With Wes Anderson's latest film The Grand Budapest Hotel opening the Glasgow Film Festival on Thursday, it seems a good time to look at the impact the aesthetic of his films has had on fashion.
You can tell a film is by Anderson from the quickest of glances as his style and costumes are so distinctive. The characters wear retro-inspired clothes that recall the 1960s and 1970s with a colour palette that includes mustard, olive green, russet and tobacco. He favours characters and costumes that are heavy on eccentricity.
Fashion designer Orla Kiely has based her spring/summer 2014 womenswear collection around Anderson's 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom. Set in the 1960s and featuring a pair of teenagers called Sam and Suzy who run away together, Kiely has taken her inspiration directly from Suzy's wardrobe.
Costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone was responsible for the looks in the movie and dressed Suzy in a petal pink cape coat, red beret and a selection of long-sleeved minidresses with starched white collars and cuffs.
Anderson's 2002 film The Royal Tenenbaums again started a fashion trend as character Margot Tenenbaum, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, wore a Lacoste tennis dress, fur coat and tan leather Hermes Birkin bag, which quickly became an iconic look. A straightened bob, eyes rimmed in black kohl eyeliner and a childish hair barrette completed the posh geek look.
Costume designer Karen Patch was enlisted to create costumes for the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums that harked back to the characters' 1970s heyday and showed how stuck in the past they were. The film is set in 2001 but all the characters wear clothes more synonymous with three decades before.
The character of Margot wears the same outfit that she favoured as a child which shows her lack of emotional maturity. The characters' clothing relays their inner turmoil and Margot in particular seems caught between the childhood and adult worlds. In Anderson's films, what the character wears is central to who they are. Their character traits are displayed through the clothes they wear. Most other modern films do not do not make this close connection between costume choices and a character's emotional state.
There are, of course, some favoured threads that run through Anderson's films. These include retro sportswear, preppy tailoring and corduroy jackets. If there is one item that signifies Anderson's aesthetic, it is the corduroy suit. Bill Murray wears it in The Royal Tenenbaums, as does the title character in the film The Fantastic Mr Fox, while Anderson himself is partial to a corduroy suit.
Anderson's films, characters and costume choices are eccentric and quirky and present to us a different world and aesthetic than is the norm. For this, the fashion world will be forever grateful.
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