These Are the Building Blocks of Wes Anderson’s Signature Visual Style

Through quirky costumes and model hotels, a new exhibition surveys the director’s unique creative vision—and the work of the craftspeople who help bring it to life

Eli Wizevich - History Correspondent

April 7, 2025

Get our newsletter!

Get our newsletter!

Picture a Wes Anderson film.

Even if you haven’t seen one of his movies from start to finish, chances are that you know his style. Anderson’s rich color palettes, rigorous symmetry and idiosyncratic settings have been widely honored, parodied and recreated through Instagram accounts, books and even an Anderson-designed cafe at Milan’s Fondazione Prada.

By the time Anderson’s work reaches the silver screen, it appears effortless. But the distinctive and immersive nature of his cinematography comes from thousands of small details, all meticulously arranged, produced and captured on celluloid film.

More than 500 of the objects responsible for building Anderson’s signature visual language—from model hotels to fox puppets—are now on view at the Cinémathèque Française, a film museum and theater in Paris, as part of a retrospective of the director’s work.

Titled “Wes Anderson: The Archives,” the exhibition will be on view through July 27 before moving to the Design Museum in London in November.

“More than any other, the cinema of Wes Anderson is one that deserves a true exhibition: a precious setting where the relics of the past become present, and where set design becomes mise-en-scène,” Matthieu Orléan, a curator at the Cinémathèque, says in a statement.

A joint effort by the Cinémathèque and the Design Museum, the exhibition tracks the filmmaker’s artistic evolution from the 1990s to the present.

“At first glance, at the risk of caricature,” film critic Josué Morel says of Anderson in the statement, “he’s the dandy filmmaker par excellence.”

But the aim of the exhibition is to travel beyond this first glance, beyond the homage Instagram accounts and deep into the world of Anderson and his collaborators.

Anderson made his debut in 1996 with Bottle Rocket. After filming wrapped, he wanted to reshoot a few scenes but discovered that Columbia Pictures had already sold his props for “next to nothing,” as Alex Marshall writes for the New York Times.

He was determined never to repeat that mistake.

Starting with 1998’s Rushmore, his sophomore effort, set at a prep school, Anderson began keeping track of his own props, costumes and other crucial objects.

“He has meticulously kept many of the props and objects that we see in this exhibition throughout his over 30-year-long career,” Johanna Agerman Ross, a co-curator of the show, tells Deborah Gouffran of the Associated Press.

Visitors to the exhibition can see the preppy blue blazers and striped ties that Jason Schwartzman wore in Rushmore; the khaki suit, fur coat and red tracksuit seen in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001); and the pale aquamarine uniforms from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004).

“Reunited for the first time, they represent much more than keepsakes,” Orléan says in the statement. “They pay witness to how they were used and conserve something of the people who made them and handled them.”

He cites, in particular, the model train cars for The Darjeeling Limited (2007), which were hand-painted by Indian artists.

For The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Anderson commissioned British artist Michael Taylor to create a faux Renaissance painting of a boy with a golden apple.

Anderson wanted the artwork to be “not very funny, just a bit funny,” Taylor recalled, as Vice’s Zelly Martin reported in 2014. When the painter and the director butted heads about an element of the painting, “Wes usually won.”

The film’s eponymous hotel is a centerpiece of the exhibition. Simon Weisse, part of the team of six craftspeople that took three months to build the model hotel, tells the Times that the color choice was Anderson’s one unyielding preference.

“I said, ‘Pink? Bright pink and dark pink? No!’” Weisse recalls. “I asked the art department to check there wasn’t a mistake, but they said, ‘It’s right. Wes has chosen these colors.’”

“In the end, he’s always right,” Weisse adds.

Through Anderson’s storyboards and notebooks, the exhibition shows “a method of work marked by freedom, obligated to no pre-established rules, especially not the hallmarks that Hollywood studios so often dream of,” Orléan says in the statement.

The retrospective also highlights the artists that help Anderson’s films come alive. The vision might be his, but the iconic props and products are the work of highly specialized craftspeople.

“What we’ve learned through this exhibition is the amazing amount of people involved in that work,” Agerman Ross tells the AP.

She cites Anderson’s two stop-motion films, Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and Isle of Dogs (2018), as examples of this creative relationship. “It’s the people that are making the puppets, but it’s also the people that are even posing the puppets,” she explains.

In both films, the director insisted on using real animal fibers for the puppets. Although the hairs were nearly impossible to pose and control, the creative choice gave the models a dynamic, swishing appearance that “totally changed the look” of stop-motion films, Andy Gent, a model maker who has worked with Anderson on seven films, tells the Times. “It was amazing fun.”

“Wes Anderson: The Archives” will be on view at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris through July 27, 2025. It will then travel to the Design Museum in London, where it will be on display from November 14, 2025 to July 26, 2026.

Eli Wizevich | | Read More

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.