“They didn’t have a big wardrobe budget, so I had to be a bit creative,” he tells us. Utilitarian clothing also plays an important role, with fencing uniforms, military jackets and an orange life vest adding a sense of physicality and danger to what is sometimes just a group of people sitting around a computer. These cross-cultural touches hint at the globalisation afforded by the internet, while the vintage pieces – many of which were pulled from Burton’s own extensive archive, The Contemporary Wardrobe Collection – give the aesthetic an agelessness. There’s even a date-night homage to John Galliano’s AW94 collection, which Burton says he was fawning over at the time. Wearing costumes designed by the legendary Roger K Burton – who’s dressed everyone from the cast of Quadrophenia to Kanye West – the kids in Hackers rollerblade to school, get busted by the Secret Service, and hack the planet in Seditionaries parachute shirts, Quiksilver rash guards, bondage trousers, tacky tourist tees worthy of Vetements runways, and ‘half-American football, half-medieval’ Vivienne Westwood armour jackets. But one aspect of its appeal, which finds itself posted and regrammed ad infinitum, is its clothing. While the tech-centric plot is very much a product of its time – floppy disks feature heavily – its throbbing, Prodigy-laden soundtrack, kaleidoscopic hacking sequences, and a photogenic young cast including Angelina Jolie, Jonny Lee Miller, Matthew Lillard, and more have cemented its status as a cult classic. Hackers, directed by Iain Softley, follows a gang of teenagers on their travels through cyberspace, encountering corporate corruption and conspiracy embedded in the code. But before the cool minimalism of The Matrix (1999) and the elegant goth of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009) made hacking synonymous with well-cut black leather jackets, one 1995 movie had an altogether different proposal when it came to how this burgeoning subculture might dress. In real life, hackers might have come to favour the stealth and comfort of hoodies and sweatpants for logging long hours on their laptops – as we learned from The Social Network, even billionaire tech overlords prefer ‘fuck-you flip-flops’ over suits. But there’s no look to that lifestyle! Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture.” Speaking to the Wall Street Journal back in 2012, John Waters lamented a decline in subcultural style: “When I was young there were beatniks.
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