Bonnie and Clyde at 50: The film's fashion legacy

Our current affinity for power suits was born on a Hollywood lot 50 years ago. It was the August 13, 1967 when Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty busted into movie theatres in Bonnie and Clyde as two glam desperadoes taking the banks hostage in dusty, Depression-era America. A story of outlaws on the run, director Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde was set in the threadbare 1930s with Oscar-nominated costuming by Theadora Van Runkle. Van Runkle crafted an aesthetic of feminine power-dressing so at odds with the trends of the Sixties that the style in the film marked a new moment in fashion - one that, over time, was to become iconic.

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as Bonnie and Clyde.

On set, Dunaway’s cocked beret and patterned neck scarves evoked the cool existentialism of French New Wave cinema, while her bias cuts emulated the real life, tough-as-nails Texan Bonnie Parker. Dunaway’s Bonnie and her brawny femininity were a precursor to the power suits that would reach a fever pitch in popular women-led films of the Eighties and Nineties like Baby Boom (1987) and Pretty Woman (1990), as well as on Armani’s catwalks. This dressing for the job you want, not the one you’ve got, has returned with élan to the autumn/winter 2017 runways of Maison Margiela, Céline and Jacquemus.

Céline's tailored pencil skirts and layered knits on the autumn/winter 2017 catwalk.

In 1966, women everywhere clutched their pearls when Yves Saint Laurent released a tuxedo suit for women, dubbed Le Smoking. A year later, Bonnie and Clyde helped to popularize a different kind of power dressing that wasn’t defined by looking like a man. Instead, this chic bandit aesthetic drew its strength from a subtler sense of power, one that incorporated femininity right into its belted tweed and fagoting stitch. Speaking to WWD in 1967, Dunaway put it simply: “The clothes are divine,” she said, “they’re masculine styles but in a feminine way.”

Read more here