would inexorably become taller as the series progressed. She also sports menswear-inspired suits, though with considerably more material in the shoulder pads and some frankly weird fabric choices (we all know about that one red plaid suit coat. It’s practically burned into our neural pathways).

For some, it’s so normcore as to be sleep-inducing. For others, it was a symbol of bland late 20th-century corporate feminism. Still, it was nice to see a woman on television who was dressed in the same kind of office wear as the male agents around her.