The star of Dune: Part Two isn’t Timothée Chalamet going full-tilt action star, or Zendaya’s turn as a fiery freedom fighter, or even a bald Austin Butler doing his best Dr. Evil voice. The real hero of Dune: Part Two is the clothes: from the Rick Owens-esque armor worn by the Sardukaur warriors to the Dilara Findikoglu-style chainmail worn by Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan, it’s been a long time since a mainstream blockbuster felt so in-tune with today’s fashion.
Sci-fi has been a source for fashion designers for decades. Raf Simons referenced the ‘80s classic Blade Runner in his Chinatown-set Spring-Summer 2018 show and an Eastpak collaboration from the same year. Alexander McQueen’s Spring-Summer 2010 collection Plato’s Atlantis, his penultimate before he died, was a hard-edged futurist vision in which the models were made up to resemble the hellish titular monster of Alien. The slick all-leather getups in The Matrix may have first been a reflection of ‘90s BDSM culture, but they’ve since become shorthand for the recent Y2K fashion redux.
But rather than influencing the clothes of the near-future, Dune: Part Two feels more linked with what’s happening right now. In an interview with British Vogue, costume designer Jacqueline West says she “drew a lot from the art of [H.R.] Giger,” the Swiss horror surrealist who designed the alien in Alien, while working on clothes for the gothy-looking Harkonnens. That influence is pretty clear to see. But it’s also easy to watch Dune: Part Two and see a lot of the hallmarks of contemporary menswear and even streetwear.
The palette—largely sand tones, muddy greens and browns, and faded black—is similar to the one utilized by labels like Fear of God, Craig Green, and Casey Casey; the ceremonial clothes worn by Butler’s sociopathic Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen recall the long, straight-cut tunic shapes that cult designer Kiko Kostadinov drops. The fraying shawls and deconstructed overcoats worn by Chalamet’s Paul Atreides look like they could have been designed by Yohji Yamamoto in the ’90s. (You can imagine Grailed sellers jacking up their prices on archival Yohji come Halloween to capitalize on the inevitable Paul/high fashion crossover costumes.) The desert landscape of Dune is there, right down to the heavily distressed, patinated effect on the life-saving stillsuits of Chalamet and co. It’s also right there on the intentionally moldy-looking Margiela gloves and jumpers.
And those stillsuits also feel accidentally Rick Owens, as do the high-necked Harkonnen body armors. There are flared hems, and rugged, striated boots, and it all looks very much like the classic Owens get-up—cult high fashion that would appear to have been beamed down for some apocalyptic far-flung planet.
