Joining Forces, The Dune Cast Demonstrate A Strategic Approach To Style

With Dune’s promotional trail hitting stratospheric proportions (and the movie landing in cinemas) Florence Pugh and Zendaya — along with Timothée Chalamet, Austin Butler and the rest of the cast — are on a sartorial showstopper of a tour.

Florence Pugh has truly mastered the art of the fashion moment. Take the Dune: Part Two premiere in New York on Sunday night. The actress wore an ethereal dove grey pleated Valentino couture gown, taken to the next level by futuristic-looking mirror-finish eye makeup and slicked back hair, putting her diamond earrings and ear cuff centre stage.

It’s a remarkable look in its own right, which more than held its own alongside Zendaya (in Stéphane Rolland), Anya Taylor-Joy (in Margiela couture), Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler — perhaps the most interesting and stylish red carpet dressers of our time. But it is more extraordinary still when you realise that it forms part of an epic fashion jigsaw that is the Dune: Part Two round-the-world tour of premieres.

There has clearly been an effort on the part of the film’s marketing team to have the lead actors reflect its themes and aesthetic in their red carpet looks. This “method dressing” is an increasingly popular strategy, also employed by Margot Robbie for Barbie.

Each of Dune’s stars’ looks will have had to co-ordinate with those of the other actors, so that there’s a nice cast photo op at every stop. Multiply that co-ordination by the number of premieres and photocalls (London, New York, Paris, Seoul and Mexico City so far) and it becomes rather mind-boggling. All of this is unfolding during awards season, when other celebrity stylists will be calling “bagsie” on the latest catwalk looks.

You don’t need to know, to enjoy this sartorial spectacle, that the Dune franchise is based on a 1965 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert about a world in the distant future, in which all “thinking machines”, such as robots and AI, have been banned. Nor that the landscape is arid and desert-like, although these factors have been the main sources of inspiration for the stylists involved in co-ordinating these celebrity looks.

Safe to say, the brief has been nailed by all parties. And the likely goal — convincing people who might not have gone out of their way to see a sci-fi film, that this one is worth their time — fully achieved.

Planning for this will have been in the works for quite some time, says celebrity stylist Rachel Davis, who works with Sharon Horgan and Edith Bowman and has dressed countless stars for red carpets and press junkets. She says there’s always an element of co-ordination.

“Normally, as a stylist, you’d be doing this alone,” she says. “You would be saying, I want Florence to wear this amazing Harris Reed, but of course it can’t be too similar to what she did last time…

“I styled a presenter for Bafta once and it had to fit with what the male presenter was wearing. I chatted to his stylist and of course, we liaise and we co-ordinate, but this is on another level, you’d have to show so much flexibility that you normally wouldn’t have to do. On this occasion they’re working as a collective.”

Davis is too polite to add that there are probably a lot of egos to navigate as well, and that the celebrities are the least of it. At this level, even the hair and makeup artists will be industry-famous — and their creative input is valuable too.

At the London Dune: Part Two premiere, Zendaya’s stylist Law Roach even walked the red carpet alongside her. Given she was dressed in a silver robot suit first seen in Thierry Mugler’s Fall-Winter 1995-6 collection, which promptly went viral, he was probably keen to lap up some of the adulation it inspired for himself.

Alex Babsky, the makeup artist behind Pugh’s silver eye decoration, is the best of the best, Davis says: “He’s an artist. He really is. He illustrates each look before he does it.”

And he will have been working overtime too: “This is the other thing,” she adds. “It’s the hair and the makeup and everything to go with it. It’s such a mammoth task. Everything Florence is wearing, there’s probably about three or four other options.

“Then Alex and [hair stylist] Evanie Frausto will have had to come up with ideas for each option. So say, three or four options of dress, then you’ve got jewellery, then you’ve got shoes. Then you’ve got hair and makeup, and then it has to fit with what Zendaya’s wearing or what Timothée’s wearing.”

Then there are the advertising or ambassadorship deals, according to which stars are obligated to wear certain labels, limiting the possible options. Pugh works so closely with Valentino, her stylist Rebecca Corbin-Murray probably has Pierpaolo Piccioli himself on speed dial.

And she’d have to; even though Pugh wears couture like she was born to do it, she does not have traditional model proportions so Corbin-Murray must commission each of Pugh’s looks to be custom-fitted.

“All her looks will have been bespoke, which makes the whole co-ordination thing even harder,” Davis says. “Because it’s not a case of ‘Oh, just pull it from the catwalk’ — although everybody does want to dress Florence, she has probably been inundated with offers.

“But they will have been in planning for a long time, and I think the nature of the film being sci-fi, they probably all really wanted to push it, because they can, because there’s always that slight costume-y element to a premiere a lot of the time,” says Davis.

And then there’s the art of knowing when not to be OTT. When Zendaya wore the archive Mugler couture robot costume to the Dune: Part Two London premiere, ”it could have been a bit crass and ‘Bride Wars’ to try to outdo her, says Davis.

Instead, Corbin-Murray styled Pugh in a relatively pared-back brown sequinned Valentino gown with a hood. “I think on this occasion, [Corbin-Murray] knew that Florence could still look fierce by just being cool and calm,” says Davis.

That’s because Pugh has her very own real-life superpower: “She knew Florence just being Florence can hold her own. Even if you put her in a little black dress – she would still be Florence.” No sci-fi plotlines required.

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