The Best Dressed People in Hollywood Are Not the Actors

Last month, while perusing a copy of the book “How Directors Dress” — a collection newly published by the entertainment company A24 — I came across a striking full-page photograph of the filmmaker David Cronenberg. It was taken at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where Cronenberg accented an otherwise-formal outfit with a pair of oversize wraparound sunglasses designed for mountaineering. These white-framed, gogglelike shades have since become a signature accessory for the director, who has worn them at Cannes so often that audiences there sometimes applaud when he puts them on. In late May, one video making the rounds on social media captured the moment when a standing ovation for Cronenberg’s latest film was briefly hijacked by cheers for the sunglasses.

There are a few different ways to explain people’s fascination with Cronenberg’s choice. There is its sheer incongruence as a red-carpet look. There is the fact that Cronenberg, who does few interviews, has never explained it. And there is the fantastically meme-ready manner in which he puts the shades on: He tends to look as if he’s about to retreat in satisfaction from an argument he has handily won.

The deeper appeal of the look, though, should be obvious to anyone familiar with the way online cinephiles post about famous directors and their clothes: David Lynch’s obsession with “a good pair of pants,” or Francis Ford Coppola’s “insane drip” in photographs taken during the filming of “Apocalypse Now,” or the charm of Wes Anderson’s enduring commitment to corduroy suits. That the people behind the camera needn’t be costumed, and aren’t meant to be seen, makes their self-presentation all the more interesting — and, we might suspect, more revealing. Our interest in Cronenberg’s shades is about identity as much as auteurism. It’s about the way dedication to a highly personal aesthetic — in fashion as in filmmaking — hints at an all-consuming vision that transcends both.

One of the earliest filmmakers to adopt this kind of sartorial persona was Alfred Hitchcock, whose fine suits amounted to a uniform — one that helped make him as recognizable to the public as his superstar actors and actresses were. “How Directors Dress” is replete with other examples. John Ford favored billowy slacks, open-collared dress shirts and neckerchiefs in place of neckties. (This last touch — shared by, among others, Peter Bogdanovich — now rivals the beret and Cecil B. DeMille’s jodhpurs as a deep-rooted cliché of how directors dress.) Jean-Luc Godard wore his suits like rumpled leisurewear, sometimes without a tie and often with dark sunglasses. As men’s wear grew less formal, Woody Allen would stake a claim on baggy khaki and corduroy as the uniform of a tweedy, tightly wound New Yorker. Spike Lee would craft a larger-than-life persona around Nike sneakers, basketball jerseys and baseball caps. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who directed more than 40 films before dying of a drug overdose at 37, cultivated a look as chaotic as his short, astonishingly busy life, dressing himself in everything from running shorts to leather jackets to leopard-print suits on his sets.

Other directors adopt a uniform so utilitarian — picture Steven Spielberg’s bluejeans, trucker caps and many-pocketed camera vests — that they transcend practicality to the point of self-parody: The filmmaker winds up somewhere between a hiker and a safari guide, intrepid, ready for the challenges of any location, any set. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Quentin Tarantino, who tends to dress on theme, in everything from jeans and tropical shirts to track suits and Kangol hats. But however clichéd or iconoclastic the look may be, the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto suggests in an afterword for “How Directors Dress” that filmmakers are never more attuned to their own sense of fashion than they are on a movie set, in the clothes they’ve chosen for the specific purpose of doing their work. “Each director has their own reason to wear something,” he writes. “While they’re making a film, they are in their natural setting: Their styling is natural.”