Los Angeles Magazine
December 1, 2001
BY: Amy Wallace
Bitter sweet dreamers: in their comedies Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and now The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson and his friends Owen and Luke Wilson skirt irony in favor of sincerity. They are the perfect funnymen for an unfunny world.
YOU HAVE TO SEEK OUT VAHRAM. IF you need to know about Wes Anderson, if you really must understand, then you have to find Vahram. Vahram knows. Oh, you can read the impossibly detailed scripts Anderson writes. You can watch his funny, melancholy movies. You can talk to his best friend and writing partner, Owen Wilson, or Owen’s actor brother, Luke. If you don’t mind waiting–and waiting–you can sit down with the filmmaker himself and discuss why he was obsessed by limousines as a child or why Linus is his favorite Peanuts character.
But to comprehend Wes Anderson, the 32-year-old writer-director who has been called the next Martin Scorsese by Martin Scorsese, you have to get into his head. And to get into his head, you have to get into his pants. That’s where Vahram comes in.
Vahram is Anderson’s tailor. His name rhymes with arm, but Anderson calls him “Varn,” which rhymes with barn. Vahram doesn’t care. Vahram knows Anderson’s inseam, where he wants to be suppressed and where he wants to stick out. Vahram has touched Anderson where few other men would dare. As much as anyone, Vahram has taken Anderson’s measure.
“I got a lot of customers with their own bugaboos,” Vahram says. He is sitting in his Manhattan workshop, a narrow room stacked ceiling high with bolts of fabric. Most people, he says, want to be taller or thinner or broader in the shoulders. The six-foot-two-inch Anderson wants to be understood. “He wants to bring you into his world.”
So far that world consists of three films: Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, which comes to theaters December 14. Anderson’s movies are comedies, but they are also sad, filled with messy emotions. Loss. Betrayal. Contrition. Regret. He finds laughs not in jokes but in juxtapositions. His movies aren’t gross or mocking or savagely ironic. They are sincere, observant, nonjudgmental.
Anderson likes to wear traditional suits in wacky colors–a wardrobe whose meaning I’ve had time to ponder. For weeks I have hounded his assistant, his agent, his producer, and a phalanx of publicists connected with the movie studio releasing his new film. Everyone says Anderson is on board, excited to be interviewed. Finally he summons me to New York for a lunch meeting. Then he cancels lunch.
Vahram could be a character in one of Anderson’s movies–wry, modest, very much his own man. His name, however you choose to say it, fits right in among the Dignans, the Royals, the Kumars, and the Pagodas who populate Anderson’s films. His bearing, too, is Anderson-esque: He’s a plain-talking guy who looks on the bright side and calls his father “Pop.” When Vahram talks about clothes, it’s as if he’s run Anderson’s psyche through his sewing machine.
Anderson has figured out that he can use wardrobe to alter reality. Wear a white turtleneck under your rust-colored suit jacket, and you are professorial. You are rakish. You are Carl Sagan. Wear a purple turtleneck with that same rust-colored jacket, and you are Sagan-ish, Sagan-like, but with a twist. People receive you with trepidation, perhaps, but also with curiosity and a willingness to be surprised. In Anderson’s hands, weirdness is a tool to make you lean closer, to make you listen.
In Vahram’s 5th Avenue shop, the tailor makes Anderson’s seersucker and pin-striped suits. He cuts, tucks, and hems the cashmere herringbone suits and the fine-wale corduroy suits in royal blue, egg white, and burnt orange. “Not a lot of people are going to get this kind of color,” Vahram says. That’s why he has to order it special.
Vahram’s suits fit Anderson like the tiny pinafore on the overgrown Alice in Wonderland. The shoulders are too narrow. The pant legs are abbreviated so, as Vahram puts it, “Wes’s whole sock is showing.” The jackets button over Anderson’s sternum, and the pockets hit him high, just under his rib cage, so when he jams his hands in–which he often does–his long arms form two sideways Vs, like he’s dancing the funky chicken.
