The popular Instagram account Shia’s Outfits has, for the past year, documented a variety of looks sported by the actor Shia LaBeouf—on his way to a West Hollywood gym, as he grabs an iced coffee in Studio City, as he shops for groceries at Gelson’s. A cursory glance at the feed might suggest that LaBeouf, who is thirty-one, is a particularly handsome version of the classic Los Angeles or New York fashion-conscious hipster: with his dirty denim and obscurely logoed baseball caps and facial hair and ironic T-shirts and work boots and fleece hiking tops, he is a hirsute, still sexually viable Silver Lake dad crossed with a Chinatown-dwelling trust-funded art-school kid who’s never not up for doing psychedelics. And yet this would not account for the obsessiveness that LaBeouf’s style has inspired among menswear enthusiasts. Multiple blogs and Reddit threads have been dedicated to understanding what, exactly, makes the actor, as the streetwear Web site Highsnobiety called him last week, “a bonafide fashion icon.” This past summer, New York magazine’s The Cut offered an explainer for his looks. And, as the cover story about LaBeouf in the most recent issue of Esquire reveals, a number of years ago the rapper and designer Kanye West visited the actor’s house to discuss a potential collaboration and ended up taking, in LaBeouf’s words, “all my fucking clothes.”
Intriguingly for a star known for public outbursts, LaBeouf’s style has stirred interest not because it is outrageous but, rather, because it is just the slightest bit off—revealing in its small but significant diversions from the norm the underlying conventions that most of us adhere to, and opening up a path to reconsider them anew. With the modestly calibrated oddness of his looks, he challenges our perceptions of what counts as a good outfit, or “fit,” in streetwear parlance. As one Reddit user noted last week, “all of his clothes are at the point for me where they are almost cool/ok, but then there’s something else that just makes it too wierd [sic], out there, homeless, trashy.” One LaBeouf habit is stuffing his pants into his socks, creating a soldierly silhouette in which meaty thighs contrast with dainty ankles. In another oft-repeated move, he tucks his sweatshirt into his pants, evoking the illustration in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Le Petit Prince,” in which a boa constrictor stretches itself to swallow an elephant. LaBeouf also likes wearing socks with sandals—often the much-reviled plastic Crocs, favored by nurses and kindergarten teachers. A braided rattail, as thick as a rope, which the actor sported for his role in “American Honey,” became part of his look for a spell; he’s also been known to carry around a jug of water and a large, dusty rucksack while walking around residential San Fernando Valley. In one memorable look, his scrunched up sweats revealed a slice of naked shin, which peeked out just above a pair of stout Uggs, the fuzzy Australian boot popular with sorority girls trudging, hung over, to a too-early class.
Usually, a deep interest in a celebrity’s style is sparked during a robust moment in that celebrity’s career—one thinks of Michelle Obama, Rihanna, the Hadid sisters. But the rabid fascination with LaBeouf’s sartorial choices has been at odds with his professional success. A former child actor from a chaotic, impoverished background, LaBeouf had a difficult relationship with his father, who was addicted to heroin. He rose to grownup fame in 2007, with the first installment of Michael Bay’s blockbuster “Transformers” series. His early adult performances, even in mainstream movie franchises, suggested a certain wounded sensitivity, shot through with an uneasy but affecting tension. This, combined with feral, broad-chested good looks, seemed a dependable recipe for stardom. But, in the years since, LaBeouf’s troubled behavior has come to overshadow his acting. In the course of the past decade, he has been arrested multiple times—in 2008 for driving under the influence (the charge was later dropped), and in 2014 for disorderly conduct (he pleaded guilty), among other offenses. Most recently, this past summer, LaBeouf was booked for public drunkenness when he became disorderly on a street in Savannah, Georgia, resisting arrest and spewing racial abuse after he was refused a cigarette by a police officer—behavior for which he has apologized. (He pleaded guilty to an “obstruction” charge, and the public drunkenness charge was dismissed.) In 2013, he plagiarized a Daniel Clowes comic from 2007 in a short film he made—and then begged for forgiveness, oddly, via skywriting.
Other exhibitions of eccentric if not downright bizarre behavior followed, including a red-carpet appearance, in 2014, for which LaBeouf wore a tuxedo and a paper bag over his head, bearing the words, “I am not famous anymore.” The Esquire profile called him “the guy who was handed a golden ticket and promptly lit it on fire,” and LaBeouf himself told the magazine, “I’m run out . . . No one’s giving me a shot right now.” While it’s true that LaBeouf has fallen short of his early blockbuster promise, his difficult behavior—and his self-conscious creation of a character based on it—has come to inform his public persona as an actor. His well-reviewed performance as a skeevy, tormented travelling salesman in “American Honey” seemed to knowingly enfold into it the viewers’ knowledge of his real-life struggles. Next month, in the movie “Borg vs. McEnroe,” he will be playing the hot-headed tennis great John McEnroe, who was also known for his public outbursts. Earlier this week, it was announced that he will play his father in a film, directed by Alma Har’el, about his own tortured beginnings, with Lucas Hedges playing the young Shia.
Unlike Britney Spears, whose outré style choices during her own extremely public meltdown, a decade ago—a shaved head, a variety of wigs, no underwear, bare feet—seemed inseparable from her professional and personal failings, LaBeouf is a celebrity whose problems infuse his style, in the collective imagination, with an enticing, almost mythical texture. In the words of Highsnobiety, his is a practice of “zero coordination and zero fucks.” It is, perhaps, no surprise that the culture grants this interpretation more easily to a man. Until that changes, we can imagine a future in which all of us, regardless of gender or celebrity status or muscle-mass levels, will look as good as LaBeouf does in an old T-shirt tucked securely into high-waisted P.E.-style sweat pants, which are, in turn, tucked yet more snugly into gray tube socks.
A previous version of this article misidentified the director of a forthcoming movie about LaBeouf’s childhood.
