A few sartorial tips from the 1990s bad-boy.

Before Hollywood turned to prestige television, before smartphones and social media splintered our attention spans, film was king. Say what you will about the late 1980s and early 1990s, the movies made back then were amazing. Sure, there are some bits that don’t hold up so well now, but judging from our present-day street style, no era of film has had more influence on our new-millennium dress than the one at the tail end of the last. The four films, made between 1988 and 1993, that made up Mr Christian Slater’s moonshot to movie stardom are a masterclass in costume design that look as great now as they did then, maybe even better.

For a variety of reasons, it is impossible to imagine Heathers being made today. It is a (satirical) film about a killing in a school, but it is also rife with the glinty-eyed irony you just don’t see at the cinema any more and, man, the costumes. Mr Slater made quite a rock-star breakout as the wise-ass-Mr-Jack-Nicholson-wannabe smouldering through high school in an oversized trench coat and military boots. Nevertheless, we’d venture that, if seen through the right, gentle eyes, the film still feels incisive about school cliques and materialism and the disaffections of youth that can lead to ostracism, angst and even violence.

Before he transitions into full pre-grunge flannels, concert T-shirts and acid-wash denim (all banger garments still), Mr Slater’s bleach-blond skateboarding hero in Gleaming The Cube confronts an international smuggling ring in a sporting spin on prep. Dig the slouchy sweater over a white button-up. Even skate legends Mr Tony Hawk and Mr Tommy Guerrero in the background look amazed. Bonus points to the gent on the left with the aviators on a strap and the gent on the right with the very Los Angeles buttoning scheme.

When it came out at the top of the 1990s, the premise of Mr Allan Moyle’s great Pump Up The Volume – that Mr Slater’s Mark Hunter starts a pirate radio show in order to find his own voice and in the process gives voice to a generation – was vivid, novel. These days, when every Tom, Dick and Harry has a podcast and a dozen other public channels through which to share their voice, we have to wonder what Hunter would say now. What’s not in question is what he’d wear – precisely what he wore in the film, probably. The all-black-everything, heavy-on-the-camp-collar-shirts and skinny-jeans uniform of, well, a podcaster.

A great early-career cameo from Mr Brad Pitt, Mr Quentin Tarantino’s Tarantinoiest monologues, the most outrageous character ever played by Mr Gary Oldman and Ms Patricia Arquette’s “four-alarm fire”, Alabama Whitman – True Romance is an overstuffed buffet of delights. Chief among them is the candy-coloured dream of Mr Slater’s wardrobe. Watching his freewheeling, frenetic Mr Elvis Presley impersonation is a joy. Watching him do it while hightailing out of town in a rag-top pink Cadillac wearing embroidered bowling shirts, Aloha shirts and chrome-dipped aviators is even better.