A 'GoldenEye' Era Alan Cumming Is Everyone I Meet at 3AM House Parties
A Hawaiian shirted man talks coding and "chicks" beneath cold strip lighting, and I, like Mary-Kate and Ashley, am in two places at once. The first: in front of my TV revisiting GoldenEye. The 1995 James Bond classic is still a personal favourite – absurd, incendiary, and including what may well be the best of Sean Bean's many, many death scenes. It also gives us a glory in Boris Grishenko. He is a duplicitous, self-serving hacker bawdily played by Alan Cumming. He is crass. He is greasy. He is responsible for the deaths of several innocent people at a Russian satellite facility. He is also achingly, exquisitely Nineties.
And as this turncoat smirks behind smudged circular glasses and a sparse wedged fringe, I'm not only on my sofa on a sad Sunday afternoon. I am in an unknown, blurry kitchen in Peckham on a swirling Saturday night. It is probably 3am. I am locked into a conversation with a man who is not Boris Grishenko, but someone who looks a lot like him. He's careening between cyber security, and crypto, and the Green Party. Intermittently, I flick wide, frantic eyes to nearby friends, silently begging for a life ring as they discuss a random wedding in San Sebastian that none of them attended. And though this man is not a villain, nor a junk Bond character to be disposed of following a really silly pyrotechnical set piece, he looks exactly the same. Everybody does.
Because as the needle continues to hover over anything and everything Nineties, Grishenko is an unlikely poster boy as a product of a film released, arguably, at the era's pinnacle. The unruly mop; the retina scorch shirts; the layering; the La-Z-Boy stubble; the hoodies; the exaltation and monetisation of anything remotely techy; the name 'Boris' free from visions of white blonde hair and Whitehall embezzlement. In 2019, someone tweeted at Cumming to ask about the brand, fit and collection of his shirt. "You do realise I wore [it], only for a handful of days, nearly 25 years ago!" the exasperated actor replied. And 25 years later, it seems we're all Grishenko boys.
It shows just how menswear has changed. For in GoldenEye, Pierce Brosnan's turn on the Walther PPK embodied the supposed nonpareil of masculinity. He was distressingly smooth. Always suited. Polished, preened, perfected, but not overtly so. We were supposed to become this Bond (or at least aspire to be him) as we hit adulthood. But instead, we chose Grishenko. He was everything Bond wasn't, everything we weren't supposed to be. He was a pool noodle-armed nerd. He wore silly shirts. He played computer games. And he is, arguably, the best-dressed thing in GoldenEye, if we're to go by modern day metrics anyway.
You do realise I wore this shirt, only for a handful of days, nearly 25 years ago!! https://t.co/zQpcoy7tO0
— Alan Cumming (@Alancumming) March 20, 2019
And that sort of niche nerd culture is kinda cool now. Grishenko, and all the guys who ever looked like him, sit in a Venn diagram between all those Nineties fits, and the ever swelling merchification of menswear (or, as my fine colleague Charlie Teasdale put it, the dereliction thereof). Upon his first appearance in GoldenEye, Grishenko raises both arms, exclaiming "I am invincible!" in a faded, filthy band hoody. It's not too difficult to imagine him in an Uncut Gems T-shirt, or with a Daunt bookshop tote, or in a St John restaurant sweat. Merch is cool now. Just remember that the nerds did it first.
On the final approach to No Time To Die, the idea of Bond, and the concept of cool, has changed a lot since the Brosnan years. Daniel Craig's 007 has always been more brooding, more serious, more grizzled; even his ribbed navy jumpers seem purpose-built for actual combat. But it feels like much of menswear has divorced itself entirely of Mayfair-centric, Savile Rowness in 2021. Bond is still cool. But, despite a death that sees Grishenko frozen in a sarcophagus of liquid nitrogen, the nerd-guy-as-cool-guy is an idea that has finally thawed out.
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