2018’s Most Unexpected Style Icon: Ezra Miller
The first thing you need to know about Ezra Miller is that he is preposterously beautiful; a combination of full lips, bedroom eyes and a jawline that looks like it has been carved out of precious marble by the attentive hand of an Old Master. The second is that he’s a goat doula on his farm in rural Vermont. And the third is that he’s the most exciting person putting clothes together in 2018 by far.
Last week, GQ published a delightful profile of Miller, which introduced the world to his goat birthing skills. But the most compelling part of the story, perhaps even moreso than the goats, were the accompanying images.
Miller was photographed for the story looking pensive wearing a snug turtleneck and matching elbow gloves in an arresting shade of Pepto Bismol pink. He assumed the posture of a pampered prince wearing a sharp-shouldered tiger print blazer and a sequinned vest underneath. He wore a cozy-looking floor-length knit green dress paired with a swipe of dark brown lipstick.
The outfits were theatrical and bizarre, yet Miller looked completely at home in them. Though many of the getups were traditionally feminine, Miller didn’t look like he was consciously gender bending. Rather, he appeared blissfully unaware that such gendered codes of dressing existed in the first place.
Then there’s the matter of his red carpet appearances. Recently, Miller appeared at the Paris premiere of his Harry Potter spinoff film Crimes of Grindelwald looking like the Michelin Man meets an extraterrestrial, in a floor length hooded puffer dress by Pierpaolo Piccioli from Moncler’s Genius Project – the very coat that appeared on the cover of FASHION’s October issue. Latest, he wore an all-white ensemble topped with a swan-like feathered cape, silver face paint, and the words ‘Avada Kedavra’ smudged in ink on his palms.
Which prompts me to ask, WHERE EXACTLY DID THIS SENSE OF STYLE COME FROM?! Did he pick it up from his Vermont farm, like a leaden meteorite that’s plummeted down to earth? Did it come floating down the river in a basket, only Miller plucked it from the raging currents to raise it as his own? His newfound sense of style is attention-grabbing, confounding, mystical, almost interplanetary. It is, pardon my gushing, completely brilliant. Miller is, as the kids say, “doing the most.”
In a year where the most prominent masculine aesthetic to emerge is the grubby “scumbro” of Pete Davidson’s Supreme hoodies, Jonah Hill’s basketball jerseys and Justin Bieber’s tie-dye shirts, Ezra Miller’s sheer extravagance offers salvation from slobcore. He isn’t cosplaying femininity, exactly, rather he’s channelling himself, one fabulous red carpet outfit at the time.
We could all take a lesson from Ezra Miller’s spectacularly extra sartorial choices.
