Jeff Goldblum for Prada and Macaulay for Gucci won't be the last catwalk non-models.
Celebrity catwalk cameos are a glimpse of fame at double-strength.
Whatever we were expecting from Miuccia Prada and co-creative director Raf Simons for Prada’s autumn/winter ’22/’23 menswear collection, it certainly wasn’t Jeff Goldblum closing Milan fashion week by giving Blue Steel in a mohair coat. Perhaps an inclination might have arisen after the presentation’s opening, with Kyle MacLachlan of Twin Peaks, Dune and Sex and the City fame arresting the audience’s attention in a powder blue deux piece and black outerwear. But even after a peppering of actors dressed in loose, bold Prada-fied workwear — Love Actually’s Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield among them — Goldblum bookending MacLachlan’s cameo came as a surprise. His walk, stiff and formidable, was anathema to the supermodel stride, languid and vulpine.
Naturally, the spectators ate it up, and chaos ensued on social media almost immediately afterwards. Surely both Prada and Simons knew all too well that tapping MacLachlan and Goldblum, two men whose offbeat vintage celebrity puts them in the category of “internet boyfriend-slash-husband”, was a recipe for success. Cue a barrage of tweets celebrating MacLachlan’s swagger and Goldblum’s Berghain-appropriate look. Gen X-ers and Gen Z-ers alike shared and devoured the same runway shots of both with voraciousness. In their double-breasted suits, Butterfield and Brodie-Sangster were the cherries on top.
It’s not the first time in recent memory that A-listers have been enlisted to walk in a fashion week presentation, and Prada’s autumn/winter showcase certainly seems like the latest chapter in an emerging trend. Last November, for Gucci’s Love Parade, creative director Alessandro Michele dressed up Jared Leto, singer Phoebe Bridgers and Home Alone’s Macaulay Culkin in flamboyant finery, sending them hand-in-pocket down Hollywood Boulevard. The reaction was similarly enthusiastic, revealing the delight we take in the cultural crossover.
Like the rise of the high fashion collaboration — Gucci x Balenciaga, Fendi x Versace, Gucci x The North Face, all bursting onto the scene in 2021 — there’s a magnetism that comes from seeing worlds collide. Often, we enjoy our clothing and our cinema in separate spaces. But when the boundaries of entertainment are blurred and the distinctions between art destabilised, we glimpse fame at double-strength, celebrity, identity and commerce overlapping to form a moment we just can’t look away from.
Of course, the fashion-fluent will point out that hiring non-model celebrities to appear on the catwalk in general is by no means a fresh phenomenon. Recall Lady Gaga walking for Thierry Mugler in Paris in 2011, Madonna for Jean Paul Gaultier in 1992 or Miley Cyrus for Marc Jacobs in 2020. But there’s something different about the virality of, say, Jennifer Lopez hip-swaying down the runway in that plunging Versace dress, versus MacLachlan emerging from a Kubrickian tunnel in a cocooning Prada overcoat. The former is an inevitable consequence of the designer-muse relationship, that classic connection between creative visionary and young, conventionally attractive pubic figure: Elle Fanning for Miu Miu autumn/winter ’18/’19, Kylie Jenner for Kanye West’s Yeezy in 2015, Dua Lipa for Versace spring/summer 2021.
The latter, on the other hand, is not a predictable pairing, but a symbiosis that is both organic and unprecedented. MacLachlan and Goldblum for Prada, Culkin and Leto for Gucci, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson for Valentino — all are the unique products of a digital age where the cult of celebrity is made up equally of It-girls and the eccentric. For as many followers as there are of Emily Ratajkowski and Hailey Bieber, there exists swathes of communities online devoted to the older and unexpected. These groups rally around the celebrities whose pull is seen as a welcome antidote to overly polished glamour. Willem Dafoe in Prada’s autumn/winter show of 2012. Steve Buscemi in loafers. Adam Driver in the same navy suit at every movie premiere, ever. Keanu Reeves alone, in his beanie and cardigan, could probably start a religion.
These are the non-model models who occupy our contemporary consciousness. And their hold, internet culture aside, is also refreshing because, put simply, it’s nice to see people of different ages, genders and body sizes in a fashion show. Seeing a 69-year-old, grey-haired, hawk-eyed Goldblum in head-to-toe Prada has the strange consequence of making the clothes seem more universal. Normal. Relevant.
If labels are smart — and they are — they’ll continue to explore the cultural touchpoint, and mine internet husbands for favour.
Now, for Brendan Fraser to walk a runway.