It's a full half-hour until we see Trip Fontaine ( Josh Hartnett ) in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides . He’s leaning against a blood red Corvette, a puka shell necklace hanging around his neck, the camera slowly panning up to reveal a cream button-up shirt, cropped brown leather jacket and yellow-tinted shades. His hair is loose, tucked behind one ear.
He is the polar opposite to the collective narrators of awkward neighbourhood youths in their ill-fitting suits and braced teeth. “The only reliable boy who actually got to know Lux was Trip Fontaine,” says one of the nameless teenage boys of Kirsten Dunst’s almost mythological Lisbon sister. “Only 18 months before the suicides [Trip] had emerged from baby fat to the delight of girls and mothers alike.
” From Brad Pitt's distressed leather jacket to Denzel Washington's perfect Levi's This year, The Virgin Suicides turns 25. And while many will remember the film for its feverish soundtrack by Air, and dreamy girlish fashion (you can probably thank Coppola for every single coquette trend of the 2020s), it's Trip Fontaine who we'll remember for his enduring 70s heartbreaker style. This is a guy who, in a film characterised by suburban repression and conservative attitudes to sex, stalks through the school hallways drenched in pheromones and testosterone.
He wears his soft masculinity like a halo; the American dream personified; a fuckboy before there was such a word on Urban Dictionary. Trip isn't exactly a stand-.
