Timothée Chalamet showed up at the Oscars last night and did his job. He presented an award and sat through the entire show without noticeably falling asleep or screaming at anybody. And yet, because he didn’t wear a suit—the default outfit expected of men heading to the Academy Awards—he still managed to freak some people right the fuck out.
To be fair, Chalamet’s clothes were pretty goofy. He wore a shiny blue zip-up with a popped collar, matching pair of fancy-ish tracksuit pants, and giant ruby-and-diamond brooch topped off with a used-car salesman slop of slicked-back hair. The outfit was unusual enough that it managed to captivate the internet, which is currently trying out different descriptions of its effect. None of them are quite as accurate as a summary tweeted by John Manuel Arias, who dubbed it “gas station Dracula.”
Still, others attempted to name the look in different ways, describing it as everything from “trust fund kid showing up to his parents’ funeral” and “Ford V Ferrari cosplay” to the simpler observation that it looks like he’s wearing fancy pajamas or a janitor’s uniform.
The efforts continue by drawing parallels to valets and paramedics, French Olympians from the 1980s, exterminators, and hockey players.
Elsewhere, articles have been written about the supposed horrors of Chalamet’s sartorial choices. The outfit has been called “a letdown” and an act of fashion rebellion. This goes too far. Chalamet simply did his job in the clothes he felt were best suited to the event. That those clothes made him look like a shiny junior mobster is nothing to get worked up over. Actors are not a monolith—they should come from all walks of life and represent all aspects of the world we live in. If Chalamet wants to be the thespian version of our collective weird cousin, then we say good for him.
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