The Directors Are Really Getting Dressed at the Venice Film Festival

The duty to stand out on the Venice Film Festival red carpet alongside Timothée Chalamet in the off-the-the-runway and Taylor Russell in the Balenciaga panties is nothing short of Sisyphean. But that’s exactly what director Luca Guadagnino—wearing a faded polo shirt, skinny jeans, and green Jet-Puffed-marshmallow sneakers from Loewe’s spring 2023 collection—— was successful.

Guadagnino and company, in town to show their new movie Bones and all, is no stranger to the distinctive fashion style that Italy’s connoisseurs tend to invite. (The day before that, he had arrived at Excelsior pier, wearing Thélios sunglasses and an oxford shirt with a picture of his mentor, Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, but no Not reminiscent of his Chalamet print button Call me by your name Screenwriter James Ivory wore ao dai to the 2018 Oscars.)

And Guadagnino isn’t the only one in Director Fits mode that works well in Venice. Noah Baumbach, promoting the film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White noiseopted for loose-fitting Prada and Adidas Sambas (summer shoes), while filmmaker and collaborator Greta Gerwig, who also starred with Adam Driver in White noisehas been sporting a lot of Palm Springs-y Gucci.

But there are two distinct stylistic modes at the Venice Film Festival: black-tie premieres and light-hearted photocalls. At such off-peak events, high-fashion casual wear (with a lot of emphasis on anything fashion or normal mean to the wearer) is the informal dress code — of which Guadagnino, wearing a t-shirt and jeans and also a head-to-toe designer, is a perfect example.

Movie call style and aspirational “post-swag” dressing, like GQSam Hine’s own Sam Hine wrote earlier this year, is a genre of its own, pioneered by Chalamet herself; have “the freedom to dress as often as possible.” Seemingly taking a page from a post-swag play is Mexican director and Academy Award giant Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who arrived at the dock in a pair of embroidered cargo pants and a Rick Owens x turtleneck. Converse. Here’s hoping that somewhere out there there is a Chalamet-Guadagnino-Iñárritu hypebeast group chat.