Wim Wenders: Fashion Hero?

The acclaimed filmmaker has long been anti-ostentation, but avant-garde designers have repeatedly found a collaborator in him.

“Fashion. I got nothing to do with that.”Words from director Wim Wenders in his 1989 documentary , a meditative study of legendary Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. At first glance, it’s a strange statement from someone who has popped up on the runways of, collaborated with, and focused his lens on people who peddle exactly that. “I am interested in the world, not in fashion. But maybe my judgment was premature,” Wenders continues in the film. It’s been a long and eventful relationship since.

There’s recent history. At Undercover​​’s FW24 show last month, founder Jun Takahashi—who had previously used the score from , the director’s Berlin-set exploration of life between death, to soundtrack his SS24 show—enlisted Wenders to read a poem he had penned titled “Watching a Working Woman.” As models walked the runway in Takahashi’s takes on the everyday—jeans, vests—Wenders told a story: “40 years old, mother of one, single, working.”Over email, Takahashi wrote, “Since our collection theme was ‘everyday life,’ I requested [Wenders] to create a poem much like , which portrays the ordinary moments of life. I’ve always been a fan of Wim Wenders’s films, such as and , and I’ve watched them repeatedly. Among them, his recent work deeply resonated with me. Having someone like Wenders, who creates such impactful pieces of art, to craft and read a poem for us is truly an honor.”

It’s the kind of high praise for Wenders that’s been shared by film critics and scholars for over five decades. Born in Düsseldorf in 1945, he released his first feature, , in 1970. Already, his preoccupations were on display: a drifting, alienated protagonist; beautifully photographed cityscapes; an interest in an idealized, imagined America and its culture. He was part of a generation of filmmakers, along with Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose work came to be known as New German Cinema. Seven years after his debut, he made his international breakthrough with , an idiosyncratic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s , a noir as interested in cinema history as it was in crime and psychology.

Wenders did more than read poetry in Paris this year; he walked in Yohji Yamamoto’s show in a number of looks, including a bold ensemble of tailored fishing vest, signature cropped pants, strappy overcoat, and a no-tie collar situation—a Wenders go-to. (In March, he recycled that outfit on the red carpet of the 2024 Oscars.) It was the first time Wenders walked for Yamamoto, but his relationship with the Japanese designer goes back almost five decades. The pair have built a lasting friendship on the pursuit of pure craft and a celebration of inner workings, both physical and emotional.Parallels with the poem Wenders recited at the Undercover FW24 show are immediate in his most recent film, the Oscar-nominated . With unflinching steadiness, the film follows Tokyo toilet cleaner Hirayama, played by Kōji Yakusho, down to the minute details of his routine and working day, from rising at the same time to the same sounds to the regimented filing of photos and careful winding of cassettes. It’s an unabashed celebration of the beauty in banality. A call for us to notice the unnoticed.While could be seen as an idealized view of country and character—something Wenders has acknowledged—this observance and honoring of life’s minutiae and the discernable beauty in it is undeniably something that has recurred in the art and culture of Japan and resulting commentary for decades—from film to fashion. Wenders and the few Japanese designers he has collaborated with share that way of seeing, and that’s likely a pivotal reason for why this once fashion-averse director has kept coming back to a world he appears otherwise at odds with.In a recent interview with the BBC, Wenders reaffirmed his search for something more than art as ornamentation. “It happens to me that people call me artist and I don’t like that,” the director explained. “I think filmmaking is a craft. You know how something works and you work with other people. You have an attention to the instruments. Myself, I’m not an artist, I’m a craftsperson. Artist is a bit too lofty for me.”

It’s a sentiment similar to one unpacked in his Yamamoto documentary—a film that plays host to several illuminating conversations between the two, from the origins and even divine beginnings of making to the evoking of emotion and memory to be found in a finished product. Listening in on the pair’s conversations, it’s easy to understand their compatibility; Yamamoto rejects the label of “fashion designer”—instead preferring the more operative “dressmaker.”In the film, Wenders describes the first time he encountered the work of Yamamoto —when putting on a jacket and shirt by the designer. “From the beginning they were new and old at the same time. It came from further away, from deeper.”It’s this past-conjuring aspect of Yamamoto’s work which evidently speaks to Wenders on a profound level—an aspect he finds missing in wider fashion. “It only deals with today, never yesterday,” he bemoans of the industry. That longing for a palpable sense of the past—but a sense not suffocated by nostalgia and one that still has the power to affect the now—is a common trope in Wenders’s films.Though Japan boasts a wealth of visionary designers that share Wenders’s affinity for this two-way connection between user and maker, the director’s search for such exalted simplicity has led him to labels elsewhere, too.In 2018, the director teamed up with Jil Sander on a series of films titled . Launching the Jil Sander SS18 collection, these video vignettes featured startling human stories, each paused at their climax. From German fashion to Italy, where in 2021 Wenders turned his eye to a fashion film of sorts for luxury label Ferragamo, one which tells the story of a couple and their proliferating love on the set of a sci-fi drama.Both Jil Sander and Ferragamo place huge value on technicality; in shape, form, and function. Their collections are rarely overly statement-heavy and never garish. Like Yamamoto and Watanabe, these labels bring the poetic to the prosaic. Craftspeople that ask themselves what it is that will elevate the daily lives and the wardrobes of those that wear them. They don’t make costumes, they make uniforms.Connecting the dots between his collaborators, we get a sense of what and who has kept someone who has “nothing to do” with fashion coming back to capture some of its best work. But what about the fashion in work? Wenders’s films have often captured worlds of challenging austerity—whether in character, setting, or story.In , Wenders frames a grayscale story of two angels eavesdropping on the lives, thoughts, and desires of those living against the bleak backdrop of Cold War Berlin. Long dark coats crowd the screen for much of the film, but are lightened by the relief of ethereal angel wings and the glamour of Marion—a trapeze artist that angel Damiel hopes to fall in love with to achieve mortality. The fleeting feeling that surrounds Marion’s scenes, and her discipline itself, reflects an idea of an ephemeral beauty in life that’s so easily missed, or perhaps not appreciated, if not being looked for—a practice championed by Hirayama in .“It’s a huge subject for me in all my films, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that is the look and the way you look that opens up the world to let you see behind the surface,” Wenders told BBC

Offering more color but equal melancholy, (1984) tells the tale of drifter Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton), who reappears after having been missing for four years. Through the readjustment and reconnection to society, people, and place demanded from its protagonist, Wenders opens fresh perspectives on the duties of the everyday and resulting environments—gas stations, motels, endless roads. Duties but not drudgery for Wenders—the plot allowing him to focus on one of his favorite motifs: Americana.Vast, whistling vistas provide an intimidating and isolating backdrop while its characters and the riches unearthed by Wenders—the palpable mohair of Jane Henderson’s (Nastassja Kinski) pink sweater in the film’s iconic booth scene to Travis’s dusty red cap and leathery weathered skin—serve as life rafts of beauty in the otherwise barren. It’s the juxtaposition that lets the details sing with lasting power; the visuals and clothes of the film are still key in upholding its place as a much-referenced, influential piece of work to this day. Returning to the sound and scenes of her home state of Texas, Beyoncé teased her upcoming Cowboy Carter album with a nod to the red-capped Travis. At Bally’s recent FW24 show, the label paid homage to that aforementioned mohair piece. A book of the film’s stills still sells out regularly and fetches wild prices.

Of all times, places, and cultural contexts conjured by Wenders in film, it is perhaps this Americana red thread that has allowed him to examine the everyman and the fashion that follows its characters in its most raw, life-worn and authentic form—whether dressed in Texas or the bleak streets of Berlin and Hamburg. Perhaps no other wardrobe speaks to a slower, tougher, but undeniably simpler way of life than this one.In (1977), Hamburg gets the Wild West treatment not only through the film’s gun-for-hire plot, but also in its costuming, designed by Isolde Nist, that sees Wenders’s love of a disappearing style infiltrate this unlikely German backdrop. Dennis Hopper’s character Tom Ripley sports a beaten cowboy hat for much of the film—a fitting symbol for a strange character in a strange setting. “Even this river reminds me of another river,” he narrates at the film’s opening, unconnected but indicative of fashion’s power to play with seemingly fixed times and places and transport us somewhere else entirely.

In his films, clothes become objects of elsewhere—memories, places, lives lived. They are second skins; extensions of characters that feel lived-in and achingly real. With the wardrobes of his films so on-point, how does the man himself manage his own? Flicking through some of his standout looks, some of which feature in this post from IG account @directorfits, it’s apparent that the subject matter of his films, and naturally, his interests, have trickled through to the wardrobe of Wenders himself. On location for , Wenders is seen in the first slide of that post in a torn up button-down and white casual pants—a look ready for the American road he has so regularly returned to. In the film, we see Travis trade in his dusty red cap, battered suit, and dilapidated footwear for a crisp gray three-piece—a sartorial transformation not unlike the one undergone by the character’s creator.

Wenders has built somewhat of a more refined uniform for himself since the days of shooting . While strictly “anti-tie,” he often appears at events in a smart rotation of open blazers, button-down shirts, and the occasional set of suspenders, topped off with his now-signature round spectacles. His love of Japanese design remains, making its way to the red carpet on more occasions than his recent Yamamoto call-up. He’s seen at a 2017 premiere sporting a pair of black balloon pants and his favored combination of tailored goods with a pair of comfy sneakers.Wenders is stylish, but he’s not a man of trend or celebrity, the needlessly experimental, or overly elaborate. Instead, Wenders has found affinity in a chosen few designers who still hold technicality, design for a greater good, and an understanding of fashion’s everyday emotional power in high regard.The stories told in Wenders’s films, and his chosen collaborators in fashion, speak to what clothes can be when at their very best: elevators of the routine able to stir profound emotion even when serving the most functional of human needs; projectors of unseen stories, of other times and places; and despite Wenders’s protests about such “lofty” labels, pieces of art.