After Luc Besson announced on Twitter that he’ll be working a film with Cara Delevingne, we partake in some sci-fi style predictions.
Luc Besson, feted director of The Fifth Element, has popped his Twitter cherry and confirmed that he will be making a movie with our darling Cara, titled Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets, in which she will play 11th Century peasant girl Laureline. The film’s eponymous hero will be played by American actor Dane Dehaan: Valerian, a time travelling secret agent will pick up Ms Delevingne on his inter-stellar travels and with her defend 28th century earth and its neighbouring planets (phwoar!)
In an industry where high calibre costume design can go on to mould fashion trends for years to come, and in a genre where prescient design is by default required (duh), the power of Sci Fi’s influence over fashion is a self-fulfilling one. To celebrate this intergalactic collision of British beauty & Insta-icon and French hive-minded directorial genius, we’ve used telepathy to boil the prospective fashion inspiration for the upcoming film down to five requisitely nerdy possibilities (of course, given the existence of parallel universes, and the implication that all possible alternate histories and futures are real, each representing an actual ‘world’, Cara will be dressed in infinite incarnations of the costume etc etc.)
The Fifth Element (1997)
Mila Jovovich’s Leelo in The Fifth Element rocked an orange wig and a mankini to match – no mean feat. The possibility of drawing on the epic designs of Paris’ own enfant terrible, Jean Paul Gaultier, who dressed over a thousand characters in this movie in his biggest undertaking to date, must be tempting.
The Matrix (1999)
OK, so we’re assuming that Cara will undergo some sort of futuristic transformation while traveling through space-time. Everything’s possible, right? Trinity is clearly a woman you don’t want to f**k with. She defies gravity (along with many other laws of physics), employing bullet-time ninja moves of inexplicable ferocity without even breaking a sweat, let alone splitting the rump of her patent leather unitard. With an audience on the brink of a new millenium, The Matrix and its darkly minimal, high-contrast costumes became a by-word for futuristic cool
Blade Runner (1982)
Sean Young plays Rachael, a bioengineered human ‘replicant’, who as a result of planted false memories believes herself to be human. The year is 2019, and the look is that of 40s film noir meets contemporary and wearable garb. A symptom but also a pioneer of 80s fashion, there are no cliched sci-fi fashion moments to be found in Blade Runner, and Rachael is modelled on Joan Crawford as dressed by Gilbert Adrian, with padded shoulders and all the accoutrements of 80s power dressing the order of the day. If Cara’s get-up is half as influential (and with all those twitter followers we imagine it will be) we’ll be impressed.
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace/Second Trilogy (1999)
It is undeniable that no other sci-fi heroine in the history of sci-fi has a wardrobe quite as enviable as Queen Amidala’s. That headgear, the sheer number of costume changes, the fact that as a result of said head and face gear nobody notices to this day that her decoy is played by a young Keira Knightly. If we were Cara we’d be disappointed with anything less.
Barbarella (1968)
Clearly, this is Jane Fonda pre-feminist-eureka-moment, and the numerous ways the now cult-status plot transpires to make her remove her clothes is obscene. Despite all of this, we want that (que predictable sci-fi trope) AMAZING green leotard for festival season, and all of the others she wears throughout the film too, please. We’re sure Cara agrees.
Words: Florence Trott