In London the actor’s vintage outerwear proved his top-tier menswear credentials.
Timothée Chalamet is familiar with the menswear big guns. He’s the type of guy that can get custom looks made by the hottest designers (we’re talking Givenchy, Chrome Hearts, and Bottega Veneta). But in London for a Marty Supreme Q+A event, he showed he really knows the game. The actor wore a Raf Simons Summa Cum Laude bomber jacket plucked straight from the archive of the now-shuttered label. This wasn’t just rare. This was straight-up menswear dynamite.
The jacket featured in the Raf Simons’ Spring/Summer 2000 collection, also titled ‘Summa Cum Laude’, reflecting the prestigious academic honour. The curved shoulder MA-1 is a poignant reflection of the designer’s explorations of youth culture. It combines American academia with a hazy subcultural buzz, drawing from the function-heavy uniforms of gabba ravers. This combination of high-fashion, intellect, and youthful energy left a defining mark on menswear, where streetwear and traditional luxury could exist in the same universe.
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Simons closed his label in 2022, shortly after being installed as Prada’s Co-Creative Director alongside Miuccia Prada. That makes scoring archive Raf Simons pieces harder, especially those early gems like Chalamet’s bomber, which sells for upwards of £3000 on the secondary market.
To the uninitiated, the actor is wearing a chill-guy jacket, amped up to movie star levels with a mini Hermès Kelly handbag. But to those in the know, it’s a grail of the highest order, and a power move that says ‘my vintage plug works harder than yours’.
Timothée Chalamet has flexed his vintage Raf Simons muscles before, pulling up to a Lakers game in an Autumn/Winter 1997 zipper jacket. But with his latest move, he’s proven himself a faithful custodian of sacrosanct menswear grails.
