Elizabeth Holmes Has a New Look. What's She Trying to Tell Us?

The New York Times profile that re-familiarized many of us with Elizabeth Holmes, the woman who duped some of the world’s most powerful shareholders into championing a rickety toaster filled with blood, is mentioned throughout You Can See Everything, the new documentary co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.

Holmes and her partner, hotel heir Billy Evans, aren’t pleased about a quote in the article attributed to Elizabeth, who now goes by “Liz.” As she and Evans insist, Liz couldn’t possibly have said “they’re playing a character I created,” in reference to the many film and TV projects that have dramatized the Theranos scandal.

The images of Holmes included in the piece were striking at the time and remain so now: the much-softened former CEO is wearing a tan sweater, blue jeans and cherubic, no-makeup makeup. The article, written by Amy Chozick, proposes that motherhood is the latest role to be taken up by the entrepreneur who, for a time, could be found in boardrooms and on magazine covers in full Steve Jobs drag and brick-red lipstick.

The first hour of the documentary picks up where these photographs left off, presenting the audience with a visual cornucopia of Holmes in postpartum Earth Mother mode. She multitasks beatifically, making deep eye contact with Fielder while rocking her infant daughter, Invicta, with her foot. Coming across like a delicate trad wife, she gently whisks a couple of eggs in a yellow bowl before Evans snatches it away, intent on complete the task himself. We’ve never seen Holmes looking so domestic, or trying so hard to appear relaxed. Though she's due to report to prison only days later, she jogs languidly down the San Diego beach like she has all the time in the world.

One of the first things I thought to myself when I saw the first teaser trailer for the film, which features Holmes’s bulging blue eyes and oval, high-cheekboned face in close-up, was that she looked quite pretty, though as resolutely creepy as always. If her bleached blonde hair, snug turtlenecks and eyeliner-rimmed peepers were meant to please the likes of Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, the Holmes of Everything—a soft-spoken homemaker bustling around with her hair in a claw clip—was fabricated to elicit empathy from women.

While feeding her children or typing on her laptop at her oceanside cottage, Holmes wears grey leggings and black zip-up hoodies. Her feet are often bare, and occasionally she tops her dishwater-blonde hair with a baseball cap. Only the grown-out ends, which are bleached platinum and fried, bear the remnants of her power-broking past.

In other words, nothing stands out about the way Holmes dresses in the film because she herself is a creature without style, despite the enormous effort she has put into constructing legible selves for public consumption. There is no spirit or point of view she wishes to convey sartorially aside from a desire for self-advancement.

Her every blink, smile and utterance feels calculated to make Fielder and the audience believe she is not only innocent of inveigling patients and shareholders, but behaviorally or emotionally stunted as a result of the supposedly unwarranted public flogging she received in response to her earnest efforts to change the world through revolutionary medical technology.

But the crux of it is that Holmes has no personal style because in order to have personal style a person must harbor something that they wish to express. Holmes, however, expresses nothing; she is a void, absent of everything except ambition, and so her appearance itself depends on her motives. When it benefitted her to appear capable and enterprising, she copied the wardrobes of great men. But the seams were showing: her inexpertly-applied makeup and fried hair were early tells that all was not as it seemed. Now, it’s in Liz’s best interest to look not only non-threatening, but utterly guileless, and so she has taken to wearing cozy separates and a necklace with a cross on it.

You are allowed to “see everything,” as the film’s title promises, because, in Holmes’s mind, her mutable surfaces convey nothing but the truth. Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, is barely more expressive in his sartorial presentation as a rich gym bro. He favors The Kooples hoodies and moisture-wicking tees.

The idea of “Elizabeth Holmes” is, itself, something like a suit, meant to be donned and shed at will. It’s Evans who communicates this most explicitly in You Can See Everything. Days before Holmes begins her prison sentence, he facilitates the capture of every inch of her body and face so that AI-rendered copies of her can speak to their children, presumingly regurgitating scripts he’s written. Later, he reveals to a horrified Amanda Seyfried that he approached the top brass at X to gain access to Holmes’s personal account, from which he now tweets voluminously, in his own voice, as Liz. Even more sinister is the revelation in the film’s third act that he has his partner’s power of attorney.

Does Holmes care that Evans, with impunity, is operating the levers behind her public profile while she’s locked away in federal prison? The answer that the film offers is as ambiguous as the woman herself. In a previous life, she playacted as a passionate, mission-driven CEO. In front of Fielder and Oppenheim’s camera, Holmes is a vulnerable new mother who’s dazed by the wreckage of her past. And for Evans, it’s clear, Holmes plays the role of submissive and devoted lover. It's her most ill-fitting uniform yet, including her new coveralls.