Further pushing the boundaries of corporate dress codes as we know them, director Anton Tammi [best known for his work with The Weeknd] and a team of young creatives have dropped a new short film with Finnish label Latimmier. In it, the brand’s SS24 collection – which was made up of extreme office-wear and signature outré silhouettes – spills out off the runway and onto the streets of Helsinki.
Titled Positions of Power, the offering – which debuted at Copenhagen Fashion Week in August – provided a fun, subversive take on the clothing worn by hyper-masculine “men in power”, with shredded-up suit trousers, shirt cuffs blown up to XXL proportions, and jackets paired with thigh-high trouser boots and matching full-body cuffs.
On the runway, as audio clips from Succession and The Wolf of Wall Street looped in the background, models stomped out in shirting tacked with rows of pens, fabric printed with shredded invoices, jumpers knit to match the highs and lows of the stock market, and tongue-in-cheek graphic tees printed with the words “money, powder, glory”.
“We aren’t literally doing 80s business pastiche,” the label’s creative director Ervin Latimmier told Vogue Scandinavia after the show, breaking down the collection’s references towards archetypes of powerful men seen in American film and TV. “Thematically, [it’s] the idolisation of these men, pounding their chests, high on cocaine, making and stealing money.”
Now, in the minute-long film, the collection and and themes are seen IRL, showcasing how Latimmier’s corporate characters transform and literally bend historic masculine dress codes. Unlike on the runway – which also saw Ervin Latimmier slip into his drag persona, Anna Conda, to perform a lip-sync to “Hey Big Spender” [a hint towards the collection’s campy energy] – the short sees Latimmier’s cast of models striding down city streets while takeaway coffee-drinking, newspaper-reading corporate employees bend and stretch in shape around them.
Amid the blurry figures, models are lensed walking underneath skyscrapers in the label’s boxy suiting, commuting with red pens tucked into their collars, and ducking through swarms of paperwork in copy machine-printed suiting – all showcasing Latimmier’s vision of shape-shifting everything we’ve been taught about office-wear to date.
