When Michael B. Jordan stepped out on the silver carpet of the 25th Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night in a navy blue double-breasted suit and a bright, multi-colored harness emblazoned with the Louis Vuitton logo, he became the latest celebrity to wear the designer look.
The Black Panther star isn’t the first celebrity to sport the statement menswear accessory for a high-profile event; Timothée Chalamet also wore a harness (albeit a black, bedazzled one) at the 2019 Golden Globes to much acclaim from both sartorial critics and the Internet, while Chadwick Boseman wore a white one with an all-white ensemble to the 2018 ESPYs last summer.
Jordan, Chalamet and Boseman all wore Louis Vuitton harnesses that were shown as part of creative director Virgil Abloh’s inaugural Spring/Summer 2019 menswear collection, which was inspired by Michael Jackson, who wore a gold harness for his iconic 1993 Super Bowl performance.
However, it’s Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon who may have kicked off the current trend when he went viral early last year for wearing a black harness underneath a tuxedo with cutouts at the 2018 Oscars.
Long associated with BDSM, the harness as a style statement usually calls to mind high-fashion figures like black leather enthusiast and architect, Peter Marino; the queer erotic art of Tom of Finland; and counterculture high fashion labels like Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang and Rick Owens.
For Jordan, making the harness a part of his look was easy; he told Variety of his choice to wear it: “Why not? It was just like f-ck it, I’m going to do it.”
See Jordan, Chalamet and more in harnesses below.
