This Week We're Channelling: Oliver in Call Me By Your Name

Set in the early 1980s in the Italian countryside, and coupled with director Luca Guadagnino’s strong visual signature, coming-of-age drama Call Me By Your Name was always destined to be a visual feast. Characters Oliver and Elio, played by Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet respectively, forge a relationship against a backdrop of over-burdened fruit trees, al fresco dining and 16th-century Italian architecture. Costume designer Giulia Piersanti is responsible for the styling in the film, which acts as an extension of this leisurely aesthetic: shorts skim the upper thigh, shirts are oversized and unbuttoned and shoes, if present, serve a purely functional purpose. Although the precocious Elio has his own boyish charm, it's Oliver's preppy style that steals the show.

Oliver is a college graduate visiting from America, and his everyday attire is a casual take on Ivy League style. Where Elio wears band T-shirts and printed shorts, Oliver is more buttoned-up, favouring boxy, short-sleeve or rolled-up shirts in a variety of colourways, often with the tell-tale stitching of a polo player, further underpinning his heritage. He wears these with tidy cotton shorts, paired with a woven belt, or racy swimming trunks, while sporting Steve McQueen's signature Persols. The dusty feel of the film, matched with its effortless styling, has more than a whiff of The Talented Mr Ripley, and is well on its way to rivalling it as a seminal style piece.

SaveSave