In a piece on i-D last year, our very own Douglas Greenwood wrote:
“Call Me by Your Name tells the story of Elio, a 17-year-old boy spending his summer swimming, transcribing sheet music and lounging around at his Antiquity Professor father’s villa, ‘somewhere in Northern Italy’. His serene, lackadaisical lifestyle is turned upside down by the arrival of his dad’s new assistant Oliver, an impossibly handsome 24-year-old from the States. Together, over the course of a few short weeks, the two fall for each other, simultaneously experiencing the electric beauty of young, uninhibited love in the throbbing, Mediterranean heat.”
And throbbing it is. Throughout the movie, both Elio and Oliver appear almost perpetually in tiny shorts. Tinier, even, than the tiniest Matrix sunglasses.
Here’s Armie Hammer, who plays Oliver, and Timothee Chalamet, who plays Elio, discussing the film’s wardrobe in an interview with IMDb last year:
But the clothes are more than simple adornment, alone. In the billowing shirts, tiny shorts and high-top sneakers lie a plethora of hidden messages to be dissected. A series of codes that speak of the characters’ desires and tell a story all of their own.
In this week’s episode of Fash-ON Fash-OFF, we’re talking all things film. We’ll be revisiting The Wachowskis 1999 classic The Matrix and seeing if we can discern its influence beyond last week’s discussion of tiny sunglasses. We’ll be discussing the probable impact of Call Me by Your Name on your summer wardrobe — a film that i-D has written about approximately 60,000 times since its release. And we’ll be hearing from costume designer Ruth Carter, on her afrofuturist vision for recent Marvel movie Black Panther.
Joining me today are i-D Junior Fashion Editor Bojana Kozarevic and i-D Contributing Editor Douglas Greenwood.
You can listen to Fash-On Fash-Off on Acast, Apple or wherever it is you get your podcasts.