Dan Stevens is making the rounds this week to promote his role in the new series Gaslit, set inside a Nixon administration mired in the Watergate scandal. And while the fashion
on that show will presumably hew to the sober polyester of the early '70s, Stevens has turned the press junket into a truly wacky outfit spree. It would be one thing if Dan Stevens kept it to a singular amazing technicolor dreamcoat this week—but then he wouldn’t be Dan Stevens, the red carpet whiz we’ve long known him to be.
But let's back up a second. First, there was the Lemonhead-yellow tee he wore under a sharp navy blazer on The One Show, where Stevens elicited gasps and several thousand retweets for likening Prime Minister Boris Johnson to President Nixon. Then, there was the aforementioned dreamcoat he wore to the show’s premiere at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.
The look was part of a full rainbow-sherbet-hued suit look from designer Licong Gong’s graduate showcase collection as a MA menswear student at the London College of Fashion—with matching color-blocked leather boots. (“I wanted to come disguised as a work of art,” Stevens told Vanity Fair. He later changed into a tobacco-brown floral suit from Erdem’s fall 2022 collection, because, you know, why not?) He brought that same cheeky sensibility, at least outfit-wise, in a peaky, electric-yellow Awake NY houndstooth suit on The Today Show the next day.
This isn’t a blip on the radar for Stevens, who, with the help of his longtime stylist Michael Fisher, has been wearing the unexpected since his Legion and Downton Abbey days. (He even made an appearance here publication back in 2017 sporting an array of wonky three-piece suits.) And what’s better is there’s often a cohesive energy to his looks, even if the connective tissue is just chaos—this makes sense, given that Fisher, who also dresses fellow red carpet heavy-hitters like Jake Gyllenhaal and Sebastian Stan, has said he likes to reference his clients’ work in their outfits. While there haven’t been any explicit references to Stevens’s Gaslit character John Dean, the former (eventually disbarred) attorney who served as Nixon’s White House Counsel and later testified in front of Congress regarding his role in the cover-up, the actor’s groovy ensembles just about sum up everything Richard Nixon hated about the ’70s. So, congrats to you Dan Stevens, because that can only mean they must look good.