When you picture Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, there’s probably only one image in your mind’s eye: Standing tall behind the turntables alongside his bandmate Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, both of them dressed in gleaming robot helmets and skintight leather. As the iconic French electronic music duo, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo were larger-than-life style gods, often donning custom looks by Hedi Slimane during his stints with both Dior Homme and Saint Laurent. Their uniform of slim satin suits and streamlined biker jackets helped define the “Hedi Boy” look for years to come.
So it might come as some surprise to hear that in 2025—four years after Daft Punk officially hung up their helmets for good—Bangalter has emerged as a leading figure of the dad style movement. Over the past decade or so, the concept of dad style and its attendant staples—chunky sneakers, slouchy caps, roomy chinos—have gone from frumpy to fashionable. And there’s perhaps no greater endorsement of this comfort-first agenda than Bangalter’s embrace of it.
Since Daft Punk’s disbanding, Bangalter has remained plenty busy. In 2023, he scored a dance performance that debuted at the Paris Opera House called Chiroptera, and then followed that up in 2024 by releasing the full six hours of music he produced for the project as a solo LP. He’s also contributed music to several films (including the 2023 French absurdist movie Daaaaaalí!), produced music for Lil Nas X, and scored the most recent runway show for Japanese brand Anrealage. And, of course, there’s his other job as an honest-to-goodness father, raising his two sons, Tara Jay and Roxan, with his actress wife Élodie Bouchez.
It makes sense, then, that these days, Bangalter’s fits are a little more human. With so much on the go, he’s swapped his hip-hugging Dior for something a little looser, comfier, more practical. Unlike the fashion vloggers who do their best to approximate cool dad style with designer collabs and formulaic combinations, Bangalter’s approach to the form is far more natural. On his torso, he prefers threadbare tees, untucked chambray shirts, and rumpled linen blazers. Below the waist, he’s usually wearing relaxed chinos, often with a drawstring waist, alongside a lineup of true dad shoes: New Balance runners, Clarks lace-ups, and—the piéce de résistance—slip-on Skechers. All of that gets topped off with one of several worn-to-hell LA Dodgers caps.
It’s a uniform worn by plenty of Brooklyn dads, sure, but Bangalter imbues the look with a devil-may-care flair that makes the whole thing feel more artistic than ordinary. If there’s one thing you should take away from these photos, it’s not the individual pieces per se, but the attitude. Bangalter is living proof that real style—dad-coded or otherwise—comes from the way you wear things, rather than the things themselves. And frankly, we’d argue that in this evolved fatherly form, he looks cooler now than he ever did in Daft Punk.
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