James Bond stole my look

The undershirt is back. That's the main fashion message of the new Belvedere vodka commercial starring James Bond actor Daniel Craig, which is going viral around the world. At least that's how the message came across to the younger colleagues. I hadn't even realized the undershirt was ever gone.

In the little film, Craig, after a photo shoot in a light James Bond blazer on the Parisian Pont Neuf, dresses in the car and dances, initially still wearing a leather jacket, back to the posh hotel "Cheval Blanc". There he plays spin the bottle with an empty vodka bottle in the lobby, steals a waiter's handkerchief and opens the minibar in the room to treat himself to a vodka. After that, the whole thing turns out to be a film-in-a-film. A very annoyed director calls "Cut" and (in the Extended Version) has the recording repeated until Craig, who apparently always drinks real vodka, eventually falls off the catwalk drunk and into a pool.

At least the first part is reminiscent of the atmosphere and the fact that an actor of tough macho men is dancing here, reminiscent of the video clip for "Weapon of Choice" by Fat Boy Slim from 2001. At that time it was Christopher Walken who ended up after a hard day's work, put on an incredible, gravity-defying dance performance directed by Spike Jonze in the deserted Marriott Hotel in Los Angeles, bathed in golden evening light.

However, I had a completely different kind of deja vu. The hairstyle, the mood lighting, the silver necklace and especially the black undershirt looked damn like it did in a photo of me from 2018. Strapless undershirts, which are completely incorrectly called “wifebeaters” in English, were never out of my style Fashion.

And Craig's, at best, mediocre, grooving way of dancing finally gave me the eerie feeling that the James Bond actor was parodying my look and my always somewhat alien appearances on the dance floors.

Luckily I don't have delusions of grandeur or paranoia. The explanation is probably more in the artistic intentions of director Taika Waititi ("Jojo Rabbit", "The Mandalorian") and choreographer JaQuel Knight, who worked a lot for Beyoncé, in the city of Paris and at the age of Craig.

The whole video breathes a deliberately manufactured eighties atmosphere. The leather jacket, belt and army-style pants Craig wears might have been borrowed from Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan (or me, if I'd kept my old stuff) five years his senior. The undershirt seems borrowed from Freddie Mercury (although it would have been a mesh shirt for him). The androgynous twerking dance steps look like something out of any music video from the era in which mass gender roles in pop culture were ironically deconstructed for the first time – albeit without the dogged seriousness with which this is done today. The undercut hairstyle was also back in fashion after the rampant seventies.

Only a few small details of Craig's look are more modern. The tattoo – tattoos didn't become popular culture until the 1990s. Or the flat shoes – in the eighties it would be Dr. Martens or cowboy boots.

The filming location is also typical of the era. At that time, Paris was competing with London and New York as a place of longing, especially in the cinema. Bands like Depeche Mode, Visage or Blancmange didn't give themselves French names by accident. And the eighties cult director Leos Carax shot his most famous film "The Lovers of the Pont Neuf" at exactly the point where the vodka clip now begins. In addition, the 1980s were the decade in which, for a short time, the advertising industry, which is now jokingly joked about in the little film, became glamorous and its actors stepped out of anonymity. The supermodel was invented at that time.

Last but not least, the James Bond cult was at its peak back then. The Bond character's cool, stylish, sexist cynicism was welcome as an antidote to the previous decade's hippieness. Superstars of the era like Duran Duran created Bond theme songs or even starred like Grace Jones. By the way, they drank vodka with it. But preferably original Russian.

I doubt that director Taika Watitli, who was born in 1975, knows all of this and has thought about it. It may be an overinterpretation. I'm sure Daniel Craig, who turned 14 when the '80s really took off in 1982, will remember some of it. Nobody can take this knowledge and our undershirt away from us.