We tend to think of film directors as either deliberate slobs or posturing auteurs, but once you zoom in, many have a signature that’s all their own. It’s a form of personal image-making that makes them memorable, behind the camera or in front of it. Amid the chaos of the film set, there are a lot of eyes on the director.
Artists and managers equally, charged with bringing a movie’s concept to life, they set the tone and lay down their vision for the project. This was the inspiration for a new coffee table book from the film company A24. “There is a singularity about the director,” said the book’s editor Charlie Robin Jones, a British content strategist and fashion journalist, via phone from London.
“They stand alone, in charge.” Take , who grew up a fashion muse to her pal Marc Jacobs. But as she took the helm of films with budgets of more and more millions, from “The Virgin Suicides” to “Marie Antoinette” to “ ,” she also took on a uniform: Custom cotton button-up shirts, both long and short sleeve, from the Parisian tailor Charvet are her on-set signature.
“It’s almost as though the more traditionally — and elaborately — feminine her characters on screen are, the stronger her desire to adhere to her own playbook, one that favours simple shirting over frills and bows,” former Dazed & Confused magazine editor Claire Marie Healy writes in “How Directors Dress.” Coppola has said she doesn’t want to have to think about what she is wea.
