Timothée Chalamet Is Dressing Like It’s 2012 All Over Again

What, you may wonder, is Timothée Chalamet listening to?

First, let’s consider his outfit. On a stroll in Manhattan this week, the native New Yorker wore a black Supreme box logo long-sleeve tee, matching black sweatshorts, Saint Laurent cat-eye sunglasses, a New York Rangers cap (how Lydia Tár of him!), and white Nike crew socks hiked up over a pair of blue Converse x Commes de Garçons PLAY high-top Chuck Taylors. From the looks of it, Timmy’s participating in the city-dwelling ritual of going on a little errand walk: He’s got over-ear headphones on and he’s carrying a shopping bag from the NoHo vintage store Looks, which later posted a photo of the actor on Instagram thanking him for “FOR STOPPING IN AND COPPING SOME HEAT FROM US TODAY👀🤯.”

On the surface, it’s a typical post-swag, logo-centric Timmy fit—right down to the telltale anthropomorphic “heart eyes” emblem on the sneakers. But this particular style of sneakers has lived many lives since Converse and CDG first partnered up in 2009—the same year, according to some experts, that fashion died. As a widely available, relatively affordable, and easily wearable streetwear fixture, the CDG Chuck Taylor has survived adoration, ubiquity, and backlash over the last decade and a half. (If you managed to avoid the #HeartShoeBad TikTok discourse of 2020, then you and I experienced very different pandemic lockdowns.) Just as Newton’s law of universal gravitation dictates that what goes up must come down, the laws of streetwear dictate that anything once considered swaggy will eventually be considered swagless, if only to eventually be considered swaggy once more. And if anyone’s primed to resurrect a contentious silhouette, it’s Timothée Chalamet. This is, after all, a man who wore sweatpants and high-top Chucks to the Met Gala.

But back to the music question. Let’s assume that Timothée tends to regress a bit when he’s back in NYC, as many of us do when we return to our hometowns. He’s got his Supreme bogo tee and his CDG Chucks on—surely there had to be some early Kid Cudi tracks bumping through those AirPods Max headphones of his, right? Perhaps he was listening to the Frank Ocean song “Pyramids” on repeat…or even some Beam Me Up Scotty-era Nicki Minaj. After all, it’s apparently his well-documented New York adolescence as a hammy circa-2010s LaGuardia High School student that nabbed him the titular role in the upcoming Wonka movie in the first place.

“[Because] he’s Timothée Chalamet and his life is so absurd, his high school musical performances are on YouTube and have hundreds of thousands of views. So I knew from stanning for Timmy Chalamet that he could sing and dance really well,” Wonka director Paul King recently told Variety, confirming that the actor didn’t even have to audition for the role. “When I spoke to him he was quite keen. He’d done tap dancing in high school and he was like, ‘I’d quite like to show people I can do that.’” The question is, can they affix heel taps to a pair of Commes de Garçons Chuck 70s?