You might just think of Fabien Frankel as a very well-dressed man. And you’d be absolutely correct in that. But the House of the Dragon star often avoids being dressed by one brand for events, opting for a mixture of his own wardrobe and vintage clothing. That’s unusual. In the Hollywood fashion industrial complex, famous guys often elect for one brand that they have ‘a close working relationship’ with (which often means a huge campaign for an undisclosed sum).
But when he does work with brands, like with Cartier for the HBO show’s Paris premiere, it’s unassuming, and it doesn’t try too hard. “I don’t know how good that is for brand relationships,” he says with a laugh.
Frankel’s been into this for a long time – way before he was on red carpets. “I’ve always been a bit of a hoarder,” he says, speaking from his hotel room. “I’ve been vintage shopping since I was 14 and I have a bit of a Narnia-like closet.” In his everyday outfits he has a strong pull to solid, bulletproof tailoring, drawing inspiration from the classic ‘90s Armani zoot suit. “Wide shoulders and big lapels and beautiful leather loafers, I love that silhouette of a suit,” he says. “In the mid ‘00s, when everything was really tight, it was never my thing. A mix between the ‘90s and the ‘50s is more my kind of fashion.”
Oddly, the bulkiness of the broad shouldered, wide legged, tiny waisted Armani look isn’t too far from the battle armour Frankel wears as the bitter and spurned Ser Criston Cole in House of the Dragon. “That’s a very well-noted comparison,” he says. “I hadn’t thought about it like that.” Frankel has mentioned in the past that the armour was so heavy he often had to be fed on set – did they lighten it for season two? “They did! They made the cape lighter, that was a relief. I was able to feed myself this time around.” As for details about season two, he can’t say much lest the HBO gods smite him. But Cole, he says, is “definitely less in the shadows, I think, than in season one.”
Frankel has established a close working relationship with Luke Day, his stylist. And while most actors say that, Frankel truly can’t stop waxing lyrical about him. “It’s one of the greatest genuine collaborations I’ve been able to have in my career, in a weird way,” he says. “He’s one of the few stylists who never pushes a brand on you. He’s never once done that.”
An average collaboration between the pair sees Day assemble around twelve complete looks for an event and leave it up to Frankel to decide closer to the time. “We’re always doing something vintage mixed with something new mixed with something of mine mixed with something of his,” he says. In the recent New York leg of the press tour, Frankel would wear, for example, “[Day’s] jacket, my shirt, trousers that he got from a vintage store, then an actual pair of branded shoes.”
Frankel wouldn’t change this dynamic for the world. “I love that we work like that and I just think it’s really unusual. Talking about it now, I’m sort of made aware of just how unusual it is.” His look for the House of the Dragon Paris premiere is a typical mash-up between the pair – a vintage ‘70s stone-coloured suit, with an Edward Sexton shirt, a tie of Day’s, and a pair of ink-black Christian Louboutin loafers that Frankel copped in Amsterdam. Topping it off is a grey Santos-Dumont watch courtesy of Cartier. And yes, like Frankel, it skews deeply classic: yellow gold case and bezel, satin-finish grey sunray-brushed dial and semi-matte grey alligator leather strap. This kind of watch will live forever.
The first season of House of the Dragon made Fabien Frankel hot property, but he made the decision to jumping head first into big fashion. “Not that it wasn’t interesting to me but I felt too centred on other things,” he says. “It’s something that I’m looking towards doing, working more with brands. But because I’m so particular, I worry that brands wouldn’t want to work with me, rather than the other way around.” Frankel just wants everyone to work together, and Cartier fits right into his crowd-sourced approach to style: "They’re incredibly collaborative as well.”
