Roger Moore as James Bond in Moonraker (1979)
Vitals
Roger Moore as James Bond, suave and sophisticated British MI6 agent
Rio de Janiero, Brazil, February 1979
Film: Moonraker
Release Date: June 26, 1979
Director: Lewis Gilbert
Costume Designer: Jacques Fonteray
Tailor: Angelo Vitucci
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
Moonraker launched James Bond into orbit when it premiered 45 years ago today on June 26, 1979 as the fourth of Sir Roger Moore’s seven adventures as the dashing spy.
Before his out-of-this-world journey, 007 trots the globe from California to Italy and ultimately to Brazil, where he landed in Rio de Janiero during the annual Carnival festivities held in February. February is a summer month in Brazil, so Bond dresses for the warmth in a cream linen suit and open-neck brown shirt and matching pocket square as he alights from his plane.
Checking into his opulent hotel suite, Bond quickly makes contact—in every sense of the word—with the enchanting Manuela (Emily Bolton), who may be among the shortest-lived of his female allies and also among the shortest-to-succumb to 007’s seductive charm.
What’d He Wear?
As my summer plane travel usually finds me tucked into the middle seat on a cramped 737 (God help me) with a bourbon-and-ginger ale or two, an off-white silk suit from an in-demand Italian tailor isn’t the most practical choice for me to wear when flying. But for a sophisticated secret agent aboard the fashionable Concorde landing on a bright summer day in Rio, James Bond could hardly do better than the trendy cream silk suit provided by Angelo Roma.
Established in 1963 by former Brioni manager Angelo Vitucci, Angelo Roma’s celebrity roster included the likes of Frank Sinatra, Telly Savalas, and Roger Moore, who exclusively wore Angelo Roma tailoring in his two late ’70s Bond films, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.
Thus, Bond’s suits during this era blend contemporary trends with a Roman silhouette, which Peter Brooker and Matt Spaiser write in From Tailors With Love “is defined by straight, padded, and often roped shoulders with a clean chest and suppressed waist.” In his excellent analysis of this outfit at Bond Suits, Spaiser also speculates that this particular cream suit is likely either silk or a cool-wearing silk-and-linen blend.
As opposed to the two-button jackets on his other suits, the cream suit jacket’s single mother-of-pearl button suggests a rakishly relaxed alternative, appropriate for a man ostensibly flying into Rio on holiday… and not on a dangerous mission that will find him swapping out his silk for a spacesuit any time soon. The cut follows Brooker and Spaiser’s definition of the Roman silhouette, adapted for late 1970s trends with broad notch lapels and long double vents rather than the traditionally ventless Italian style. The straight shoulders are roped at the sleeve-heads, and each sleeve is finished with three smaller mother-of-pearl buttons. The flapped hip pockets are positioned on a sporty rearward slant, and Bond dresses the welted breast pocket with a light-brown pocket square to match his shirt.
We see considerably less of the matching flat-front trousers that presumably ended up on the floor of his hotel suite soon after arrival, but it’s all but assured that they follow the same pattern as Moore’s other Angelo Roma-tailored trousers in Moonraker, with a proportionally long rise and lacking visible pockets. The plain-hemmed bottoms are cut with a wide flare, consistent with the excess of late ’70s style.
Photo sourced from thunderballs.org archive.
Bond offsets the cream suit with a light-brown shirt with an iridescent sheen that harmonizes with the silk fibers in his suit. The narrowly spaced center stitch up the front placket is a signature of London shirtmaker Frank Foster, who crafted all of Moore’s shirts on Bond and also counted the actor among his many fashionable celebrity clients. The tab cuffs follow the design of a traditional squared barrel cuff but with an extended pointed tab that closes through a single button, a design that Foster branded as the “Lapidus cuff” in tribute to the French designer Ted Lapidus who pioneered them. (You can read more about Lapidus cuffs in the context of James Bond’s style at Bond Suits.)
The long point collar echoes trending styles of the ’70s, which Bond wears open at the neck to continue visually communicating that he’s simply a well-to-do traveler in Rio to enjoy Carnival. In lieu of a tie, Bond wears a pocket square ostensibly made from the exact same light-brown cloth as his shirt.
In Bond on Bond: Reflections on 50 Years of James Bond Movies, Moore recalls that he had a neighbor in Italy who was married to Salvatore Ferragamo’s son and was “horrified to see” that Moore’s Bond wore Gucci shoes and belts on screen. “From then on, Ferragamo supplied shoes, belts, and luggage for the films.”
Moore’s Bond’s preference for slip-on shoes serve him particularly well with his informal outfit, wearing a pair of dark-brown leather Ferragamo cap-toe loafers accented with a straight gold bar across the top of each vamp, rather than the traditional snaffle-bit that decorates horsebit loafers.
Strapped to his left wrist under that distinctive Lapidus-style shirt cuff, Bond continues to wear the SEIKO M354-5019 Memory-Bank Calendar digital watch (model #SFX003) that he was presumably issued by Q Branch and/or EON Productions’ product placement gods, who dressed 007’s wrist with SEIKO watches for nearly a decade from The Spy Who Loved Me through A View to a Kill.
This stainless steel quartz-powered watch boasts a black-framed dual LC panel display that measures 29mm wide and 26mm tall, with a calendar across the top indicating month, date, and day of the week, reserving the bottom 2/3rds to show the time in either a 12- or 24-hour indication, chosen by the user. You can read more about this specific SEIKO and its usage in Moonraker at James Bond Lifestyle, and join me in thanking my friend Ken Stauffer (curator of @oceansographer on Instagram) for lending me his own personal M354-5019 to illustrate how Bond’s SEIKO may have looked under this particular shirt cuff.
Yours truly, modeling Ken’s “Moonraker SEIKO” and a light-brown striped cotton tab-cuff shirt made for me by Surmesur Pittsburgh.
This combination always felt like the nearest that James Bond ever dressed to Sam “Ace” Rothstein, the ostentatious dresser portrayed by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 crime epic Casino, based on real-life Las Vegas executive Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. Especially in the scenes set through the 1970s, Casino‘s costume designers Rita Ryack and John A. Dunn often placed Ace in nontraditional-colored suits and shirts, the latter often rigged with tab cuffs and with pocket squares made from matching silk.
What to Imbibe
Bond’s reputation follows him to Rio, where Manuela knows to mix him a “vodka martini, shaken not stirred.” Rather than serving it in the traditional stemware, she pours the contents of the shaker—vodka, vermouth, and ice—into a rocks glass.
Bond doesn’t seem to mind.
How to Get the Look
Roger Moore as James Bond in Moonraker (1979)
Bond departs from his typical sartorial aesthetic for his arrival in Rio, dressed for the warm summer tourism season in a fashionably tailored cream silk-and-linen suit and open-neck brown bespoke shirt with a matching pocket square.
- Cream silk-and-linen Italian-tailored suit:
- Single-breasted 1-button jacket with wide notch lapels, welted breast pocket, slanted flapped hip pockets, 3-button cuffs, and long double vents
- Flat-front trousers with flared plain-hemmed bottoms
- Light-brown iridescent shirt with long point collar, front placket, and Lapidus-style single-button tab cuffs
- Dark-brown leather cap-toe gold-bar loafers
- Light-brown iridescent pocket square
- SEIKO M354-5019 Memory-Bank Calendar (SFX003) stainless-cased quartz watch with black-framed date/time digital display on stainless five-piece bracelet
Do Yourself a Favor and…
Check out the movie.
The Quote
How do you kill five hours in Rio if you don’t samba?
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