WHAT directors WEAR

In a new book from A24, the elements of auteur style get a close-up

- LEANNE DELAP

We tend to think of film directors as either deliberate slobs or posturing auteurs, but once you zoom in, many have a signature style. It’s a form of personal image-making that makes them memorable, behind the camera or in front of it.

Amid the chaos of the film set, there are a lot of eyes on the director. Artists and managers equally, charged with bringing a movie’s concept to life, they set the tone and lay down their vision for the project.

This was the inspiration for “How Directors Dress: On Set, in the Edit and Down the Red Carpet,” a new coffee table book from the film company A24.

“There is a singularity about the director,” said the book’s editor Charlie Robin Jones, a British content strategist and fashion journalist, via phone from London. “They stand alone, in charge.”

Take Sofia Coppola, who grew up a fashion muse to her pal Marc Jacobs. But as she took the helm of films with budgets of more and more millions, from “The Virgin Suicides” to “Marie Antoinette” to “Priscilla,” she also took on a uniform: custom cotton button-up shirts, both long and short sleeve, from the Parisian tailor Charvet are her on-set signature.

“It’s almost as though the more traditionally — and elaborately — feminine her characters on screen are, the stronger her desire to adhere to her own playbook, one that favours simple shirting over frills and bows,” former Dazed & Confused magazine editor Claire Marie Healy writes in “How Directors Dress.” Coppola has said she doesn’t want to have to think about what she is wearing when she is working.

Spike Lee has a different approach: the famously snappy dresser didn’t change his look for the longest day on set or the fanciest red carpet. Lee wore his Air Jordans on the sand at Cannes in 1991, paired with a custom varsity jacket that read “5 for 5,” commemorating the number of films he had made at that time.