Last month, while perusing a copy of the book “How Directors Dress” — a collection newly published by the entertainment company A24 — I came across a striking full-page photograph of the filmmaker David Cronenberg. It was taken at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where Cronenberg accented an otherwise-formal outfit with a pair of oversize wraparound sunglasses designed for mountaineering. These white-framed, gogglelike shades have since become a signature accessory for the director, who has worn them at Cannes so often that audiences there sometimes applaud when he puts them on. In late May, one video making the rounds on social media captured the moment when a standing ovation for Cronenberg’s latest film was briefly hijacked by cheers for the sunglasses.
There are a few different ways to explain people’s fascination with Cronenberg’s choice. There is its sheer incongruence as a red-carpet look. There is the fact that Cronenberg, who does few interviews, has never explained it. And there is the fantastically meme-ready manner in which he puts the shades on: He tends to look as if he’s about to retreat in satisfaction from an argument he has handily won.
The deeper appeal of the look, though, should be obvious to anyone familiar with the way online cinephiles post about famous directors and their clothes: David Lynch’s obsession with “a good pair of pants,” or Francis Ford Coppola’s “insane drip” in photographs taken during the filming of “Apocalypse Now,” or the charm of Wes Anderson’s enduring commitment to corduroy suits. That the people behind the camera needn’t be costumed, and aren’t meant to be seen, makes their self-presentation all the more interesting — and, we might suspect, more revealing. Our interest in Cronenberg’s shades is about identity as much as auteurism. It’s about the way dedication to a highly personal aesthetic — in fashion as in filmmaking — hints at an all-consuming vision that transcends both.
One of the earliest filmmakers to adopt this kind of sartorial persona was Alfred Hitchcock, whose fine suits amounted to a uniform — one that helped make him as recognizable to the public as his superstar actors and actresses were. “How Directors Dress” is replete with other examples. John Ford favored billowy slacks, open-collared dress shirts and neckerchiefs in place of neckties. (This last touch — shared by, among others, Peter Bogdanovich — now rivals the beret and Cecil B. DeMille’s jodhpurs as a deep-rooted cliché of how directors dress.) Jean-Luc Godard wore his suits like rumpled leisurewear, sometimes without a tie and often with dark sunglasses. As men’s wear grew less formal, Woody Allen would stake a claim on baggy khaki and corduroy as the uniform of a tweedy, tightly wound New Yorker. Spike Lee would craft a larger-than-life persona around Nike sneakers, basketball jerseys and baseball caps. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who directed more than 40 films before dying of a drug overdose at 37, cultivated a look as chaotic as his short, astonishingly busy life, dressing himself in everything from running shorts to leather jackets to leopard-print suits on his sets.
Other directors adopt a uniform so utilitarian — picture Steven Spielberg’s bluejeans, trucker caps and many-pocketed camera vests — that they transcend practicality to the point of self-parody: The filmmaker winds up somewhere between a hiker and a safari guide, intrepid, ready for the challenges of any location, any set. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Quentin Tarantino, who tends to dress on theme, in everything from jeans and tropical shirts to track suits and Kangol hats. But however clichéd or iconoclastic the look may be, the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto suggests in an afterword for “How Directors Dress” that filmmakers are never more attuned to their own sense of fashion than they are on a movie set, in the clothes they’ve chosen for the specific purpose of doing their work. “Each director has their own reason to wear something,” he writes. “While they’re making a film, they are in their natural setting: Their styling is natural.”
In appearances at Cannes, Cronenberg walked the same red carpets as Julianne Moore, Léa Seydoux and Robert Pattinson — each there to represent a film they made with the director, while pulling double duty as representatives for Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Dior. This is the nature of stardom. To remain so bankable that risk-averse financiers will back his work with art-house directors like Cronenberg or Claire Denis, an actor like Pattinson must live in the public eye; there he must appear fresh, stylish and malleable, adapting to changing trends and the vision of each filmmaker with whom he works. The public life of a director is different. At premieres and awards shows, Cronenberg tends to wear what most male directors do: the standard tuxedo. By treating formal wear as a mere formality, an auteur gets to bask in the soft edges of the spotlight, never seeming any more ostentatious than when in uniform on a film set.
To experience the cinema of John Waters and to witness his equally singular fashion sense is to suspect that they are inseparable.
Few filmmakers have challenged this arrangement as effortlessly as Sofia Coppola, a longtime brand ambassador for Chanel. Her on-set uniform is built around jeans, sweaters and button-up dress shirts by the Paris-based brand Charvet. On the red carpet, though, she eschews her upscale workwear in favor of the haute couture that has defined the look of her most ambitious features. She is among the narrow band of filmmakers capable of matching the glamour of the stars she shoots.
The directors we know by name are invariably those who present us with a distinct visual and narrative style, a particular way of seeing the world. It’s not enough for Martin Scorsese to make a good film, or even a great one; we hope to leave his movies feeling that we have seen something only Scorsese could have made. Is it any wonder that we extend this expectation to how he presents himself to the world? Personal style, after all, involves elements familiar to the auteur: costuming, storytelling, expressing character through visual cues. To experience the cinema of John Waters and to witness his equally singular fashion sense is to suspect that they are inseparable.
Some of cinema’s true masters overcome the burden of such expectations, refusing to be trapped by the legacy of their own films — and their own fashion choices. In the midst of a late-career renaissance characterized by genre-defying masterpieces like “Ran,” Akira Kurosawa abandoned the bucket hat that had once been his signature, letting it go down in history as the trademark accessory of his long-dead rival Yasujiro Ozu; he switched instead to short-brimmed caps and dark sunglasses. There is also the possibility of more gradual evolution. David Lynch has refined his wardrobe in tandem with his style — never really changing either but gradually stripping both down to the essentials, as if his high-waisted slacks and buttoned-to-the-top shirts were somehow essential to the “Lynchian.”
In the end, Stanley Kubrick’s winter jacket has as little to tell us about the meaning of “Eyes Wide Shut” as whatever Tom Cruise might have carried in his pockets during filming. Kelly Reichardt’s rainwear reveals far less about the American West than the films she makes there. Still, we can’t resist turning our attention to them. Even the shallowest discourse on filmmakers and fashion reveals a world that still profoundly cares about cinema as an art form. Analyzing all these choices is, at best, an extension of film criticism — which is to say it is both useless and essential.
Source photographs for the illustration above: Dolly Fabyshev for The New York Times; Luc Roux/Sygma, via Getty Images; The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images; Bridgeman Images.
Joshua Hunt is a freelance writer based in Tokyo and in Portland, Ore. He has worked as a correspondent for Reuters and as an adjunct assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University.
