The iconic filmmaker definitely has a look. In fact, there are various social media accounts dedicated to the Wes Anderson aesthetic, including “Accidental Wes Anderson” which has 1.8 million followers and “Wes Anderson Planet” with over 250K followers on Instagram.

In person, Anderson looks like he has just stepped off the set of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (a film that the American director admits that he adores), although there is also a touch of the modern preppy, a-la Ralph Lauren, about his look. During a junket at Berlinale for Isle of Dogs, his 2018 stop-motion animated comedy, one of the actors doing voices in the film Bryan Cranston perfectly described him as “eclectic and unique”, while Jeff Goldblum called him “some sort of enlightened fakir; he is graciousness, elegance and kindness.” The filmmaker is (and his frequent collaborators will confirm it) the perennial 12-year- old, as is apparent in his choice of footwear – dark tan Clarks Wallabees, which he is often seen sporting on the red carpet, as well as during press appearances.

He somehow manages to mix that childlike wonder with a nearly compulsive sense of precision, a combination that translates into utterly enchanting movies. Anderson has a fascination with symmetry and possesses a fresh eye for fashion and design, as well as a keen attention to detail that is almost unparalleled. Almost, I say, because there was one man before him who was just as obsessed with the elegance of small things.

In a television interview, actor Burt Lancaster once noted the meticulous skill of Luchino Visconti, the late Italian filmmaker and theatre director, who has enjoyed a renaissance of late thanks to various retrospectives as well as the remastering of his films in 4K. Lancaster revealed that during the filming of Visconti’s The Leopard in 1963, there were “shirts in drawers that I was never meant to wear, just look at, touch them, make them mine”. They were placed there simply to give the actor a sense of just how grand a character he was portraying.

Just as Visconti did before him, Anderson likes to get down to the bare essentials. When I caught up with the actors who lend their voices to the filmmaker’s latest animated venture during the Berlinale Film Festival, Bob Balaban had his own “underwear story,” for want of a better description. During the filming of Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Oscar-winning costume designer Milena Canonero sourced Balaban’s entire wardrobe “from thrift stores, and it was so rare, they kept it; even the underwear I wore, which was from 1973”, the actor revealed, before adding: “And by the way, wearing authentic period underwear is impossible!”

On the set of that same film, which can be credited with making red beanie hats and Adidas trainers popular, Bill Murray spotted a swimming suit that he coveted. As he explained: “I’m not really a fan of the Speedo swimming suit, but there is a version that doesn’t look exactly like a Speedo, which I had to wear in the movie. It was really comfortable and it wasn’t what we call a Speedo in America, but it was the same fabric and it was designed by Milena Canonero. It was beautiful; I still have it.”

While someone like Murray is lucky enough to be able to walk off the set of a Wes Anderson film with a souvenir, your average shopper needn’t feel left out. Owning a piece of the filmmaker’s fashion vision can be as easy as walking into your local highstreet store. Every brand, from Zara and Gucci, to H&M, Prada and Louis Vuitton, has drawn inspiration from Anderson’s work.

Season after season, designer Alessandro Michele, former creative director of Gucci, featured looks in his collections that seem to have been lifted straight off the set of The Royal Tenenbaums. Meanwhile, within the Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Anderson-designed Bar Luce is a cool space featuring striking colours and vintage furnishings reminiscent of The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Darjeeling Limited.

For Isle of Dogs, the inspiration came directly from Japan, where the film is set. “Japanese woodblock prints were a big influence,” Anderson admitted in Berlin. One of the early notes in his notebooks said: “Keep it poetic.”

Thanks to the help of frequent collaborators such as Murray and Goldblum, and new ones such as Liev Schreiber and Cranston, Isle of Dogs manages to be just that – extraordinarily poetic. If the activities of this pack of dogs trying to escape an island of rubbish ever became too hectic, Anderson knew to reconnect to his inspiration, which he found in the images of one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century.

“This movie started to look like a Richard Avedon picture in some of the shots,” the filmmaker admitted. “It wanted silence and an extreme simplicity to offset the fact that it is jam-packed with stuff we wanted to have in there.” Avedon is of course, remembered particularly for his great fashion photography, which changed the landscape of style from the 1950s onward, through his minimalist aesthetic and simple silhouettes.

The look of Isle of Dogs is also very futuristic: “a 1960s version of the future, as if [Japanese filmmaker Akira] Kurosawa had done the future in the 1960s,” Anderson revealed. It is, he added, “a fantasy version of Japan”. Nonetheless, it is within this magical realism, a nearly dystopian view of humanity gone to the dogs, that the style of this particular film by Anderson is found.

From baseball jerseys paired with silver dog tags to a silver mesh jump- suit worn by Katari (the lead in the film), as well as the kimono-inspired white lab coats worn by Yoko Ono and the rhinestone-studded collar belonging to the sultry Nutmeg (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), everything in Isle of Dogs can be adapted to be worn by humans, rather than just movie dogs. And designers took notice. From Balmain’s autumn 2018 silver leather pantsuit to Gucci’s latest kimono-inspired outfits, the trends for that year looked towards Japan for their style cues.

Following ventures included the 2021 title The French Dispatch and his latest Asteroid City. In the former, Anderson tapped into his love of The New Yorker, the magazine he grew up reading ravenously during his Texas childhood. As the Los Angeles Times pointed out, the film’s art director Adam Stockhausen used “color, frame and miniatures for an alluring production design.” Also in the article, by Daron James, it is noted that “design cues were inspired from reference material including the 1956 short film “The Red Balloon” from Albert Lamorisse, which brings color to postwar Paris, Orson Welles’ “The Trial” and works from Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati and Jean Renoir, among a vast collection of photos of France dating to the mid-1800s to aid in set decoration, headed by Rena DeAngelo.” The result is a luscious mix of black and white with color that make one yearn for a trip to flea markets and estate sales, from Paris to Angoulêm, where select pieces where purchased for the production.

For Asteroid City, the look is all 1950s American desert style, complete with pastel colors and Wim Wenders’ Euro take on no name town USA. His collection of photographs titled Written in the West, which he compiled during his preparation for shooting his 1984 road movie Paris, Texas.

The famous last words about Wes Anderson belong to the super stylish Jeff Goldblum, who had this to say about the filmmaker in Berlin: “I think he’s original, he doesn’t follow the trend of what’s come before, he’s a student of what’s come before, yet he’s a pioneer forging his own way. That’s an artist ... original and progressive.”