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“There are dinner jackets and dinner jackets,” Eva Green declares to Daniel Craig. It is 7:33 p.m.; Vesper Lynd and James Bond are in the bathroom getting ready to go to the eponymous casino of Casino Royale (2006) and she needs him “looking like a man who belongs at that table.” Dinner time means dinner jackets in The Clock, and Craig is not alone in donning black tie under a woman’s watchful eye. Jeanette Macdonald helps her onscreen husband Maurice Chevalier with his bowtie in One Hour with You (1932); Bill Paterson hurriedly fastens his as his wife, played by Barbara Flynn, remarks that he has “never been introduced to a clock” in Miss Potter (2006); in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Tom Cruise adjusts his in the bathroom mirror, undistracted by Nicole Kidman using the toilet; and Deborah Kerr looks disapprovingly at Cary Grant as he ties his bowtie and sings “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in The Grass is Greener (1960). The bowtie becomes a final dandiacal flourish, indicating readiness to go out, the masculine equivalent to fastening a necklace, or applying a coat of lipstick.
Clothing provides helpful temporal markers and adds chronographic layers throughout The Clock. It positions characters within their own diurnal course, from nightclothes to workwear to evening dress, heading out or staying in, rushed or nonchalant. Costumes situate scenes within not only the day, but the season and the century. Even the most timeless tailoring betrays its moment with the width of a lapel, the glimmer of a cufflink. The costume dramas speak to both historical fashions and the age of their production.
As Lynd forewarns, attire exposes those who are out of place, out of time, or out of fashion. This is amplified in The Clock as characters whose wardrobe does not meet the consensus of the hour, for example those late to rise or early to bed, immediately stand out. Much like the preceding cocktail hour, when Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, chicly dressed in an archetypal little black dress and wielding an elongated cigarette holder, inadvertently sets alight an extravagant purple hat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), over or underdressing for dinner is dangerous. The patterns in The Clock are most evident when they are subverted. The appearance of Jack Lemmon at 8:00 p.m. with a dishcloth around his waist draws attention to the regular appearance of apron-clad women preparing dinner throughout the previous hour. Lemmon is starring in The Odd Couple (1968), and as he berates his tardy roommate Walter Matthau while he dresses, Lemmon’s dishcloth and Matthau’s tie are instantly legible indicators of gendered labor.
The ability to interpret someone’s clothing in a split second is an essential social skill integral to the success of The Clock. Lynd had sized up Bond the moment they met and had his jacket tailored accordingly. One does not need the speed and acuity of her sartorial eye to pick up on the clues to character or narrative presented in the smallest detail: an upturned collar to protect from the cold, a disguising balaclava, a neatly pressed and monogrammed shirt cuff, a worn leather attaché case carrying contents unknown. Uniforms, whether police or medical, ecclesiastical or penitentiary, are likewise instantaneously recognizable.
The transformative power of a costume change is especially effective when The Clock cuts between different movies and shows featuring the same actors. Faces and films recur throughout the twenty-four hours, and Marclay makes pointed repetitions, often in close succession. Morgan Freeman goes from a boiler-suited celestial janitor in Bruce Almighty (2003) to a trench-coated detective investigating mortal sins in Se7en (1995). Julianne Moore switches between the late-aughts fashion for form-fitting bodycon dresses in Chloe (2009) and the voluminous circle skirts of the 1950s in Far from Heaven (2002). In both scenes, she is kept waiting by her husband.
This sense of time passing yet everything staying the same, the ephemeral and the enduring, reveals a synchrony between fashion and The Clock: both are constantly rooted in the now. Like each of Marclay’s vignettes, the time of fashion, according to Giorgio Agamben, perpetually exists at the ungraspable threshold between the not yet and no more. Fashion is fleeting, fast, today too fast. It promises novelty yet thrives on cycles: presented in seasonal fashion weeks, consumed through monthly magazines, celebrated at annual galas. Self-referential trends, quotations and revivals offer nostalgic pain and pleasure by making the past wearable once more. Likewise, the repeating patterns drawn across The Clock’s twenty-four hours make it joyful, disguising, even redressing, its unrelenting temporal tirade.
Dr Rosalind McKever is Curator of Paintings and Drawings at the V&A, London, where in 2022 she co-curated Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear. A specialist in modern European art, she is particularly interested in its relationship with fashion and design, its reception in Britain, the US and Brazil, and ideas of time and history. She has held fellowships at the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and taught at the University of Sussex. In 2025 she was the inaugural curatorial resident at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Centre for Modern Art and published Vanessa Bell: Modern Living (V&A/T&H).