10 Coolest Costume Outfits In The Matrix Franchise

The Matrix is not short on era-defining scenes, and some of its most influential were set apart by their distinctive and cutting-edge costume design. The Wachowski sisters wrote and directed all four movies in the franchise, although only Lana wrote the fourth, while only Lily directed it. All Matrix movies maintained a deep level of authority in the sci-fi genre, pioneering cyberpunk for a whole new generation. It was this cyberpunk aesthetic that made waves and resonated deeply into the movies, guided as they were by Australian costume designer Kym Barrett.

While The Matrix 5 is shaping up to take the franchise in a slightly different direction from 2021’s The Matrix Resurrections, it is the perfect time to look back on the movies’ best costumes. Lindsay Pugh took over from Barret as lead costumer for The Matrix Resurrections, otherwise known as The Matrix 4, taking inspiration from Barrett’s seminal work on characters like Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus. Keanu Reeves, as Neo, had many of the franchise’s best costumes across its four outings, but he wasn’t alone, with many supporting characters often looking just as good.

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10

The Merovingian’s Red Shirt & Black Duster

Lambert Wilson

Lambert Wilson was all class as the French-accented Merovingian. He was perfectly cast and characterized as the opposite of the many thugs throughout the movies. In his supreme power, he was the villain who could afford to be nice, and he was always suitably outfitted for it. Achieving a rare unity of style and function, the Merovingian’s suits spoke volumes. For a Hollywood wardrobe to rely on male tailoring as much as The Matrix does is challenging. On the one hand, it restricts expression significantly. On the other hand, its minimalism forces a powerfully consistent aesthetic language.

The Merovingian’s Hel Club tailoring involved an extra high collar, a cravat, and a jacket with a modern front, fitted waist, and period back designed to create a bat wing span.

Morpheus’ bold purple suit proudly declared his individuality above his black shirt. In stark contrast, Merovingian’s demonic red silk peeped out from a swathe of black uniformity underneath his black suit duster done up from the chest down. The Merovingian’s tall-neck, high-spread wide collar and sweeping gothic silhouette transformed a simple suit into the officewear of Count Dracula himself. Merovingian’s necktie was a work of understated genius, its double wrap heightening the collar into period ruff territory while creating the illusion of a typical, cookie-cutter knot under the other knot. Nothing was ever what it seemed with this slippery character.

9

Seraph’s Mandarin Jacket

Collin Chou

Everyone seemed to wear sunglasses in The Matrix, and Seraph wore them particularly well. Taiwanese actor and martial artist Collin Chou fully embodied the sentient program that lived to protect the Oracle. First appearing in The Matrix Reloaded, Seraph wore all-black just like his allies, Trinity and Morpheus, from his Chinese-style sports slacks to his micro-sunglasses. But Seraph stood out among his peers like a sore thumb due to the gleaming white jacket adorning his black getup. It was as if he’d been told to do Kung Fu but make it techno and had taken it far more seriously than anyone expected.

Seraph’s jacket was an ingenious emblem of The Matrix’s radical combination of Western and Eastern philosophy.

The sunglasses were Kym Barret’s signature and her way of individuating the cast – each pair was custom-made to measure by Richard Walker and expressed their wearers’ personalities. Meanwhile, Seraph’s jacket was an ingenious emblem of The Matrix’s radical combination of Western and Eastern philosophy. Its color referenced the angelic seraphim of Christian legend that gave Seraph his name while sending an important message. Gun-toting insurgency looks good in black, but rising above the chaff may just entail the Buddhist approach of awakening to a deeper reality – Kung Fu and Buddhism are deeply linked.

8

Switch In White Leathers

Belinda McLory

Switch wore full white in The Matrix, even though everyone else wore black. The trilogy’s techno-inspired aesthetic was, in fact, always monochrome, rather than black. The typical punk style that originated in the ’70s likes black but is happy to dabble in brights and tartans, whereas cyberpunk tends to phase out the brights in favor of a goth palette and futuristic design. And for every full black goth outfit, there is an all-white equivalent. No goth friend group is complete without the one person all in white.

Lana Wachowski brought Neo and Trinity back for Matrix Resurrections as part of her grieving process after losing her parents.

But Switch was always meant to be a little different. Switch stands out, partially, because she was originally written as transfemme. Switch was “originally written as a trans character who was male in the real world and female in the Matrix,” but Warner Bros.’ wasn’t ready for it. Switch helps make The Matrix an apt trans allegory, albeit an unintentional one on the parts of the trans Wachowski sisters. Taking a pill and waking up in the real world is a dead giveaway. Switch’s orange glasses are also an exemplary use of accent color.

7

Agent Smith’s Suit

Hugo Weaving

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Hugo Weaving blew minds as Agent Smith in The Matrix, in no small part due to his very snappy dressing. Smith’s powers in The Matrix were perfectly complimented by his corporate suit. Weaving was the Men in Black in his abundance, multiplying into myriad scarcely defeatable clones. Smith’s suit said all of this and some – he was just a number in the corporate maze, a literal code devoid of humanity.

At the same time, Smith’s suit rendered him an anonymized security guard. He could have been anything from a high-class bouncer fading surreptitiously into the background of a night out to a serious FBI agent concealing where he was looking behind dark sunglasses. In this sense, the Smith created by Kim Barrett was delightfully subversive and uncannily appropriate, a corrupt CIA agent diseasing the system.

6

Persephone In White Latex

Monica Bellucci

Monica Bellucci is so formal, elegant, and pretty in the white dress she is largely remembered for in The Matrix, it scarcely seems to be latex at all. And yet, miraculously, latex it is. And a most marvelous latex at that. The off-white color and subtle pearlescent sheen of the material perfectly imitate a formal, high-class fabric like silk or satin, subverting everything viewers think they know about evening wear. Sporting perhaps the most impressive latex costume in cinema, Bellucci truly put the punk in cyberpunk, attacking traditional and formal notions of style with every fiber of Kym Barett’s inspired brain.

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Like Persephone’s mock-formal dress, Merovingian’s suit, in this scene, was just centimeters away from completely ordinary. But it turned fashion on its head with the flick of a wrist – his striking and never-before-seen necktie knot became known as the Merovingian Knot in menswear. Persephone’s “formal” cocktail dress seated itself flawlessly next to Merovingian’s “formal” suit during their “dinner party” with Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity. This flawlessly conceived farce was written lovingly into every thread of the wardrobe.

5

Morpheus’ Purple Suit

Laurence Fishburne

Laurence Fishburne was unforgettable in his purple suit as Morpheus. The micro-sunglasses of this look have filtered down to runways to become a cyberpunk-influenced staple, breaking the mainstream in the 2020s even more explicitly than they did in the ’90s and 2000s. Barrett was playing a game of contrast with The Matrix wardrobe, and that was never more evident than in Morpheus’s purple costume. Up top, the three-piece purple suit was fairly typical. It could have been any wedding suit, had it not been offset by a beautifully matched green tie that dunked the whole ensemble into vintage villainy.

Like the Matrix itself, it appeared almost perfectly normal, but something was not quite right.

Presenting at once as the hero and the Joker, Morpheus’ suit jacket just got weirder below the waist, extending bizarrely into a mid-length coat with a period look. There was no better way to say that Morpheus could, and would, be anything he wanted in the dreamlike world from which he derived his name (Morpheus was the Greek God of dreams). Exemplifying The Matrix wardrobe strategy, the costume was deceptively conventional but distorted the status quo just enough to be unsettling. Like the Matrix itself, it appeared almost perfectly normal, but something was not quite right.

4

Trinity’s Black Vinyl Dress

Carrie-Anne Moss

Carrie-Anne Moss became a ’90s and 2000s fashion icon by default as the lead woman of The Matrix movies, blessed as the most powerful focus for Kym Barrett’s creativity. Womenswear afforded more diversity than menswear to the meticulous Matrix wardrobe, which was a lesson in restraint. Even through its Berghain minimalism, the wardrobe’s cybergoth and rivethead undertones were unleashed upon Moss’s slick-haired heroine. One of Trinity’s best costumes was the black vinyl dress she took for a woefully short spin in the original Matrix.

The Matrix taught German superclub Berghain how to discriminate against busy looks.

The dress is perhaps the franchise’s most loud and overt cybergoth moment, which says a lot because it is still understated. The dress would be at home in London’s Cyberdog – the home of cyber style since 1994. And yet, it is easy on the eyes. The Matrix taught German superclub Berghain how to discriminate against busy looks, ruthlessly cutting color and embellishment away to form an almost cartoonish simplicity that spoke to its anime influences. This sinister dress demonstrates that to a fault with its corseted sophistication, inspiring Underworld’s sleek vampires.

3

Neo’s Standing Collar Tang Suit

Keanu Reeves

As the main character of The Matrix, Neo changed Keanu Reeves’ life and changed fashion forever, courtesy of the Wachowski sisters. Like Seraph’s white jacket, Neo’s black jacket stood defiantly as a proud symbol of Kung Fu, Buddhist ideas, and anime styling. The jacket celebrated a host of martial arts movies that came before it, in homage to legends like Jackie Chan.

The mandarin collar saw a revival since The Matrix, now featuring as a cut commonly available in menswear design. The coat’s long, flowing silhouette was classic Matrix, allowing sharp definition of movement during the movie’s pioneering action scenes. Length creates drama, as Barrett so rightly noted in designing The Matrix wardrobe. Neo’s coat accented his every move in a fight, showing clubbers all around the world how to use a duster on the dance floor.

2

Neo’s Black Trench Coat & Combat Boots

Keanu Reeves

Neo’s iconic black trench coat costume defined the aesthetic of The Matrix overall, virally spreading to catwalks and high streets faster than Agent Smith in his heyday. Neo’s all-black style was essential to his character, reflected by that same aesthetic choice in Trinity, who was the other side of the same coin. These two love birds were parallel assassins that meant business. Neo grew from a disheveled computer geek wearing a poorly fitting, run-of-the-mill suit to a terrifying God of a man, regaled in dominant, form-fitting black materials.

Blending into the shadows and signaling his altered perception with his sunglasses, Neo was a sci-fi superhero, equipped with military boots, a utility belt, and a coat with the cut of a cloak. For all intents and purposes, Neo’s coat was his superhero cape, designed to stream behind him in the wind as he flew unnaturally through the air, defying gravity like any Superman worth his salt. The dystopian darkwear and techwear trends spring from Neo’s look, with combat boots and utility belts alone becoming a million-dollar industry.

1

Trinity In Black PVC

Carrie-Anne Moss

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Trinity wearing bodycon black PVC from head to toe may be the best costume of The Matrix franchise, but it is a tough call and realistically, there is an ideal outfit for every occasion. This all-black look was the most striking and simple of The Matrix, affording Trinity effortless utilitarian style. With her custom sunglasses designed to fit the arch of her brows, Trinity was the epitome of ’90s style in this fetish-inspired attire.

The Matrix can be streamed on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S.

Riffing off the kinky looks of the underground rave scene in the ’80s and ’90s, Trinity’s belted trousers offset her high-neck tank top, refusing over-feminized sexualization. Contrasting the ample cleavage on display in all of Monica Bellucci’s costumes, Trinity was a gender-defying weapon. She was meant to look like an oil slick, moving through the world like liquid (Fashionista). As Trinity in The Matrix, Carrie-Anne Moss was superhuman, impossible to catch, and bringing the wet look back.

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Source: Fashionista

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The Matrix is a sci-fi action franchise that launched with the Wachowskis’ 1999 film. It depicts a dystopian future where humanity is unknowingly trapped in a simulated reality by sentient machines. The protagonist, Neo, discovers this truth and that he is “The One,” a being that will lead a rebellion against the machines and restore freedom to humanity.

Movie(s)

The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, The Matrix Resurrections, The Matrix 5

First Film

The Matrix

Cast

Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Joe Pantoliano, Jada Pinkett Smith, Monica Bellucci, Lambert Wilson, Harold Perrineau, Gina Torres, Collin Chou, Neil Patrick Harris, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick, Jonathan Groff, Priyanka Chopra Jonas

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Source: https://dinhtienhoang.edu.vn
Category: Entertainment