Lights! Camera! Fashion! A New A24 Book Explores ‘How Directors Dress’

There’s a brilliant photograph of Sofia Coppola on the set of Marie Antoinette in which she appears, mid-stride, amid dozens of actors dressed in 18th-century courtly attire: britches and elaborate waistcoats on the men, robes a la françaises on the women, white powdered wigs on all. Coppola, meanwhile, is dressed in a white men’s button-up shirt by Charvet, layered tanks, and a pair of dark slacks. In the swirl of all that pastel-toned period finery, she cuts a rather amusing figure. “I like to have a bunch when I’m shooting,” she told Self-Service magazine of her Charvet shirts, “so I don’t have to think about what I’m wearing.”

This and other snapshots make up A24’s latest book, How Directors Dress, out this week.

Assembled by Hagop Kourounian (of the Instagram account @directorsfits), Jon Dieringer (editor in chief of Screen Slate), film critic Caitlin Quinlan, and fashion journalist Charlie Porter, How Directors Dress is filled with rare snaps of filmmakers dressed for the job, and sometimes—in the cases of people like Kathryn Bigelow, Chloé Zhao, and Baz Luhrmann—what they wore to accept their Academy Awards. Though this is not a fashion book, per se, it’s no doubt a book about style (Coppola looks the picture of effortless chic), and so a group of esteemed fashion writers—including Lynn Yaeger, Lauren Sherman, Rachel Tashjian, Sami Reiss, Claire Marie Healy, Adam Wray, Brad Phillip, Thom Bettridge, and Shumon Basar—were called upon to contribute essays musing on the directors’ fashion choices. “This is a book that uses clothing to tell new stories about directors, their lives, their movies, and the times in which their films were made,” Porter explains in the book’s introduction.

Below, Kourounian and Quinlan walk us through a selection of images from How Directors Dress.

John Ford