The popular Instagram account Shia’s
Outfits has, for the
past year, documented a variety of looks sported by the actor Shia
LaBeouf—on his way to a West Hollywood gym, as he grabs an iced coffee
in Studio City, as he shops for groceries at Gelson’s. A cursory glance
at the feed might suggest that LaBeouf, who is thirty-one, is a
particularly handsome version of the classic Los Angeles or New York
fashion-conscious hipster: with his dirty denim and obscurely logoed
baseball caps and facial hair and ironic T-shirts and work boots and
fleece hiking tops, he is a hirsute, still sexually viable Silver Lake
dad crossed with a Chinatown-dwelling trust-funded art-school kid who’s
never not up for doing psychedelics. And yet this would not account for
the obsessiveness that LaBeouf’s style has inspired among menswear
enthusiasts. Multiple blogs and Reddit threads have been dedicated to
understanding what, exactly, makes the actor, as the streetwear Web site
Highsnobiety called
him last week, “a bonafide fashion icon.” This past summer, New York magazine’s The Cut offered an
explainer for his looks. And, as the cover story about LaBeouf in the most recent
issue of Esquire reveals, a number of years ago the rapper and designer Kanye
West visited the actor’s house to discuss a potential collaboration and
ended up taking, in LaBeouf’s words, “all my fucking clothes.”
Intriguingly for a star known for public outbursts, LaBeouf’s style has
stirred interest not because it is outrageous but, rather, because it is
just the slightest bit off—revealing in its small but significant
diversions from the norm the underlying conventions that most of us
adhere to, and opening up a path to reconsider them anew. With the
modestly calibrated oddness of his looks, he challenges our perceptions
of what counts as a good outfit, or “fit,” in streetwear parlance. As
one Reddit user noted last week, “all of his clothes are at the point
for me where they are almost cool/ok, but then there’s something else
that just makes it too wierd [sic], out there, homeless, trashy.” One
LaBeouf habit is stuffing his pants into his socks, creating a soldierly
silhouette in which meaty thighs contrast with dainty ankles. In another
oft-repeated move, he tucks his sweatshirt into his pants, evoking the
illustration in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Le Petit Prince,” in which a
boa constrictor stretches itself to swallow an elephant. LaBeouf also
likes wearing socks with sandals—often the much-reviled plastic Crocs,
favored by nurses and kindergarten teachers. A braided rattail, as thick
as a rope, which the actor sported for his role in “American Honey,”
became part of his look for a spell; he’s also been known to carry
around a jug of water and a large, dusty rucksack while walking around
residential San Fernando Valley. In one memorable look, his scrunched up
sweats revealed a slice of naked shin, which peeked out just above a
pair of stout Uggs, the fuzzy Australian boot popular with sorority
girls trudging, hung over, to a too-early class.
Usually, a deep interest in a celebrity’s style is sparked during a
robust moment in that celebrity’s career—one thinks of Michelle Obama,
Rihanna, the Hadid sisters. But the rabid fascination with LaBeouf’s
sartorial choices has been at odds with his professional success. A
former child actor from a chaotic, impoverished background, LaBeouf had
a difficult relationship with his father, who was addicted to heroin. He
rose to grownup fame in 2007, with the first installment of Michael
Bay’s blockbuster “Transformers” series. His early adult performances,
even in mainstream movie franchises, suggested a certain wounded
sensitivity, shot through with an uneasy but affecting tension. This,
combined with feral, broad-chested good looks, seemed a dependable
recipe for stardom. But, in the years since, LaBeouf’s troubled behavior
has come to overshadow his acting. In the course of the past decade, he
has been arrested multiple times—in 2008 for driving under the influence
(the charge was later dropped), and in 2014 for disorderly conduct (he
pleaded guilty), among other offenses. Most recently, this past summer,
LaBeouf was booked for public drunkenness when he became disorderly on
a street in Savannah, Georgia, resisting arrest and spewing racial
abuse after he was refused a cigarette by a police officer—behavior for
which he has apologized. (He pleaded guilty to an “obstruction”
charge, and the public drunkenness charge was dismissed.) In 2013, he
plagiarized a Daniel Clowes comic from 2007 in a short film he made—and
then begged for forgiveness, oddly, via skywriting.
Other exhibitions of eccentric if not downright bizarre behavior
followed, including a red-carpet appearance, in 2014, for which LaBeouf
wore a tuxedo and a paper bag over his head, bearing the words, “I am
not famous anymore.” The Esquire profile called him “the guy who was
handed a golden ticket and promptly lit it on fire,” and LaBeouf himself
told the magazine, “I’m run out . . . No one’s giving me a shot right now.”
While it’s true that LaBeouf has fallen short of his early blockbuster
promise, his difficult behavior—and his self-conscious creation of a
character based on it—has come to inform his public persona as an actor.
His well-reviewed performance as a skeevy, tormented traveling salesman
in “American Honey” seemed to knowingly enfold into it the viewers’
knowledge of his real-life struggles. Next month, in the movie “Borg
vs. McEnroe,” he will be playing the hot-headed tennis great John
McEnroe, who was also known for his public outbursts. Earlier this week,
it was announced that he will play his father in a film about his
own tortured beginnings that he will also direct, with Lucas Hedges
playing the young Shia.
Unlike Britney Spears, whose outré style choices during her own
extremely public meltdown, a decade ago—a shaved head, a variety of
wigs, no underwear, bare feet—seemed inseparable from her professional
and personal failings, LaBeouf is a celebrity whose problems infuse his
style, in the collective imagination, with an enticing, almost mythical
texture. In the words of Highsnobiety, his is a practice of “zero
coordination and zero fucks.” It is, perhaps, no surprise that the
culture grants this interpretation more easily to a man. Until that
changes, we can imagine a future in which all of us, regardless of
gender or celebrity status or muscle-mass levels, will look as good as
LaBeouf does in an old T-shirt tucked securely into high-waisted
P.E.-style sweat pants, which are, in turn, tucked yet more snugly into
gray tube socks.
Sourse: newyorker.com
