O
n a rooftop in Manhattan, Antoni Porowski, the Canadian actor and chef from Queer Eye, is throwing himself into the role of James Dean. He wears a zip-up jacket that recalls the one the movie star sported in Rebel without a Cause and a pair of sunglasses inspired by the models Dean wore. And it is these glasses that have brought him to this rooftop and the apartment attached to it, which is where the young actor lived in the mid-Fifties and which today looks much the same as it did then, kept as a celebration of its former tenant by its current one.
Porowski, a fan of Dean’s, was contacted by Renauld sunglasses and the James Dean estate to see if he’d be up for a photoshoot here. “I couldn’t believe it — I’d had this obsession with Americana, being a Polish-Canadian kid, and as a teenager I just got obsessed with James Dean’s life and how he wasn’t just an actor but a real renaissance man — he loved poetry and dance and music,” he says. “What’s so interesting about him is that you have this stereotypical masculinity of the adrenaline rush of riding motorcycles and driving cars real fast, and then the turtleneck and bongos and the more scholastic side, which his glasses seem to symbolise. He was an enigma, not just one thing.”
