“Every week, I had to come up with six outfits that are top to toe tailored with accessories, so I came up with formulas. One formula was the turtleneck under a dress.

“There are a lot of cocktail dresses out there, but that isn’t going to work for a nanny. How do I solve that problem? With a turtleneck. I found a thin turtleneck, so you’ll see a lot of her in a turtleneck.

“This was from BCBG, and it was this specific fabric and very molding to the body. That dress was from Ralph Lauren. Nobody would put a turtleneck under that dress, and it started a trend.”

“That red jacket was my jacket. I had a collection of 1940s jackets, and I used to put C.C [Lauren Lane] in all of them. She was a different character. She was town and country, very proper, but she couldn’t be town and country boring,” Cooper says.

Also, “I would make pencil skirts for her, but it would be to her ankle. It was the same principal as Fran, but executed differently; muted colors, shoulder pads, more demure, a bit kind of uptight looking and stiff, but still appealing.

“With Fran, that crop top was by Rachel London and it needed to fulfill something in the script, but I always wanted to elevate the humor with the clothes.”

“The major influence was a piece of clothing that was used on Twiggy in ‘Princesses.’ That show was in 1991, and her character Princess Georgina ‘Georgy’ De La Rue wore it,” says Cooper.

“It was from Moschino’s Cheap & Chic, and that vest was another departure point for her character on that show. I was able to take that vest from the show. That vest with the white shirt and black skirt was the inspiration and the embryo of the Fran Fine character. That was when we did the pilot. The white shirt formula was a go-to fabulous one. I used white shirts as an alternative to the turtleneck. I would buy them from Anne Fontaine Beverly Hills.

“I loved the ruffles and then I’d put a jacket over it. That was another formula of going back to the white shirt where color would make it loud and sassy. There was always that formality to it.”

“This look was perfect for a date. Yes, I could have just done her all in black, but why? Why do all black when you can just add this vest and it had those sparkles? This is the essence of clean, elegant, graphic, sassy and sexy.”

“She has to wear a robe, but it couldn’t be any old robe, it had to be the perfect robe. I’d go shopping and found the perfect robes by Canyon Road but they weren’t quite right. Again, it was how to elevate the robes, so I elevated it with the shoulder pad. I loved the 1940s look. There is nothing more fabulous than when you think of Katharine Hepburn and Lana Turner and all those 1940s movies with that shoulder line,” says Cooper.

And this ended up being just the start: Fran was known for showing up to the breakfast table in a variety of cozy and colorful robes, juxtaposing the family, which “dressed” for meals.

“Whatever robe we had, my team of seamstresses who used to work for Bob Mackie would put shoulder pads in it, and that became the signature robe that people loved.”