The Willem Dafoe oversized collar made its public debut on Hollywood Boulevard this week, and it was emphatically not the kind of thing you overlook. Dafoe was there to celebrate Angélique Kidjo, the Beninese singer-songwriter who became the first African musician to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he turned up dressed like a man who has done his research in the wardrobe department of every organised crime film ever made.
The ceremony on Hollywood Boulevard
The star unveiling took place on 18 August at 11:30am at 7011 Hollywood Boulevard, according to Angélique Kidjo’s official announcement, across the street from the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Dafoe spoke at the ceremony alongside Kidjo and Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. Also in attendance was Djimon Hounsou, who, like Kidjo, is from Benin, according to the BBC.
Kidjo, 66, is a five-time Grammy award winner, making the Hollywood Walk of Fame honour another landmark in a career already stacked with them. The occasion drew a room (or rather, a pavement) of people who clearly dressed for it. Dafoe, for his part, dressed for a slightly different occasion.
Willem Dafoe’s oversized collar and the art of proportion
The Kinds of Kindness star arrived in Celine shades and a green blazer worn over a black polo shirt. So far, so composed. The polo, however, was left unbuttoned at the top, and its collar was not the usual modest fold of fabric that sits quietly beneath a lapel. The two collar points were splayed right out across the blazer’s lapels, wide enough to read as a deliberate statement rather than a wardrobe malfunction.
It was the kind of collar you would not look twice at in a scene from Goodfellas or Casino. The sort of thing that, in the right context, arrives alongside a gold chain and a pinky ring. Dafoe, 71, has spent enough of his career adjacent to fictional organised crime to know exactly what he was doing. He played drug lord Armando Barillo in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the extremely stabby hitman J.G. Jopling in The Grand Budapest Hotel, and FBI agent Paul Smecker in The Boondock Saints, unpicking mafia-related malarkey for two hours straight. The man has a frame of reference.
The historical context is worth a moment. Back in the 1970s, shirt collars escaping over jacket lapels were simply part of getting dressed. Photographs of Al Pacino around the time of Serpico make the point plainly. Over the following decades, collars shrank, stiffened, and became largely forgettable. Dafoe appears to have looked at that trajectory and decided to reverse it.
This is not the first time he has played with scale. Two years ago, leaving a junket for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, he wore an all-black outfit finished with a shrunken cardigan that looked, as one observer noted, like it had lost a fight with a tumble dryer. The pattern is consistent: cardigans small, collars enormous, menswear somewhere in between and considerably more worth talking about.
Kidjo’s Walk of Fame ceremony takes place against the backdrop of a touring career and a Grammy tally that few artists anywhere in the world can match. The fact that the most discussed detail of the day involves a polo shirt collar says something either about fashion’s current appetite for proportion play, or simply about Willem Dafoe’s ability to make a green blazer do more work than it was designed to do.
