Another accessory that took Scully through the course of the show: heels. Even in the field—even fleeing pizza-delivering vampires and liver-eating mutants and the U.S. government—her shoe of choice was a pair of pumps. At the outset of The X-Files, the shoes were as practical as any pair of pumps can possibly be: kitten-heeled, sturdy, as expansively cut as Scully’s taper-slacked pantsuits. They were pumps, indeed, that had a whiff of wartime austerity. But the shoes evolved as both Scully and footwear trends external to The X-Files’s universe did, to the extent that in the reboot of the show, Scully is wearing heels that are essentially stilettos. And they signal just what they did in the ’90s: femininity that will insist on itself even when it is impractical. Scully both heralded and embraced a Hollywood trope that continues today: professional women, be they detectives (Jules O’Hara in Psych) or executives (Claire Dearing in Jurassic World), clad in footwear that is, literally and otherwise, highly impractical.

* * *

For that, and also for a myriad of reasons that can be shorthanded as THAT TARTAN BLAZER, it’s become popular to mock Scully’s sartorial choices. Rebecca Traister, in an otherwise loving ode to the sci-fi heroine, referred to her “ill-advised jewel-toned pantsuits.” The fucknoshoulderpads Tumblr has a post tellingly titled, “Oh, Dana Scully, No.” Paper Magazine recently wrote that “pop culture’s foremost alien huntress … has terrible style.”

And, indeed. The ScullySuit is, ultimately, the sartorial equivalent of mom jeans: trying at once too hard, and not enough. Scully herself, however, cannot be fully faulted for her fashion faux pas. Not just because the ’90s had their way with us all, but because even the most garish and most marmish of her outfits have their message to send about who—and, indeed, why—Scully is. The X-Files is ultimately a show about institutions: about our ability, and possibly our complete inability, to have faith in the bodies that give form to government and culture and society at large. Trust No One, and all that. And what represents The Institution writ large more than a dull, black pantsuit? As worn by other characters—the Smoking Man, in particular, and his variously smoldering henchmen—suits, in The X-Files’ universe, take on a menacing quality. They represent both conformity and conspiracy, and the show’s ultimate conviction that those two things might actually be indistinguishable.

In that sense, Scully’s fashion missteps establish her, from the outset—despite her official assignment as the Bureau-appointed babysitter of Spooky Mulder—as that rarest of things: trustable. Hers is a uniform of non-conformity. It acknowledges the reality of Scully’s workplace (“a lot of what we’re constrained by is the actual restrictions of the FBI,” Molly Harris Campbell, the show’s costume designer, told The New York Times, noting that “this is very much a show that concentrates on being realistic”). But its colors and patterns and occasional abandonment of slacks for skirts also carry a broader message within The X-Files’ moral cosmology: Trust No One makes an exemption for one Dana Scully.

Scully’s outfits—and they are technically designer outfits, by the way: Max Mara coats, suits by Calvin Klein and Emporio Armani—are also the uniform of a woman who is playing a traditionally masculine role. (“‘Baby’ me,” she informs an epithet-wielding assailant at one point, “and you’ll be peeing through a catheter.”) She is “Scully,” not “Dana.” And her suits are evidence of a strategy many women-in-a-man’s-world have relied on: the striking of a careful balance between standing out and fitting in. They acknowledge femininity—the silk blouses! the bright colors!—while also de-emphasizing it (boxy cuts! pants! suits!). Her suits insist that Scully—shooter of guns, dissector of corpses, author of a doctoral dissertation on Einstein—is, as it were, “just one of the guys”; they insist at the same time that she most definitely is not.