A Look Behind the Scenes of Japanese Breakfast’s Fashion-Maximalist New Video
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The new video for Japanese Breakfast’s “Savage Good Boy” tells the brief story of a wealthy silver fox (The Sopranos’s Michael Imperioli) and his beleaguered but fabulously attired partner (Michelle Zauner, who performs as Japanese Breakfast). Sequestered in a cavernous space, they eat dinner (one grape), watch a movie (she recoils at his touch), and gamble with cards (he taunts her after winning each hand). Eventually, she finds a way to bloodily express her displeasure.
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The song was inspired by a headline Zauner saw about billionaires buying bunkers. “The alliteration of a billion-dollar bunker for two sounded really menacing,” she says on a call from Brooklyn. “I was interested in billionaires’ ability to rationalize hoarding wealth. When I m enticed by a specific type of villainy, I like to write from that perspective to understand it better. And so I envisioned this narrative of a billionaire coaxing a young woman to live with him in his bunker as the world burns around them.”
Zauner has directed most of her own videos—about 10 in collaboration with cinematographer Adam Kolodny—since 2016’s “Everybody Wants to Love You,” in which she shotgunned a beer in her mother’s wedding hanbok, a traditional Korean dress. Although she studied film at Bryn Mawr, she has taken to directing partly out of fiscal prudence. “The type of directors that I would be interested in would not do it for our budget,” she laughs. “I would rather utilize that resource myself than have it go to waste on someone I’m not really interested in.”
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Her inspirations for the video range from Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) to Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016) and Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes. “I wanted the juxtaposition of this postapocalyptic bunker with this Rococo set design and fashion,” Zauner says. “And my stylist, Cece Liu, just went so hard with it.”
Liu says she was thrilled by the concept. “It was super fashion heavy and maximalist, and I live for a fantasy moment, especially in this time where we all need some escapism,” says the New York–based stylist. “Since we were going for super drip heavy and extravagant, I knew this wasn t really a situation where we could find something in a store for normal human shopping, especially in a pandemic when the store buys are particularly bleak and designed for the couch, so I went straight for runway pulls.”
Zauner dons five eye-popping looks in the brisk two-and-a-half-minute video, from designers like Gucci, Vaquera, Area, Patou, and Puppets and Puppets. “Cece and I have worked together for almost three years now, and we went from brands not knowing who I was to getting people like Gucci and Roger Vivier to loan to us.” Her favorite outfit is the voluminous white ensemble and outsize hat by Vaquera: “I remember coming in in that and everyone just gasping.”
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Over-the-top dressing fits with the theme of her upcoming third album, Jubilee (out June 4), which is an exploration of joy after dealing with grief in two albums and a book. (Her memoir about the death of her mother, Crying in H Mart, came out less than a month ago and debuted at number two on The New York Times best-seller list.) “Jubilee is so much about embracing feeling and being ambitious and theatrical. It wasn’t until recently that I’ve developed more of an interest in fashion—I dress like a stagehand outside of shows,” Zauner says. She names Björk, FKA Twigs, Rosalía, Karen O, Dua Lipa, Caroline Polachek, and Christine and the Queens among her style icons. “Cece has given me such a newfound appreciation for fashion as an art form that I definitely want to continue to push myself to be more adventurous. I hope a lot of people feel that way, post-pandemic. I would love to see everyone bringing some epic looks.”
