Baby Driver: Painting with Clothing

A black iPod Classic with white Apple headphones and black wayfarer sunglasses. If you knew me in the summer of 2017, you knew these items were inseparable from my body. That same summer, another boy donned an eerily similar getup on the big screen. This was Baby, from Baby Driver.

Baby Driver is a movie musical like no other, it’s a ballet of red metal, rubber, and rock. There are no emotional outbursts into complicated dances here. There are only adrenaline-pumping car chases synchronized to the guitar riffs and drumlines of rock and roll. Baby Driver is a product of writer/director Edgar Wright. Wright is famous for his style of visual comedy, mastery of the needle drop, and birthing characters with iconic costumes. Wright’s most iconic characters are all identifiable by one colour embedded into their clothing, like Ramona Flowers’ blue hair or Shaun of the Dead’s red tie. All these costuming choices serve to tell us who they are.

 In all Edgar Wright’s films, the world around the premise is fully realized and meticulously crafted to tell a story. This includes costuming! You learn a lot about the characters from what they wear. Baby’s duo-toned wardrobe is dense with details. The duality of black and white speaks to his life in crime and outside of it; one as a serious and stone-cold driver and the other as a kid with a love of music. The final crew of Bats, Buddy, and Darling are all painted with red, blue and pink respectively: Red for Bats’ thirst for blood and unhinged energy; blue for Buddy’s cool and easy demeanour and ties to the navy suits of corporate America; and pink for Darling’s feminine presence in the crew and balance to Buddy’s blues.

In revisiting this film for this recommendation, I immediately jumped the colour coded characters (see this video essay for more on that). Now, we aren’t murderers or chauffeurs for the criminal underworld, so we don’t need to colour our wardrobes to represent that. But we can dress in a way that more closely reflects how we feel. Take Debora, when not in her work uniform, Debora always wears yellow; she lights up Baby’s world.

You can add in some small details into your fits that allude to how you feel or who you are. If you’re ecstatic one day, you don’t need to don a yellow tracksuit. A pair of yellow socks will work excellently. After recontextualizing Baby Driver, you can expect me to start projecting my emotions onto my outfits. You can also expect more colour to appear on future Televised products. Colour, when used with intention and purpose, can elevate your wardrobe to new heights. Tell your story, through your clothes.

Baby Driver is available to stream on Netflix and you can rent or buy the film at any digital retailer.