Rollergirl was excited about it. Style Salvage was excited about it. Anybody worth their music salt was excited about it. Yup, the film, Control came out and I only just saw it a few days ago. Just in case you haven’t had the promos thrusted upon you (it could just be a London thing…), Control is the biopic film about Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis who committed suicide at the tender age of 23. The film is based on the book ‘Touching from a Distance’ by Deborah Curtis, widow of Ian.
The film is Anton Corbijn, a music video director who has taken his experience and added a very purposeful stylistic approach to the film. It’s filmed in very stark monochrome and yes the cinematography is as stunning as they say. However I’m still a little unsure whether the details of Curtis’ life, the involvement of the other members of other Joy Division and the finer emotional details were glossed over a little in favour of style. Sam Riley and Samantha Morton do stellar jobs of playing Ian and Deborah Curtis and the band’s own performances of the songs must be commended as other music biopics seem to be in favour of using dubbing…. (*ahem* La Vie en Rose…)
The fashion point of this post though is a tribute to Ian Curtis’ personal style that Style Salvage noted a while back. More to the finer point, both the boyf and I have been trying to figure out the material/structure of these jeans that Ian Curtis wore at a very early gig when the band was still called Warsaw in 1977. Questions ensued…
Are they leather trousers? That would have been my first guess as the time period would suggest so, but then upon closer inspection, they also look to be waxed denim (much like those Dior Homme sheeny jeans I so wanted…). Did shiny waxed denim even exist back in 1977? In the film, they used leather trousers to hint at this particular outfit but looking at this image, I’m not convinced…
Either way, leather or denim, they looked superb as worn by Curtis and it seems all pants shiny are making headwaves at Topshop so the quest for the exaggerated shiny pant (those black sequin ones that ppl have pointed out to me aren’t exactly the ones I wanted but thanks for the tip-offs anyway…) continues.
I’ll leave you with one of my fave Joy Division songs: She’s Lost Control (which is incidentally the inspiration behind Maaike Mekking’s AW07-8 collection which I talked up a while back…).
Source: stylebubble.typepad.com
