Hello and welcome to the Cult Classic Cine Club! Every month there will be a selection of four films curated around a theme. Each following Cult Classic Cine Club send will look like this one, which dissects every outfit worth discussing. Paid subscribers will get additional sends that feature a vintage curation, style notes and more, inspired by each film. The first theme was NEW YORK NOSTALGIA and this is Hackers (1995).
⋆˚౨ৎ ⋆.˚Please note, the NEW YORK NOSTALGIA cine club sends will be wrapping soon. There will be a June theme announcement next week and then a send like this weekly as I finally get into the swing of things! How fun.⋆˚౨ৎ ⋆.˚
I recently bought my boyfriend Rafe an old Apple Macintosh booklet from 1989. It is titled “Who Needs a Computer Anyway?” and features illustrations from cartoonist and Simpsons creator Matt Groening. The joke was that Rafe, both a recreational and professional computer nerd, very much always needs a computer.
The booklet was distributed on college campuses to encourage students to buy Apple computers. It’s an amazing piece of ephemera because it represents a time where people had to be convinced they needed technology. It’s also a catalogue with genuine charm. The idea was that there were different kinds of personas on campus, from the stressed to the clueless to the procrastinator, who could benefit from a computer to get their school work done. But that was it. Computers were sold as a tool, not a home. Computers were sold as something that could help you enjoy your life outside of it, not create one for you.
I kept thinking about this little booklet while re-watching Hackers, a cult classic starring Angelina Jolie as a hot ‘hacktivist’ who wears Vivienne Westwood. It came out in 1995, six years after “Who Needs a Computer Anyway” circulated around college campuses. At that point, computers weren’t just equipped with programs to help students write essays or make pie-charts. The World Wide Web was happening. It was the early days of the internet, where no one really knew what they were doing but joyfully dedicated hours to coding hot pink fanpages for things like Ren & Stimpy, not sure if anyone would even see it. It felt human and weird, like taking a ride through the brains of people you didn’t know with no operative other than connection.
That’s also the appeal of Hackers. The movie itself has a pretty nonsensical plot. There’s a group of high school hackers who have aliases like Zero Cool, Acid Burn, and Cereal Killer. There’s a villainous former hacker who tries to frame them to cover up his fraud under the guise of preventing an oil spill, all with a virus called “Da Vinci.” There are yellow floppy disks they all wield like nunchucks. I find the storyline nearly impossible to follow every single time but it also doesn’t really matter, at least not to me.
The best parts of the film, aside from the outfits, is that it feels like what we all thought the internet would be. The hackers travel through a neon-colored cyberspace that looks like a digitized New York, skyscrapers erected out of long stretches of code. They create cookie monster viruses that eat away at stretches of text like pac-man. They shout things like, “Hack the planet!” with the unbridled optimism of a group that believes technology might save the world. When they’re done, they just step away from their keyboards, wearing punk red parachute shirts and silver armor rings that extend past their knuckles, to weave in between zooming New York traffic while on rollerblades.
That is the campy and technicolored virtual existence I was promised. But I guess it was never real either. It was always this mirage of what could be. I genuinely did google, ‘when did computer nerd stereotype begin,’ after my initial rewatch because the cyberpunk futuristic aesthetic the hackers wore really threw me off. I even asked Rafe, “Hey, how and when did your kind get their reputation for…uninspired outfits?”
Turns out, computer nerds have existed as long as computers have and they never really wore Vivienne Westwood. Back in 2020, the film’s costume designer, Roger K. Burton, did an interview with Dazed where he admitted that the hacker fashion scene was completely uninspiring, so he created his own. “We went on a series of recces around New York, because the hackers over here [in London] didn’t really have too much of a profile: you couldn’t identify them,” he said. “But in New York it was quite a big deal. They’d have conferences, and so on. And, fucking hell, they were so boring. Dressed in black. Some of them were quite old, actually, and they’d obviously been into computers for a long time. It didn’t quite have the glamour or the persona that I really wanted to create so we had to create our own, basically.”
I see where he’s coming from. It’s fun to close your eyes and try to imagine what the world would be like if all the evil computer geniuses who have eroded our reality into a hellish landscape of non-human optimization and algorithmic slop just rollerbladed around after writing some code, while wearing bright tartan and chunky combat boots. What if they just hacked for fun and looked fabulous? For a moment, I’d like to think that’s a realistic persona who needs a computer and not just a cinematic figment of our imagination.
More from Cult Classic: An interview with the costume designer of The Devil Wears Prada 2 that reveals how Miranda wears little to no Prada…The Drama of The Drama’s orange puffer coat…Every outfit from an underrated Chloë Sevigny classic that’ll provide a great blueprint for summer dressing
EVERY SINGLE OUTFIT WORTH DISCUSSING
If computer nerds went cyberpunk.
OUTFITS ONE AND TWO (0:10:53): Dade “Zero Cool” Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller) and Ramon “The Phantom Phreak” Sanchez (Renoly Santiago) clearly stand out from the rest of the student body. The film sets us up immediately to see them as cool, not geeky.
Dade also just moved to New York and his camouflage fishing vest gives that away. You can sense he’s trying to belong. There’s a little bit of edge there but the utilitarian nature of the vest has a more nerdy vibe than his hacker peers give off. Then there’s Ramon, who wears different shades of clashing leopard print in a way that feels quintessential New York.
OUTFIT THREE (0:11:12): Out introduction to Kate “Acid Burn” Libby (Angelina Jolie). She’s asking Dade about his transfer forms while wearing a blue Vivienne Westwood t-shirt that reads: Too fast to live, too young to die. The ‘50s style pixie-cut, extensive ear piercings, and skull-and-bones t-shirt send across an obvious message: she’s anti-establishment. In the world of Hackers, those that are skilled at computers don’t just dress well, they use their techy smarts for subversive good. They view themselves as misunderstood vigilantes with an impressive typing speed.
When she turns around, she reveals her backpack, which is so long it almost hits her at the back of her knees. After doing some research, I found out that this is a military parachute deployment bag. Some users on twitter have even been so inspired as to try to recreate their own.
Throughout the entire film the main cast is dressed so well you barely notice anyone in the background…except for this diva making eyes at Dade. Her impressive pattern-mixing with the harlequin-style tank and plaid skirt instantly caught my eye.
OUTFIT FOUR (0:15:22): But back to the hackers. Dade’s signature piece is this biker jacket from the ‘70s that Roger found on Portobello road in London. The biker fits feel right for someone who rollerblades around New York and also skates around cyberspace.
Previous New York Nostalgic Cult Classic Cine Club Sends:
OUTFIT FIVE (0:15:36): Every hacker in Hackers dresses punk but Emmanuel “Cereal Killer” Goldstein (Matthew Lillard) is the closest thing to a authentic New York street punk. His military-style jackets are covered in patches, his necklaces are adorned with multiple charms and his belt loops always have something dangling from them. He feels like a magpie who bops around New York, picking up trinkets others have deemed trash.
In an interview, Roger also revealed that a lot of the shirts and patches Cereal decorates himself with are of his anti-heros like Charles Manson and Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. Once again, these hackers fancy themselves as misunderstood champions, not nerds.
OUTFIT SIX (0:15:56): This cat t-shirt with New York written in script underneath it was actually from a souvenir shop in Times Square and the lights in the rose initially lit up, although it stopped working ahead of filming. Why do we not have New York merch this good anymore? I am tired of the I <3 NY shirts. I want a stern-looking airbrushed cat holding a battery powered flower!
OUTFIT SEVEN (0:16:17): One of the most interesting things I read while researching Hackers was that Angelina Jolie was extremely reticent about doing the film initially. When she met with Roger about the costumes, he said she was fairly stand off-ish until she saw the clothing he wanted to put her in. Eventually she was so sold