Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in The World is Not Enough (1999).
Photo by Keith Hamshere/Sygma via Getty Images.
Vitals
Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, sophisticated English spy
Baku and Istanbul, December 1999
Film: The World Is Not Enough
Release Date: November 8, 1999
Director: Michael Apted
Costume Designer: Lindy Hemming
Tailored by: Brioni
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
On the 00-7th of November, today’s post celebrates Pierce Brosnan’s third and penultimate movie as James Bond—The World Is Not Enough—which premiered 25 years ago tomorrow on November 8, 1999 at the Fox Bruin Theater in Los Angeles.
With most of Ian Fleming’s original material already adapted by the end of Timothy Dalton’s tenure, Brosnan’s Bond films relied on original storylines with nods to earlier works in the franchise. In the case of The World Is Not Enough, this applies to the title itself—the English translation of the Bond family coat of arms (“Orbis non sufficit”) mentioned in the novel and film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Bruce Feirstein crafted the original screenplay for The World Is Not Enough, centered around Bond’s assignment to protect heiress Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) from Renard (Robert Carlyle), an international terrorist who had kidnapped her years earlier. As the stakes of his mission grow, he recruits the help of an old enemy-turned-friend Valentin Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane) and the improbably named—and improbably cast—nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones (Denise Richards).
A hallmark of the Bond franchise are its aspirational sequences that highlight both the danger and elevated lifestyle of James Bond’s missions, exemplified in The World Is Not Enough as he strides into a swanky casino in an exotic locale, clad as usual in an impeccable tuxedo with a Walther holstered under his arm and a dry martini in his hand. After a Bollinger-soaked romantic interlude with an impossibly beautiful woman, Bond’s back on the trail of his dangerous foe, who only narrowly escapes as Bond saves the life of yet another impossibly beautiful woman following a gunfight.
What’d He Wear?
Whether you’re planning your style “to have Christmas in Turkey” or simply looking to elevate your black tie game, The World Is Not Enough demonstrates a timeless examples of sophisticated black tie that remains as fashionable today as it was a quarter-century ago.
Bond dresses to have Christmas in Turkey.
Lindy Hemming designed the costumes for all four of Brosnan’s Bond films, establishing a continuity that, according to Pete Brooker and Matt Spaiser in From Tailors With Love, gave “a James Bond actor a consistent sartorial identity throughout all his films” for the first time since Sean Connery. Hemming’s costumes for Brosnan prioritized style and sophistication, focusing on tailored suits—less likely to look dated than casual wear—and enlisting the services of renowned Italian fashion house Brioni.
In his excellent analysis for Bond Suits, Spaiser observes that the midnight-blue cloth on 007’s tuxedo was a cool-wearing blend of wool and mohair provided by William Halstead. The cut follows Brioni’s Roman silhouette with straight, padded shoulders, roped sleeveheads, clean chest, and suppressed waist.
“When I think of an evening suit, I think of a peak lapel,” Hemming explained to Brooker and Spaiser for From Tailors With Love. Following this direction, Hemming would equip Brosnan’s Bond exclusively in dinner jackets with peak lapels, making him the only Bond actor to wear the same style of dinner jacket lapel across multiple films. All of these jackets have silk-faced peak lapels that roll to a single cloth-covered button, as well as a welted breast pocket and straight jetted hip pockets. Brosnan’s ventless jacket in The World Is Not Enough features midnight grosgrain facings on the lapels that matches the silk covering the single front button and the four buttons decorating each cuff.
The matching midnight mohair-and-wool evening trousers are styled with a darted front, on-seam side pockets, and plain-hemmed bottoms as well as the requisite grosgrain side galon extending from the fitted waistband to the bottoms.
The black tie dress code requires dressy shoes, with black leather oxfords considered the most traditional footwear. Bond’s polished cap-toe Church’s oxfords from are most prominently—if not exactly clearly—seen as he kicks Elektra’s security chief Sasha Davidov (Ulrich Thomsen) in the face. Naturally, Bond also wears black dress socks that maintain the dark leg-lines of his trousers into his shoes.
Bond’s white dress shirt from Turnbull & Asser has a poplin body for comfort, but the parts that show when he wears his jacket buttoned—the spread collar, double (French) cuffs, and bib-style front—are all woven in a stiffer marcella (piqué). His round cuff links are gold with mother-of-pearl settings, matching the four studs he initially wears up the front. When Bond gets dressed again after his tryst with Elektra, he foregoes the studs and merely uses the shirt’s built-in mother-of-pearl buttons, leaving the top few undone.
Note the small hole next to the second button on Bond’s shirt. This would accommodate the studs he was wearing earlier, which would be pushed through the buttonholes on both sides of the shirt. Since he was merely getting dressed (and not dressing up) after his romp with Elektra, there was no need for the showy formality of studs and he used the shirt’s built-in buttons instead.
Bond wears a butterfly-shaped bow tie made from a midnight horizontal-ribbed silk, neatly mirroring the grosgrain silk facing his lapels.
Upon stepping into Zukovsky’s casino, Bond dons a pair of x-ray glasses that allow him to determine which of his fellow patrons are armed and/or clad in provocative lingerie under their evening gowns. Bond Lifestyle reports that a member of the costume team had purchased the screen-worn specs off the shelf at a Scrivens Opticians location in High Street, identifying the model as the Blue MOD No.9048 ANT BLU 50×19. Despite the coincidentally cyanic company name, the light-blue tinted lenses were actually added by the film’s production team.
Pierce Brosnan was the first Bond actor to prominently wear Omega watches for his characterization, specifically sporting an array of blue-dialed Omega Seamaster dive watches through his run. Unlike his successor Daniel Craig, who often cycled between several different Omega models within a single film, Brosnan would wear essentially the same model across his tenure. This tradition began in GoldenEye with the quartz-powered 2541.80.00 until he switched in Tomorrow Never Dies to the automatic Omega Seamaster Professional 2531.80.00 chronometer that he would continue to wear in The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day.
Both the automatic 2531.80.00 and quartz 2541.80.00 Seamaster Professional models were introduced in 1993 and share similar aesthetics and functionality, including the 300-meter water resistance, though the self-winding 2531.80.00 chronometer is powered by the Omega 1120 calibre movement with a power reserve up to 44 hours.
The stainless steel 41mm case is rhodium-plated with a helium release valve pointing out from the 10 o’clock position. The stainless link bracelet matches the case and closes with a deployable clasp. A 12-sided unidirectional rotating bezel with a polished blue ring encircles the blue “wave”-printed dial. Protected by a lightly domed sapphire crystal, this blue dial features luminous non-numeric hour indices, except for a date window at the 3 o’clock position.
You can also read more about Brosnan’s automatic Seamaster at Bond Lifestyle and Omega.
As usual, Q Branch equipped Bond’s Omega with a few gadgets beyond merely telling the time, including bright LED lights emanating from the dial and a grappling hook that he uses to engineer his escape from an ICBM base by firing a small piton with a 50-foot microfilament from behind the screw-down crown.
While infiltrating the aforementioned ICBM base in Kazakhstan, Bond changes out of his dinner suit into a blue cotton uniform issued by the Russian Atomic Energy Agency—supporting his cover identity of nuclear scientist Mikhail Arkov, the same name on the badge he swiftly manufactures in the airplane bathroom en route to the base and clips onto the right side of the uniform jacket. You can read more about this uniform at Bond Suits.
Though Bond swaps out his dressy black oxfords for black patent leather lug-soled boots, he continues wearing the white evening suit from his tuxedo. (A more discerning sentry may have questioned why a nuclear scientist was wearing such a formal shirt with his work uniform, but this was before we had resources like @dieworkwear to keep people on the lookout for these sartorial queues!)
The Guns
The World Is Not Enough was the first movie where Bond’s sidearm was exclusively the Walther P99, which replaced his Walther PPK mid-mission in Brosnan’s previous outing, Tomorrow Never Dies, coinciding with the weapon’s 1997 debut.
Walther designer Horst Wesp conceptualized the P99 to replace the aging 9mm P5 and P88 semi-automatics for German law enforcement. The initial P99 featured a double-action/single-action (DA/SA) trigger with an “Anti-Stress” decocker and an internal striker rather than an external hammer.
Following the P99’s introduction in the 9x19mm cartridge, a .40 S&W model with a slightly longer barrel was added to appeal to American law enforcement—each with double-stack magazines that could carry up to 16 rounds (9mm) and 12 rounds (.40 S&W), though these capacities would be reduced by one round each as the pistol would continue to be refined over its production timeline.
The P99 was overhauled in 2004, with these “second generation” models including the double-action-only P99DAO, a Glock-style P99QA (“Quick Action”), a P99AS reflecting the first-generation’s “Anti-Stress” DA/SA trigger, and the compact P99C. In addition to the all-black P99 models used by Bond, the P99 would eventually be available with a titanium-coated slide, an olive-drab frame, or a desert tan frame.
At the time that The World Is Not Enough was produced and set, Bond would have used a first-generation P99 with 16-round magazines of 9x19mm Parabellum. The P99 continued to be Bond’s standard sidearm through Daniel Craig’s debut film, Casino Royale.
Bond keeps his Walther P99 drawn on Renard.
Given his covert assignments (and the occasional need for an assassination), Bond occasionally equips his P99 with a suppressor, which he attaches when he anticipates killing Renard in the ICBM base. During the subsequent gunfight, he picks up a Makarov pistol from a downed Russian military guard and dual-wields it alongside his suppressed P99.
It makes sense that Bond would have had access to the Makarov in this context, as the “Pistolet Makarova” (PM) had served as the Russian standard sidearm since it replaced the Tokarev pistol in 1951. Nikolay Makarov took inspiration from the Germans’ popular Walther PP and PPK series of pistols, using a similar blowback action and dimensions to craft his design. The pistol fired Boris V. Semin’s new proprietary 9x18mm Makarov ammunition, fed from eight-round box magazines.
Bond supplements the firepower of his suppressed Walther P99 in his right hand with a picked-up Makarov pistol fired with his left.
As the gunfight continues, Bond ups his firepower by picking up a discarded FN P90 to return fire. This distinctive-looking submachine gun—technically classified as a “personal defense weapon” (PDW)—was introduced by the Belgian firearms manufacturer Fabrique Herstal in 1990 to respond to NATO requests for a powerful compact firearm that fired an alternative to 9mm ammunition. Thus, the P90 was developed in tandem with the proprietary 5.7x28mm ammunition, a high-velocity centerfire round ballistically similar to the rimfire .22 WMR cartridge.
The P90’s ergonomic bullpup design includes a futuristic polymer frame that unusually feeds from top-mounted magazines that lay flush with the top of the P90’s frame. These transplant polymer magazines can carry up to 50 rounds of 5.7x28mm, fed through a unique system that rotates each round 90° before chambering it.
BOND
What to Imbibe
Bond begins the evening at the casino with his signature order of a “Vodka Martini… shaken, not stirred,” taking it from the bartender while handing him a stainless Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver taken from a thug he disarms at the bar. Perhaps distracted by the disruption, the barman neglects to garnish Bond’s martini with either the traditional olive or lemon twist, though 007 doesn’t seem to mind.
BOND
After storming into Zukovsky’s office, Zukovsky pours them glasses of Smirnoff Black Label vodka from his personal bar. According to The Whisky Exchange, “This premium variant of Smirnoff is pot-distilled and filtered through seven tons of charcoal in a painstaking production process designed to produce a vodka of rare purity.”
Smirnoff maintains a long association with the Bond franchise, dating back to 1962 when Sean Connery drank it straight and as a martini ingredient in the first-ever Bond movie, Dr. No.
Photo by Keith Hamshere
Bond treats Elektra to another of his favorite alcohol brands when the pair drink Bollinger La Grande Année 1990 champagne in her bed. Every Bond actor since Roger Moore in his debut have enjoyed Champagne Bollinger in a variety of vintages, though the Bond association dates back even further to the 1956 novel Diamonds are Forever, in which Tiffany Case sent Bond a quarter-bottle to drink with the Sauce Béarnaise she prepared for him.
BOND
How to Get the Look
Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in The World is Not Enough (1999)
During a sequence that demonstrates the franchise’s signatures from girls and guns to cocktails and casinos, it makes sense that James Bond exemplifies black tie perfection in his sharply tailored Brioni tuxedo.
- Midnight-blue wool-and-mohair Brioni tuxedo:
- Single-button dinner jacket with grosgrain-faced peak lapels, welted breast pocket, straight jetted hip pockets, 4-button cuffs, and ventless back
- Darted-front trousers with fitted waistband, on-seam side pockets, grosgrain-faced side galon, and plain-hemmed bottoms
- White poplin evening shirt with marcella/piqué spread collar, button-up bib, and double/French cuffs
- Gold-framed mother-of-pearl studs and cufflinks
- Midnight-blue horizontal-ribbed silk butterfly-shaped bow tie
- Black polished leather cap-toe oxford shoes
- Black dress socks
- Black-framed rectangular sunglasses with blue tinted lenses
- Omega Seamaster Professional 300M 2531.80.00 Chronometer rhodium-plated stainless steel watch with 41mm case (with helium escape valve), blue-ringed unidirectional rotating bezel, blue “wave”-motif dial (with luminous hour indices and 3:00 date window), and stainless steel link bracelet
Do Yourself a Favor and…
Check out the movie.
The Quote
This is a game I can’t afford to play.
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