SCREEN PRESENCE - DOUBLE FEATURE - What happens when two of the hippest men on the planet join forces? Get ready to roll camera.

Mention personal style and Wes Anderson, who was chortling just a moment ago, looks like he suddenly slurped down a bad oyster. "I don't want anyone to think I follow trends and fashion because, well, frankly. . . I just don't," says the director.

Never mind the fact that Anderson is kitted out in a handmade khaki suit, marlin blue oxford with starched collar and cocoa-brown suede loafers that bear nary a scuff. Or that he popularized the shrunken suit to such a degree that almost every menswear designer -- from Thom Browne to Valentino -- now uses less fabric. Or that his films -- "Rushmore," "The Royal Tenenbaums," "The Life Aquatic" -- actually get flak for being so obsessed with style.

Call him a misfit. Call him an outsider. Just don't call him stylish.

"Wes is very stylish," says Marc Jacobs by phone from Paris. The designer, as artistic director of Louis Vuitton, teamed with Anderson to come up with a new look -- flannel suits that don't cinch at the shoulders or reveal naked ankles -- and a set of luggage for his latest film, "The Darjeeling Limited." The pairing makes perfect sense. Jacobs' fashion shows have an ethereal, cinematic quality, and he even name-checked Bernardo Bertolucci as inspiration for a recent collection. Anderson's fastidious attention to quirky style details in his films is legendary.

The fashion designer and the film director, both occasional expats who spend months at a time in Paris, first met a few years ago. "I think we were introduced by Sofia Coppola at a birthday party for her brother, Roman," says Jacobs, who adored "The Royal Tenenbaums" and was impressed before they even shook hands. Anderson simply says: "I would have to drop a lot of names to be exact, so let's just say that we met through mutual friends in Paris."

Anderson's aversion to name-dropping typifies his cool. It's an indelible type of composure, like invisible ink. But whether you can decode it or not is no matter. The director has a personal style that informs, even embosses, his films, his characters, and his own distinctive look. And over the years, that style has hatched fashion trends as reliably as a swan spawns ugly ducklings.

Take Anderson's aforementioned shrunken corduroy suits, which we first saw the director wearing back in 2001 and even earlier on the Max Fischer character in "Rushmore." Two years later, Thom Browne launched a career with suits that looked like they had been hung to dry in a sauna, clearly taking a cue from Anderson. Designer Scott Sternberg of Band of Outsiders might have raided Anderson's own closet for the label's preppy geek aesthetic, a look that's at the forefront of men's fashion today.