![]() ![]() If I can point you to just one clip that illustrates of all of this, let me show you this three-odd minute segment from very early on in the show’s run. Mr Michael Mann, the show’s producer (and the director of Heat, Collateral, The Insider and other macho classics) is now rightly revered for the concussive volleys of violence he orchestrates, along with the oil-sleek modernism of his visual taste in constructing a world. I was 10, maybe, when the show was a primetime mainstay, so I wasn’t yet aware of anything such as a director or mise en scène, but I knew that the way this somewhat sleazy world was being presented, and the way in which Miami (its colours, its places, its style) was being realised – or, really, fantasised – was special. The cool didn’t just come from Mr Johnson and his partner-in-crime-solving, Mr Philip Michael Thomas (who played the grittier, double-breasted Ricardo Tubbs), but from the show itself. What I absorbed was a balmy, neon-coloured machismo for which I had no taste, and something else that intrigued me, something cool. My dad watched Miami Vice, which means that I, as a child, inadvertently absorbed it more than anything else. But those suits, and that style, helped to illustrate an aesthetic arc (for me, and for us all) that has, in recent years, begun again to bend towards the breezy, billowy silliness that Sonny made famous. ![]() Of course, all three of those sentiments are true. In retrospect, and in the years since Miami Vice premiered in 1984, Sonny’s wild, blousy, pastel-coloured suits, tees and sockless suave have seemed (to me, to us all) at times ridiculous, outrageously cool and oh-so-Miami. It happens just the way we remember it: when he walks on screen and into the cultural consciousness as James “Sonny” Crockett, an undercover Miami cop trying to infiltrate a drug smuggling ring, Mr Don Johnson is already all Aqua Velva and five-o’clock-shadow swagger, wearing a white linen suit, aquamarine T-shirt and white espadrilles. ![]()
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