Fashion spasm! Mission: Impossible - Time Bomb

In order to trick an eastern European officer into showing them how to defuse his bomb, the IMF - well - they kinda lost me early on, to be honest. I was too distracted by Jim's disguise...

He starts off casual, even choosing to carry his jacket over his shoulder for the dead drop...

Every one looks pretty sharp at the briefing, too -

Barney looks extra-sharp, Jim looks refined...

...Wai Lee (Barbara Luna) looks great, Willy's looking hot...

...and Paris looks ... Ahem. No, I'm sorry, Paris. This is not a good look.

And then we arrive in the Eastern European country (cue a very high count, even for Mission: Impossible, of amusing 'Eastern European' words such as 'detür', 'Stat Matenz', and 'maihn powar'). Jim stays slick for a short time, like this - 

Always looking good in uniform...

But then Paris does this to him - 

I can't help but think that when he tells Paris how well he's done, he must be dying a little inside...

And then we get - 

...a lot of this...

...and this, and the hideous stained glass window...

...all distracting them from Barney-in-a-box.

There's a brief flicker of joy with Paris in some uniforms. Nimoy can pull off uniforms far too well.

And finally Jim gets to peel of that beard and look more like a cool lecturer than like Matthew Kelly

(this is Matthew Kelly - if you're not British you probably won't truly understand.)

[EDIT: I have to interject here with a snippet from the Mission: Impossible dossier - 'Peter begged us not to use him as the artist,' says Stan Kallis. According to Graves, 'that was one of those mistakes that you want to forget about. He could have been a wild character without that red beard and wig.' White, Patrick J. The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier. (London: Boxtree, 1996), p. 253.]

And then all we are left with is, mmm, Jim in corduroy :-)

Yay!

Fashion spasm! Mission: Impossible - Underwater

Season Six, Episode Eight - Original Air Date: 6 November 1971. In order to recover a haul of stolen diamonds and bring the criminals to justice, lots of deviousness involving a fake ring and plenty of scuba diving is used, including Jim pretending to be a hip and funky scuba instructor. The scope for fun outfits is endless...

We start off sensibly...

The episode starts in casual and relatively innocuous clothing...

And of course, whilst in his apartment, Jim is as stylish as always. He's not allowed in his apartment without refined clothing...

But then the fun begins! First - Scuba-Jim!

Scuba-Jim is wet and floaty...

And then - funky scuba-instructor Jim!

Jim runs in his funky clothes, and, 'Boy, am I hung,' he needs some pink liquor to pick him up...

Jim is funky, and blows smoke out slowly in a sexy cloud, and wears funky sunglasses...

Later, on the boat...

...Jim wears lovely stripy swimming trunks, and generally flexes in a semi-nude way while donning his wetsuit, so...

...he can look sexy and ruffled like this...

...and he can hang about on deck with his zip open like this...

...and he can don all his gear like this...

...and later he can emerge and look all wet and panting and Scandinavian, like this! Just think... This is how Jim may look in the bath... mmm....

For the clincher, as the criminals are hoodwinked and the police swoop in - Jim pulls out all the stops, with paisley and stripey trousers!!

Those sunglasses (which incidently Jim removes as soon as he's left the building and got in the car) and that stunning paisley shirt, which I actually quite like!

The stripey trousers... Jim will wear these or some very similar later, in Season 7. This must mean he likes them...

Fashion spasm! Mission: Impossible - Crack-Up

Crack-Up is a pretty good Season 7 episode. The premise is interesting – Peter Cordel is a contract killer, and a particularly good one. The IMF are contracted to gain evidence of his killings, and also to discover the identity of his Syndicate boss. Cordel is not only a killer, but also a genius, and a member of a chess club, where Jim, in the guise of a psychiatrist and with the help of Barney’s chess-computer (a device we’ve seen before), challenges him to a match. Jim doses Cordel with a drug which will make him susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, and the team proceed to convince Cordel that his urge to kill has got out of control, leading him to murder on the spur of the moment for no real reason.

The purpose of this blog entry, however, is fashion! Season six and seven bring us some pretty groovy 70s fashions, and Jim’s jacket at the pickup deserves internet recognition.

Jim attempts to look studious while wearing sofa upholstery. Well done, Jim!

Apparently large checks were in in ’72. How Jim thinks he can pull off an apparent knowledge of the necessary fuel mix for a rather lovely motorbike in that jacket and purple-tinted rectangular shades is a mystery. We can only believe that Jim isn’t so good at choosing his clothes at the early hours he’s required to go and pick up the tape, or wasn’t told that he’d have to talk to a hairy biker about fuel mixtures.


Later, fully awake and in ingenious-genius mode, Jim pulls it all back in a slick grey suit reminiscent of the earlier days of Mission. Willy’s looking pretty good too in a heavy suit jacket that looks as if it may be wool.

In his apartment, Jim cannot look anything but chique. It's such a cool-ass apartment anyone would look chique, and no bad suits are allowed through the door.

During the mission, as a crack chess player and psychiatrist he is equally sensible, even down to the thick-rimmed glasses through which he hears his cues from Barney and his chess-computer. The later suit here particularly sets off his eyes.

This photos don't exactly focus on the suits, but they do focus on the dreamy, dreamy eyes.

This concludes our fashion lesson for today… I won’t pretend this has been an incisive episode critique. It hasn’t.