Purple Noon, Alain Delon’s lesson in style
In 1960, a twenty-four-year-old actor played an impostor who steals an heir’s life. More than sixty years later, his white shirts and his ease aboard a sailing boat remain cinema’s finest lesson in summer elegance.
The film opens on a terrace in Rome, two idle young Americans, a bottle of wine and the white light of an Italian summer. It is 1960; René Clément is adapting Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, and he has given the lead role to a little-known twenty-four-year-old actor: Alain Delon. Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) would make him a star, and his bearing a reference for generations of men.
The perfect impostor
Tom Ripley is a penniless young man sent to Italy to bring back to San Francisco Philippe Greenleaf, a rich man’s son squandering his father’s money between Rome and the coast. Ripley envies everything about him: his money, his fiancée, his boat and, above all, his ease. The whole film rests on an unsettling idea: by imitating the gestures, dress and manners of an heir, you can end up passing for him.
That is also what makes the film so precious to anyone interested in style. Scene after scene, it shows that elegance is not a question of expensive clothes, but of the way they are worn.
The white shirt
Delon’s wardrobe in Purple Noon comes down to very few pieces. Light cotton shirts, often white or pale blue, worn open at the neck, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Pale pleated trousers in linen or cotton. A light jacket for evenings in town, worn without a tie. Boat shoes or loafers, without socks. Nothing more.
What is striking is how right the proportions are: well-cut shirts, neither too loose nor too fitted, trousers at the right length, a slim belt. And above all, the way everything looks as if it has been worn for years, slightly crumpled, never contrived.
Patricia Highsmith’s novel was adapted again in 1999 by Anthony Minghella as The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon and Jude Law. That film in turn revived a whole aesthetic of 1950s Italy: knitted polos, loafers, sunglasses and Vespas.
On the sailing boat
The scenes at sea, the most famous, are played almost entirely in swimming trunks and open shirts. This is where the film becomes a true lesson: tanned skin, an open linen shirt, simple shorts, and absolute ease of movement. Summer elegance has nothing to do with accumulation; it lies in simplicity and in the quality of a few pieces.
What to take from it
- Few colours: white, pale blue, beige, navy.
- Natural materials: cotton, linen, light wool.
- Well-cut clothes rather than remarkable ones.
- The relaxed crumple of linen, never sloppiness.
- One strong piece at a time: a watch, sunglasses, a belt.
Why this style endures
Because it does not try to be fashionable. The clothes in Purple Noon are the same ones an elegant man might wear today on the Amalfi Coast or in Saint-Tropez. They do not date, because they are simply a very polished version of the essentials.
True luxury, on screen as elsewhere, is never shown. It is sensed.
Watch the film again next summer, ideally on a warm evening. You will not only learn how to dress. You will see how ease, more than any garment, makes style.
