All The Sterling Point Costume Easter Eggs You Definitely Missed

Sterling Point may come from an iconic lineage of stylish teen dramas, but costume designer Marissa Schwartz actively avoided referencing the glamorous looks of co-showrunners Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage’s Y2K hits. Well, for the most part. The woman behind Sterling Point’s “lakecore” aesthetic reveals her singular tribute look to The O.C., while lifting the veil on the fashion Easter eggs foreshadowing Ramona’s finale twist and Annie’s ultimate love triangle decision.

As a teenager in the 2000s with the name Marissa, Schwartz has always felt a connection to The O.C.’s tortured female protagonist. So, getting to work with The O.C. creator and EP on Sterling Point felt almost cosmic. “When I met Josh, I was like, ‘Thank you so much for making my name cool,’” she tells Elite Daily. While the small-town Canadian series exists in “a whole different world” from the lavish 2003 SoCal show, Schwartz managed to include a subtle nod to the one and only Marissa Cooper in Annie’s date-night outfit.

“In Episode 4, when Annie goes to the movies, she's wearing a little floral green top — it’s a vintage Roxy top — and her Still Here NYC jeans, with a little braid in her hair,” Schwartz says. “Ella [Rubin] and I were like, 'This is our nod to Marissa Cooper.' To us, that is very much our version of Marissa in 2026.”

Schwartz also used clothing choices to send subliminal hints about important character connections. An important recurring (but unspoken) trend is Annie borrowing the clothes of the people she’s growing closest with. “You see her mixing her own staple pieces she brought with the things she’s discovering in Muskoka, some of which are Ramona’s, and some are her mom’s,” Schwartz says.

The costumer singles out the pieces in a finale dream sequence, where Annie imagines a life where her mom Goldie didn’t die, saying she “doesn’t know if everyone will catch” that it confirms many of Annie’s outfits were passed down from Goldie.

“In that montage, Goldie wears a brown sweater that Annie then wears the following day, as well as a T-shirt you see Annie wearing earlier in the show,” Schwartz says. “They even share some pajama pants. We put quite a bit into that montage; it was a nice moment to close the loop on where those pieces came from.”

Annie’s borrowing habit also signals who she ends up with by the first season’s finale. “At the end, she's starting to put on Ellis’ jacket and shirt, and all that stuff a teen girl with a new boyfriend does,” Schwartz points out, saying that she proposed this idea. “Listen, I was a 16-year-old with a boyfriend at summer camp. I remember it well, and that is the beauty of being able to tap into your own experiences. And [creator] Megan [Park] and Ella were super on board.”

Perhaps the most pivotal styling detail in terms of plot is Ramona’s mismatched socks, which are prominently featured in multiple scenes. It seems like an idiosyncratic quirk at first, but it’s actually meant to signal that Ramona is colorblind, which eventually leads her to realize she’s the biological daughter of Annie’s adoptive dad, Steven.

Schwartz wasn’t aware of this big paternity twist during most of the season, revealing the sock details “were written in the script as a little moment you can catch.” Despite not knowing about the Ramona and Steven connection for half the season, Schwartz thinks there are some serendipitous outfit choices that foreshadow it without trying.

“We got the scripts as we went, so the Ramona and Steven thing wasn’t something I knew about early enough to be able to infuse,” Schwartz says. “However, there are some cheeky color coordinating moments for Ramona that I actually do think lend themselves really well to someone who's colorblind.”

Consider all this attention to each character’s wardrobe choices to be fans’ early heads-up to lock in on every little detail when Season 2 finally arrives. In the world of Sterling Point, something as minute as a pair of socks or a jacket can hide a deep well of lore.