THE JOURNAL
Mr John Waters, Switzerland, June 1988. Photograph by ullstein bild via Getty Images
Photographed in 1988, this image of Mr John Waters outside a hairdresser’s has all his style signatures present and correct. Here is the Pope of Trash, as Mr William S Burroughs famously called him two years earlier, in his pomp.
The backdrop is not accidental: 1988 was the year Hairspray was released, taking the director, who had previously been making low-budget cult films, to a more mainstream audience. With Ms Ricki Lake as Tracy Turnblad, and cameos from Ms Debbie Harry and Mr Sonny Bono, the film – a sweet, funny but thought-provoking story about teens fighting racism in dance competitions in the early 1960s – was even nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Later, of course, it was adapted into a successful musical and film starring Messrs John Travolta and Zac Efron.
Waters’ films are the subject of an upcoming exhibition John Waters: Pope Of Trash, which comes to the Academy Museum in Los Angeles in September. The first event to look at his career as a whole, costumes worn in the films will be featured as well as notes and scripts. It’s a must-visit – and provides a good moment to acknowledge that Waters is no slouch when it comes to style.
When Hairspray came out, Waters, who was then in his early forties, had been making films for more than 20 years. He began in his native Baltimore as a teenager, roping in friends including Ms Mink Stole, Ms Cookie Mueller and Divine to appear in underground – and often outrageous – efforts including Hag In A Black Leather Jacket, Eat Your Makeup and Multiple Maniacs. His style as a younger man had the thrift store sweaters, garish shirts and long hair you might expect.
“‘The sight of a pair of khakis turns my stomach,’ Waters writes. Instead, he messes with what men ‘should’ wear”
By the 1980s, he had switched to something ostensibly smarter, but bearing the hallmarks of Waters’ signature subversion: it might be a suit, but it’s not boardroom-ready. Waters has made a career out of celebrating offbeat and outsider characters, and he brings this spirit into his own look. As Ms Ariel Levy wrote about him for The Cut in 2008, “the thing he makes fun of is propriety”. This runs throughout what he wears.
In his 2010 book Role Models, Waters explains how he resisted the preppy outfits his parents approved of. “Even today the sight of a pair of khakis turns my stomach,” he writes. Instead, he messes with what men “should” wear. The tradition of tailoring is playfully subverted here. See an oversized jacket, and combinations that would not play out well in the corporate setting. A striped shirt clashed with a polka-dot tie is a case in point – one that takes the conventions of menswear and revels in the absurd.
Perhaps for this reason, Waters has found a kindred spirit in Comme des Garçons founder Ms Rei Kawakubo, a woman who loves nothing more than sending up ideas of what fashion looks like, and who once declared “red is black”. In Role Models, Waters dedicates a chapter to her, explaining how he first discovered the designer in 1983. “Ms Kawakubo is my God,” he writes. “I genuflect to Rei’s destruction of the fashion rules.” Her influence can be seen here.
“Suits that ‘pass’ while also being just a bit deviant have become a trademark”
The details of Waters’ look are as intentional as his clothes. His famous moustache began, as he once said, as “a ridiculous fashion joke” or a “twisted tribute” to the musician Little Richard, who also had a pencil-thin upper-lip accessory, and was one of Walters’ childhood heroes. Waters accentuates his with an eyebrow pencil, specifically Maybelline Velvet Black. By 1988, it was bedded in – and it remains an essential element to the distinctly Waters take on style. “I know my moustache is creepy to some people, but it’s creepy in a positive way,” he said to The Baltimore Sun in 2011.
As a child of the 1950s, Walters knows the power of sunglasses, as a symbol of rebellion, mystery and, of course, cool. But this isn’t a straight-line homage to Brando and friends. In his book Crackpot, published in 1986, Waters describes the crucial element of slipping on a pair of sunglasses on the way to work, to play his role properly: “after all, I am a movie director,” he writes, with a wink. Sunglasses are still in his wheelhouse – he wore them, with a snarl, for a SAINT LAURENT ad campaign in 2020.
The cigarette as accessory is a finishing touch, another element that doubles down on bad-boy symbolism. This may be the only part of Waters’ look that has changed significantly. Once smoking five packs of Kools a day, he’s quit in recent years. Or, to put it in his words, “I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t even smoke cigarettes anymore.”
Suits that “pass” while also being just a bit deviant have become a Waters trademark. At the age of 77, the director is enjoying something of a resurgence with a new generation. Along with the exhibition, he’s been a scene-stealer in TV shows such as The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and Search Party, wearing suits for both appearances. (This, too, leads back to Hairspray. Waters, in the style of Sir Alfred Hitchcock, even appears in the film, as a malevolent psychiatrist, wearing a suit.)
He is now working on his first film since 2004’s A Dirty Shame, an adaptation of his novel Liarmouth, which he describes as a “feel-bad romance”. If anyone can make such an idea work, it might be Waters. The other certainly? He’ll be wearing low-key subversive tailoring while doing it.