Harris Dickinson, the British actor turned emerging auteur, made a quietly arresting entrance at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, unveiling his directorial debut, 'Urchin'
By The Celebrity Editorial Team
Walking the red carpet alongside lead actor Frank Dillane, Harris Dickinson extended his artistic vision into sartorial sensibility that spoke to discipline and pushing boundaries.
Just two years ago, Dickinson stood on the fringes of the festival circuit, pitching Urchin with nothing but a story and a plea. As he recounted to The Hollywood Reporter, “It was five or six meetings a day of me essentially begging for money and telling the story with my whole heart and trying to convince hungover, tired and bored execs of my wonderful idea." Now, he returns not only as a filmmaker but as a fully-formed creative presence—composed, commanding, and dressed in a Prada ensemble that tells its own story.
His look, drawn from the spirit of Prada’s Fall-Winter 2016 collection, echoed the film’s layered emotional terrain. A black wool gabardine jacket, its sharp silhouette punctuated by a white cotton drill collar, recall the themes central to Urchin. “How do we follow Mike and go on a journey with someone that is immoral and badly behaved and unkind, but also lovable and charming and trying to survive?” Dickinson said of his protagonist. His ensemble's interplay of light and dark echoing that complexity. Dickinson finished his look with a hazelnut calfskin belt on his Panama trousers and a white and red saffiano leather agenda for a final touch.
The film, appearing in the Un Certain Regard section, follows Mike, a drifter grappling with addiction and identity on London’s fringes. “Mike, throughout the years, became an amalgamation of all different types of people that had crossed into and out of my life. People that I'd worked with in the community and people close to me, and the darkest versions of the things we've encountered within ourselves as well,” Dickinson explained. The film, raw and unsentimental, mirrors the director’s own path—self-taught, self-funded, and deeply personal.
Every element of Dickinson's Cannes appearance seemed to extend from the same impulse that drives his filmmaking: a desire for truth, craft, and clarity. “I wanted to direct before I wanted to act,” he said in a recent interview. “I’ve been making short films since I was eight or nine—skate videos, films in the forest, web series.”
In both film and fashion, Dickinson makes a compelling case for complexity over simplicity, and elegance over excess. With Urchin, he defines himself as a creator of rare clarity, where every detail matters, and nothing is worn or said without purpose and intent.