Happy Birthday to Kirsten Dunst and her Chanel blazer

a tribute to a champion rewearer and unsung millennial icon of mid-late 00s style

This is a birthday post in honour of one of my longtime faves and a millennial icon (both by birth - on this day in 1982 - and by fanbase allegiance), a woman who served style as impeccable as her filmography and ruled the hearts of the Fashion Spot forum posters in the decade in which she came of age (the thread devoted to her style is over 1300 pages long). I speak, of course, of Kirsten Dunst. Wearing a beanie to the Met Gala? She’s done it (Missoni beanie, Marc Jacobs dress). Wearing the Death Star on a dress at the Met Gala? (Rodarte) She’s done that too. Wearing vintage on red carpets? She did that back in the 00s (Met Gala again, and she bought her own vintage YSL dress, to boot), over a decade before red carpet stylists started catching on to the idea of using blue chip designer vintage as a tool to try and make their clients look like they had taste. Re-wearing? She’ll do it with clothes and shoes she’s owned for well over a decade, and take them to the Oscars and Cannes red carpets. Let the fashion internet breathlessly repeat that ‘real style comes from re-wearing things!’ and hype celebrities as reinventing the fashion wheel for being seen in the same (gifted/sponsored) thing more than once over the course of a single season, maybe a year if we’re lucky. But this particular icon plays in a different league, and while other outlets have already told the story of her favourite and re-worn Christian Lacroix minidress and heels (there is no vintage chicer than that which turns vintage in your possession), in this, her birthday post, I’d like to devote my rhapsodies to another piece she frequently wore that really sealed her champion rewearer status for me. Specifically, this:

This little number is a Chanel Spring 2003 RTW bit of cropped black pinstriped seersucker-textured cotton-silk blend¹ with bracelet-length sleeves and raw edges, that was modelled in the show with matching slim trousers and a hat (sorry for the watermarks but the only place online that had pictures of the full collection was Elle, and they’ve since removed the gallery or at least the pictures).

There aren’t many pieces that immediately send ‘WANT!!!!’ bells ringing in my head after seeing them on other people, but this was one of the very first - I absolutely adored it, and coveted it for everything I saw in it - elegance, femininity, and a total lack of preciousness about the first two. if I were projecting, I’d say that’s what she saw in it too, the difference between us being that she actually had it and proceeded to wear it exactly as I would i.e. all the time and with everything.

So here we are, with all the known photographed public appearances of The Jacket, starting from the first time:

• seen on Kirsten’s friend at the premiere of Mona Lisa Smile, in December 2003². What Kirsten herself was wearing was a different Chanel jacket over a Jovovich Hawk vintage-style dress (Old Hollywood-influenced styles and silhouettes were even bigger among the directionally stylish young female celebs of that era than they are now because ‘vintage’ back then meant 1930s-1970s, with a cheeky dash of 80s thrown in sometimes- we'll see it again below).

the first public appearance of the jacket - not ON Kiki, but behind her! (see left)

• wore to it a party in honour of Sofia Coppola in February 2004 (afaik the first time Kirsten was photographed actually wearing the jacket).

  In classic elder millennial style, the very pretty, very fancy jacket is paired with bootcut jeans (we were in the era when indie boys liked to do suit jackets with jeans, and so did some girls).

• wore it to an ‘encourage the youth to vote’ event in March 2004 where she hung out with her friend and Mona Lisa Smile costar, Maggie Gyllenhaal (with a cameo appearance from yet another thing she rewore constantly in that era for years- those pointy-toed Christian Louboutin D’Orsay heels)

• wore it in LA in mid-April 2004 to do daytime things, and later to go to the club (note the calf length leggings, adopted en masse around that time as a supposed 80s style revival but actually favoured because they provided a modicum of coverage under short skirts and dresses - millennial teens and early 20somethings of that era remember!)

• and then to go clubbing again

• and then to her 22nd birthday party (below)

• and then for its most-photographed appearance (see top pic), at the New York premiere of The Day After Tomorrow, in May 2004. There are no unobstructed clear photographs of her full outfit because Jake Gyllenhaal was adoringly glued to her side in all of them.

• the next clear shot of the jacket doesn’t come till five years later (by which time she'd lost the boyfriend but kept the jacket), at a dinner hosted by AnOther Magazine and Hudson Jeans at NYFW in September 2009.

• and for its final public appearance, in a New York Times profile in September 2011. Which, as swan songs go, is possibly the most swannishly iconic way to retire from a wardrobe.

A huge part of the reason why I was so fascinated and covetous of this specific jacket was because of how much she wore it, and how often - you could tell she loved that thing, and as the pictures above show, she wore it with basically anything, and to do anything from errands to red carpets to an NYT profile, for the better part of a decade! It’s far from the only jacket she did that with, but it was a clear favourite, and worn with an ease that suggested it was a go-to despite being far from the kind of interchangeable neutral ‘basic’ that most people assume will be go-tos. And in an era when we all seem to have made a fetish of excising any hint of flair or personality from our wardrobes and forgotten the idea of wearing clothes from even two years ago, forget five or ten, I think we’d all do well to have the clarity re: our own tastes that allows us to actually do it. In the meantime, I’m sure miss Kiki up there will find some other fabulous things to repeat wear, and I’ll look forward to seeing them.

Note: all non watermarked images are from kirstenimages.com, GOAT of the fanpage website era. Last photograph (from the New York Times) by Mark Veltman

1. How do I know this? From the TRR listing for the exact piece (recently soldm for $487.50 and not to me, boohoo) which helpfully noted the fabric blend and the fact that it had a silk lining.

2. said friend is Liat Baruch, a fairly well-known stylist who is also on substack now!