The sight of director Tim Burton attending the sun-drenched Venice Film Festival is a bit like the scene in Addams Family Values when Wednesday Addams shows up to the swimming dock at summer camp in a pitch-black Victorian bathing costume: a little comical, but also pretty sick.
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Arriving at the 81st annual festival, the filmmaker wore a loosely buttoned shirt underneath his roomy navy suit, whose breast pocket held a pair of pens. The pens in the jacket pocket is, in this day and age, a nice old-school move—not unlike how the director’s Beetlejuice star Michael Keaton recently accessorized his leather blazer with a folded newspaper. (And Burton did it in Italy, the very birthplace of sprezzatura, no less!) He rounded out his look with his usual purple-lensed shades, suede Saint Laurent creepers (naturally), and a jaunty wide-brimmed black hat.
Burton’s partner, the Italian actress-model Monica Bellucci, contrasted his goth look in a svelte white pantsuit by Balmain.
Burton and his cast hit their first Venice event the next day, where the four men of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—Burton, Keaton, Willem Dafoe, and Justin Theroux—all wore dark suits. Each charted their own distinct course: Burton paired his with a jazzy shirt printed with spooky cobalt-blue shapes, while Keaton opted for a knit polo shirt and navy suede Common Projects trainers. (Keaton is, after all, a sneaker guy.) Dafoe layered his charcoal suit over a black T-shirt with matching black leather slip-ons; Theroux went for a sharp-shouldered jacket with inverted lapels and black Chelsea boots. These are all titans from before the days of major press-tour PR pulls—method dressing just comes naturally to them.
