What parts of Kill Bill's style still lives on in 2019? Sixteen years after its arrival on screens, Tarantino's movie is a masterclass in style

Of all Quentin Tarantino's films, there is one that has marked the collective imagination more than any other: Kill Bill. Beyond its cinematic merits, Kill Bill has remained memorable for its characters whose identities, as often happens in Tarantino's cinema, are strongly defined by their costumes. The work of the two costume designers, Catherine Marie Thomas and Kumiko Ogawa, was in fact "double": each costume represented an interpretation of the characters's mind and a cinematic quote. That's why Kill Bill's costume design remains a unicum throughout Tarantino's filmography: the clothes are the protagonists of certain scenes as much as the actors and the story behind them is an integral part of the film's nostalgic soul. At its most important moments, Kill Bill's aesthetic can provide keys to interpret and contextualize some aspects of the aesthetics of the decade that is coming to an end.

But here is another question: is the film that inspires fashion or fashion that inspires the film? It's like the egg and chicken dilemma and the answer is much more complex than it might seem. Tarantino is a man in love with the past: almost every costume is a reference to this or that movie, this or that subculture. The outfits featured in his films are so iconic because they are designed by their creator and costume designers to clearly express a personality, convey mental impressions. Kill Bill takes place in an indefinite era, in which the American suburb of our time coexists with the ancient samurai, a world in which digital culture does not exist and which at the same time takes inspiration from the cinema of twenty years ago. The eclecticism of references is what makes its characters so iconic, its icons are just reworkings of other icons.