Before a character even opens their mouth in a Wes Anderson film, you can tell who they are just by their appearance. They have eccentric looking hats, head-bands, sunglasses, sports jackets, suits, tuxedos, athletic wear, bow ties, unusual hairdos, facial hair, and accessories. Like Federico Fellini, Anderson has created his own surreal, comic-strip vision of the world in large part through the colorful and off-beat fashion sense of his characters. Whether their appearance reveals their solidarity, past hang-ups or self-esteem issues, Anderson’s line of quirky high achievers and melancholics struggle to find their identity and reconcile the past with the present.

Anderson’s films always deal with some sort of dysfunctional family unit of characters who dress alike. In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), the seafaring motley crew of Team Zissou has a specific wardrobe for every situation. Aboard the S.S. Belafonte, they’re outfitted in aquatic blue short sleeve button-down shirts with blue stripes on the shoulders and down the middle with matching pants and red beanie hats. In the water, they wear aquatic blue and silver scuba outfits with the Team Zissou insignia on the breast. Their leader Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), an acclaimed but over-the-hill oceanographer and documentary filmmaker, takes pride in their hip trademark apparel to reinforce the team’s camaraderie, especially as they start to lose faith in his erratic schemes and desert him.

In The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), however, the uniform look reveals the insecurities of Chas Tenenbaum (Ben Stiller). Chas is a prickly, overprotective widowered father, who makes up his two young sons to look exactly like him in a vintage 1970s red and white striped Adidas athletic suit and curly brown hairdo. Not only does he want to make sure they stay fit, he also wants them to be more easily identifiable in case they get separated. Even at his father’s funeral, he and his sons wear the same outfit, but this time it’s black instead of red. Chas has finally forgiven his father for his past failings, and now he’s in mourning. With this wardrobe switch, Anderson achieves a two-pronged effect: as we chuckle at Chas’s eccentric tastes, we’re also moved by his change of heart.

The estranged Whitman brothers in The Darjeeling Limited (2007) have a similar, but less uniform assortment of outfits. They’re decked out in a wide array of grey casual suits with button down Oxford shirts. Peter (Adrien Brody) and Francis (Owen Wilson) also have pajamas tops with the same Darjeeling Limited train embroidery, although their colors are different. Oddly enough, they wear the same outfits, as does their brother Jack (Jason Schwartzman), at an Indian funeral, and they fit in perfectly with the locals. Likewise, they have on black trench coats and collar shirts on their way to their father’s funeral, but with ties of varying colors. And when they pray together at a Hindu ceremony, they sport shiny nylon head wraps, but again the colors – gold and ruby – have subtle variations. So while the brothers do look alike in many ways and eventually forge a new bond on their spiritual journey, they still retain some individuality.

A common albatross every Anderson character struggles with is a preoccupation with the past. No better exploration of this theme can be found than in The Royal Tenenbaums. Although the story is set circa 2000, the film has a retro look circa 1975 when the Tenenbaum kids grew up and were renowned child prodigies. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Richie (Luke Wilson) have the hardest time moving forward. Reflecting their failure to match the dazzling achievements of their youth, they both look and dress almost identically in their adulthood as they did when they were kids. Margot, an accomplished playwright, has straight neck-length brown hair with a hairpin, black eye shadow and a cigarette in her mouth and either wears a fur coat or a multi-colored striped knee-length dress. Richie, a tennis pro who cracked up and retired early, wears a Fila tennis shirt, headband and wrist bands, but as an adult further conceals his shame with a camel-colored suit, dark glasses and a full beard.

In The Darjeeling Limited, the unresolved remnants of the past are made manifest through various accessories. Still grief-stricken over his father, Peter hides behind his deceased father’s sunglasses, which still have the old prescription. Francis wears a clunky white bandage around his head and chin to cover up the cuts and bruises from a car crash when he attempted suicide. After the brothers have mended their differences, he takes off the bandages and exposes his scars. Another accessory that belonged to their father, but which they all share on their Indian adventure, is his camel colored luggage with imprinted gold decals of palm trees and safari animals and his initials J.L.W. Once they get over his death, however, they leave it for a band of Indian kids to plunder.

What cannot be overlooked about Anderson’s characters is their self-esteem. The way they dress is a reflection of how they see themselves, and it never follows conventional expectations, particularly when it comes to kids. Chief case in point is the hero of Rushmore (1998), the wildly precocious tenth grader, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman). In sharp contrast to his classmates, Max proudly wears a navy sports jacket with the Rushmore crest, a white collar shirt, a red and blue striped tie, and tan khaki pants. And occasionally, he sports a red beret, a white tuxedo, a barber’s smock, a green corduroy suit with a pink bowtie, and a mishmash of other outfits for the dozens of clubs in which he’s a member, such as fencing, beekeeping, lacrosse, kung fu, theater, and so on. More than any other Anderson character, Max goes through the most wardrobe changes and, thus, the most character changes: from overachieving hipster to school drop out and failed barber’s son and back.

Beside the kids who look well beyond their years, Anderson’s middle-age characters dress in a way to prove to the world that they’re still worth a damn. In the Royal Tenenbaums, accountant Henry Sherman (Danny Glover) wants to marry Etheline Tenenbaum (Angelica Houston), but is afraid that his low level of achievement, in comparison to her ex-husband Royal (Gene Hackman) and her children, might defeat his chances. To win her over, he distinguishes himself in a dark blue suit with a plaid collar shirt and matching bow-tie. He knows that, if she will ever agree to marry him, he must present himself as a more respectable man than her ex-husband. His intentions are not lost on her, and eventually she accepts his proposal.

There is no end to describing the sophisticated costume design in a Wes Anderson film. Each character is sketched out in vivid detail to give them their own inimitable look. In fact, Anderson co-writer and frequent star of his films, Owen Wilson said that the look of Anderson’s characters actually precedes their development. So their identity, much like in a comic strip, is defined by their appearance.

>Written by d/visible contributor Kevin Hogan.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under Fashion, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.