The Four Ways to Wear Luxury in Nolan's Odyssey

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is set around 1200 BCE, more than 3,000 years before adventure kicks off in his movie Batman Begins. The anachronism sharpened the mockery Nolan received for dressing Agamemnon as Batman in a muscular, matte black suit, but the memes missed the luxury signals in his wardrobe. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick gave every principal a different relationship with luxury. Agamemnon performs it. Penelope weaponizes it. Athena refuses it. Odysseus earns it. Watch for those four positions and the film becomes a nearly three-hour argument about status signaling, one that transfers directly to interpret clothes off screen. The material choices are documented in the designer's interviews, and I drew parallels to the runway.

Decoration has to be in on its own joke

King Agamemnon was the supreme commander of the unified Greek forces during the Trojan War. He's the closest thing to a villain in the movie; he sends men to die and sacrificed his own daughter for a favorable wind without raising a weapon himself. Mirojnick dressed him in striking black armor with gold details. Gold medallions, for one, do no protective work in battle, so they're decoration.

Versace's Fall 1992 collection built evening gowns with fetish straps and then embellished them with golden medallions; fashion critic Suzy Menkes objected to the risqué theme, and 200 socialites wore these pieces to a benefit anyway. Vogue reported that getting strapped in required eight hands. Versace's collection could land as glamour because people involved treated it as theater. Agamemnon wears the same register of embellishment with complete sincerity, and this sincerity sincerity strips Versace-esque irony from his choice and leaves overcompensation.

When Agamemnon turns his back, we catch the costume's most discussed detail: a golden spine running down the back of his helmet. Fashion has been wearing the skeleton on the outside for nearly a century. Schiaparelli quilted one onto a dress with Dalí in 1938. Shaun Leane cast a metal spine and ribcage for McQueen in 1998. In that lineage, the exposed skeleton is an acknowledgement of mortality, worn as armor against forgetting it.

Cavalli ran a gold spine down the back of a dress in 2000, and the house reissued it for Zendaya in 2021. The motif crosses over to ornamentation on the Cavalli dress. On Agamemnon the same element inverts into a prosthetic, a golden spine for the man who lacks one.