Harry Styles as Jack Chambers in Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

Vitals

Harry Styles as Jack Chambers, “technical engineer”

The Victory Project, an American desert utopia modeled after late 1950s Palm Springs

Film: Don’t Worry Darling
Release Date: September 23, 2022
Director: Olivia Wilde
Costume Designer: Arianne Phillips
Tailor: Jack Kasbarian

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

I had been among those who were anticipating the release of Don’t Worry Darling since long before the gossip, mostly excited to catch my faves Florence Pugh and Nick Kroll—supporting though his role may have been—against the lush ’50s-inspired style from costumes to cars as seen in leaked photos from the production in Palm Springs.

Much of the film’s attention has since been mired in controversy between behind-the-scenes issues and frustration over its plot execution, but I’d argue that credit is still considerably due to its showcasing the most aspirational aspects of mid-century life, including natty wardrobes, naughty cocktail parties, and Detroit’s chrome-detailed finest in every driveway. Indeed, you could say a little too much attention was paid to *clears throat* Styles over substance.

Okay, that was a cheap shot. While I won’t deny that I was frustrated by what felt like unnecessary red herrings and logistical storytelling holes that didn’t even last my trip to the fridge, Don’t Worry Darling was a dazzling spectacle anchored by a solid performance from the always-excellent Florence Pugh, who celebrates her 27th birthday today.

Happy birthday, Flo.

We begin on a typical sun-bleached day—day 987, specifically—in the presumably “perfect” life of a household in the mysterious Victory Project, a suburban desert oasis. Our well-coiffed breadwinner Jack Chambers (Harry Styles) leaves for his vague job as a “technical engineer” while bread-toaster Alice pantlessly prepares his meals and cleans the house in his absence. What their neighbor Bunny (Olivia Wilde) calls their “perpetual honeymoon” resumes when Jack returns home to his Jet Age chauvinist’s dream of the lovely Alice in a bare-shouldered dress with a drink and dinner awaiting him… though it’s not her well-prepared roast that he eats first.

What’d He Wear?

Academy Award-nominated costume designer Arianne Phillips explained to Fashionista that she took advantage of the opportunity to experiment, “given that there’s multiple layers to our narrative,” as the plot unravels to reveal why the specific styles seen on screen wouldn’t need to specifically represent the fashions of a defined point in history. After all, the Victory Project is merely a simulation created by the enigmatic Frank Carlson (Chris Pine), a one-time podcaster yearning for the misplaced “ideal” of how American life was presented circa 1960, when men dressed like Sinatra and returned home to attentive wives.

“I really put my male-gaze hat on for this,” Phillips told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s not only how men idealize women, but also how they see themselves. The way that Jack chooses to dress really leaned into that Rat Pack early ’60s bro culture, in terms of that flawless suit and the leisure wear and that whole archetype. This is really about gender roles and about a time when there were these societal expectations. So that idea of the perfect wife, mother, lover, who has to be all things. But the same thinking is how Jack presents himself, and how all the men present themselves, as their most virile, handsome self.”

Tailored by Jack Kasbarian from Western Costume, Jack’s half-dozen suits were designed by Phillips in bright pastels that match Jack and Alice’s apparent optimism as well as the Victory Project’s utopian outlook, as she elaborated with Fashionista that she used “heightened colors — colors that maybe are uncommon for the time period.”

Jack Chambers bookends his story in a vivid blue sharkskin suit, significantly worn both for this early scene establishing his relationship with Alice… and his final scene where it all falls apart.

Hoping to present himself in the toxic likeness of Frank’s idealized version of manhood, you could say that Mr. Styles’ character adopted a way of dressing as it was around 1960.

Tailored with a close fit, the single-breasted suit jacket has narrow notch lapels with a two-button front. The wide shoulders are padded with roped sleeveheads and three buttons at each cuff. The ventless jacket has straight flapped hip pockets and a welted breast pocket with a neatly folded white cotton pocket square.

The first time we see this suit, Jack wears a skinny tie that harmonizes with the narrow shirt collar and jacket lapels, consistent with the sleek associations with men’s tailoring of the early ’60s. The tie is predominantly sky-blue with sets of short but wide horizontal block stripes in navy and olive, bordered along the top in a narrow olive stripe; the resulting sky-blue sections are bisected at the mid-point by a narrow blue stripe. The tie has a squared bottom like many knitted ties, though a closer look suggests the sheen and imperfect slubs of dupioni silk.

Much later, after the simulation reveal and Alice’s reprogramming, the couple essentially relives that first day, but Jack returning home from work to Alice standing in wait with a drink in her hand ends up going much differently when his mindless singing reminds her of the reality of pre-simulation life, a reality that soon comes crashing down over Jack’s head. On this day, he wears another skinny tie, though in a solid dark navy blue.

Careful where you put that glass down, Jack.

Jack Chambers seems like the kind of guy who would have learned all the wrong lessons from Mad Men, seeing the early Don Draper as an aspirational figure, and thus he follows the basic mid-century American office dress code of cycling exclusively through white dress shirts for work, albeit with plain button cuffs rather than Mr. Draper’s French cuffs. Jack’s white cotton shirts are designed with a narrow spread collar, plain front (no placket), and breast pocket.

Jack’s matching blue suit trousers echo the styling of his jacket with a close fit that flatters Harry Styles’ lean physique and a medium-high rise to near his natural waist. The fit tapers through the legs to the plain-hemmed bottoms, which break high over his shoes.

Rather than the traditional flat front or pleats, the trousers have a short dart on each side of the front. Signaling a well-placed confidence in the tailor’s abilities, the waistband is beltless with just a button-tab on each side of the waistband to adjust the fit if needed. The trousers have the slightly slanted “full top” or “frogmouth” front pockets that were popular on men’s trousers through the 1960s into the following decade.

Reflecting the somewhat more relaxed American workplace sartorial norms during the era so celebrated by the Victory Project, Jack wears slip-on shoes for work rather than the more traditional—and more formal—derbies or oxfords. The uppers are black leather with a straight cap-toe and short elastic side gussets that ease Jack slipping his black-stockinged feet into the shoes. According to Nylon, Arianne Phillips found Styles’ screen-worn vintage shoes from the L.A. outfitter Vintage on Hollywood.

Given what we later learn about how Jack spends his days, I wonder what was really in that black suitcase he drops by the door each evening.

To complete his wannabe alpha image of Rat Pack-era cool, Jack appropriately pulls on a set of sunglasses in the browline style that Shuron Ltd. vice president Jack Rohrbach had developed in 1947. Primarily available only for clear-lensed eyeglasses, browline-framed specs have become associated with mid-century figures like Malcolm X, Vince Lombardi, LBJ, and Burt Lancaster’s domineering J.J. Hunsecker in the 1957 noir Sweet Smell of Success.

As you can learn in my friend Shawn Michael Bongiorno’s well-researched post for his blog Individual Elegance, browline frames were revived in the 1980s when companies like American Optical, Art-Craft, Persol, Ray-Ban, Shuron, and Victory (appropriately enough, in this case) co-opted the style for sunglasses merely by adding tinted glass like the brown lenses that Jack wears in his black-framed sunglasses.

The fact that browline frames hadn’t yet been widely produced as sunglasses by the 1960s wouldn’t actually be considered an anachronism, given the reality of the Victory Project.

In addition to his gold wedding ring worn on the conventional finger of his left hand, Jack wears a simple yet elegant stainless steel wristwatch on a black leather strap. The round black dial with its silver-toned non-numeric hour indices and white 3 o’clock date window resemble a classic Rolex Oysterdate.

After Frank publicly presents Jack with a gold ring upon his invitation to the Victory Project’s senior advisory board, the ring never leaves Jack’s right index finger. Chanel Vargas for POPSUGAR identified the ring as the Bauhaus Model 4 Enamel by MISHO Designs in 22-karat yellow gold-plated bronze with a slightly slanted enamel-filled strip across its rectangular face. MISHO Designs offers the enamel in a variety of colors, but Frank bestows Jack with a ring filled in “black beauty” enamel.

Costume designer Arianne Phillips explained to Elle that she “learned a lot about the signet ring from working on a couple of Kingsman movies. It’s more unusual in America, yet [Don’t Worry Darling‘s male characters] leaned into this kind of bro culture, this Rat Pack early ’60s, when ‘men were men and women were women’ quote-unquote.” Indeed, rings were a status symbol among the Rat Pack and their contemporaries, with Frank Sinatra regularly photographed wearing his usual pinky rings and even once gifting Dean Martin a diamond ring that matched one of his own.

What to Listen to

The Don’t Worry Darling soundtrack celebrates many vocal standards of the 1950s and ’60s, stretching back even a decade earlier when we hear “Where or When” as recorded on Christmas Eve 1941 by the Benny Goodman Sextet with Peggy Lee singing. The song continues from Alice’s “driving lesson” in the black Thunderbird to her frying bacon and eggs for Jack’s breakfast.

Jack leaves for work with the other men of the Victory Project in a choreographed sequence scored by Mel Tormé’s jazzy 1962 rendition of “Comin’ Home Baby”, which could seem contradictory to the depiction of their morning commute until it hits us later that we are indeed watching the men returning home to their reality before they re-enter the simulation at the end of their real-life workdays.

When Jack returns home, his romantic reunion with Alice is underscored by The Platters’ 1958 doo-wop update of “Twilight Time”, which had been written 14 years before the group recorded what is now considered the definitive version of the song and which reached #1 on both pop and R&B charts.

The Car

At the start of Don’t Worry Darling, Jack drives a black 1956 Ford Thunderbird that we see he had specifically chosen—right next to his preferred nationality and his choice of Alice as his wife—in the flashback to reality. It’s an excellent choice, if somewhat obvious as the sleek first-generation T-Bird remains a chromed symbol of American automotive glamour in the fabulous fifties.

Differentiated as a 1956 model by its rear-mounted steering wheel, front-panel air vents, and porthole windows on the hardtop roof, Jack’s Thunderbird may have been powered by either the base 292 cubic-inch Y-block V8 or the larger 312 cubic-inch V8 added as an option for ’56, both engines mated either to a Ford-O-Matic automatic transmission or a three-speed manual.

Ford initially unveiled the Thunderbird to the public at the Detroit Auto Show in February 1954, having been developed a year earlier in response to the Chevrolet Corvette, which is curiously the car later chosen for Jack and Alice’s re-entry into the Victory Project.

What to Imbibe

The Chambers household daily routine includes Alice pouring Jack a bourbon, neat, in a crystal tumbler to serve him with a smile as soon as he crosses their front door. Rather than the bottle of Wild Turkey inelegantly stashed above his fridge in their non-simulation reality, the Kentucky whiskey is poured from a clear carafe with “BOURBON” printed on the side.

Jack opts for straight bourbon rather than watermelon sugar.

How to Get the Look

Harry Styles as Jack Chambers in Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

An extension of the men (including, I admit, yours truly) whose gut response to watching Mad Men a decade ago was to basically cosplay the early ’60s by wearing slick suits, white shirts, skinny ties, and pocket squares,  Jack Chambers gets the help of an Oscar-nominated costume designer to take his fantasies to the next sartorial level in expertly tailored suits made from eye-catching period textiles like silky blue sharkskin.

• Blue sharkskin suit:
  • Single-breasted 2-button jacket with slim notch lapels, welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, 3-button cuffs, and ventless back
  • Darted-front trousers with button-tab side adjusters, full-top “frogmouth” front pockets, and plain-hemmed bottoms
• White cotton shirt with narrow spread collar, plain front, breast pocket, and button cuffs
• Blue silk skinny ties
• Black leather cap-toe loafers
• Black socks
• Gold signet ring with black enamel-filled line across rectangular face
• Gold wedding ring
• Stainless steel Rolex Oysterdate-style wristwatch with round black dial (with non-numeric hour indices and 3:00 date window) on black leather strap
• Black-framed browline-style sunglasses with brown lenses

Phillips recalled to Who What Wear that “Harry was a dream to work with… open and generous with the time he gave to the multiple fittings, as there were quite a few costume changes.”

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The Quote

Alice, we’re perfect in here… don’t you wanna be perfect with me?

The post Don’t Worry Darling: Harry Styles’ Blue Suit appeared first on BAMF Style.

Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV (1985)

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Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa, two-time heavyweight world champion boxer

Krasnogorsk, Russia, Winter 1985

Film: Rocky IV
Release Date: November 27, 1985
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Costume Designer: Tom Bronson

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

“New year, new you” messaging seems to dominate the beginning of every January, and what character better embodies getting in shape than the Italian Stallion and his famous training montages?

The Rocky story famously began as a passion project for Sylvester Stallone, who became an overnight star after tenaciously refusing to sell the rights to the screenplay he wrote in three days unless he could play the lead role… resulting in an iconic sports drama that received ten Academy Award nominations and became the highest-grossing movie of 1976.

As Stallone’s stardom rose, he took directorial control of the series as well, evolving the Rocky series with a new sequel every three years until Rocky IV, when the stakes had grown so high that the scrappy Philadelphia boxer was now basically responsible for defending the very concept of American freedom against the Soviet Union, represented by the cold-hearted Russian champion and Army captain Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) who famously commented “if he dies, he dies,” after brutally clobbering Rocky’s respected rival Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in the ring.

Apollo’s death inspires Rocky to surrender his world championship by challenging Drago, who agrees to an unsanctioned Christmas Day fight in the Soviet Union, selected to protect Drago from supposed American threats of reprisal. While the steroid-enhanced Drago undergoes high-tech training with state-of-the-art equipment, Rocky returns to his more modest analog methods with saws, sleds, split logs, and speed bags around his snowy secluded cabin in Krasnogorsk, located north of Moscow… though you may think it looks suspiciously similar to Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming.

Rocky receives the usual support from his gruff brother-in-law Paulie Pennino (Burt Young) and Apollo’s devoted trainer Duke Evers (Tony Burton) as well as unexpected emotional support from his wife Adrian (Talia Shire), who had initially protested the match.

Yo, Adrian, thanks for coming!

Rocky IV remains the only entry not to include an original score composed by Bill Conti, though a few of his beats can be heard in Vince DiCola’s score, including during the “Training Montage” track. In addition to reprising the Rocky III theme “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, the Rocky IV soundtrack produced the hit singles “Burning Heart” (also by Survivor) and “Living in America”, performed by James Brown to Drago’s hilariously increasing bemusement at the spectacle of American boxing.

Despite considerable criticism, Rocky IV punched its way to box-office success as the third highest-grossing movie of 1985 and the highest-grossing overall in the franchise. Stallone released a director’s cut in 2021 that somewhat rebuilt Rocky IV‘s critical reputation as it was considered an improvement on the theatrical release.

What’d He Wear?

The Shearling Jacket

Rocky wisely dresses for his freezing destination in a civilian bomber jacket made from heavy shearling, the venerated sheep or lamb hide that has protected wearers in cold climates since the Stone Age. Shearling is produced by tanning, processing, and dying the hide of a sheep with the wool still intact on the reverse side, providing a plush fleece often used as lining while the outer shell presents the tanned hide with either a grain or sueded finish.

As aviation innovation in the early 20th century took pilots higher and required heavier outerwear for colder air temperature, air forces around the world pressed shearling and its insular qualities into service, from the UK-developed Irvin flying jacket authorized for the Royal Air Force to the B-3 worn by American bomber crews during World War II.

Rocky’s waist-length sheepskin jacket incorporates styling details from both of these iconic jackets, such as the front-belted waist of the Irvin flying jacket and the slanted hand pockets found on the American B-3 flight jacket.

On Rocky’s jacket, the grain leather outer shell has been dyed to a dark seal brown like the American mil-spec B-3; the naturally beige piled fur reverse side lines the jacket and presents across the broad collar and around the edges of the cuffs and waist hem. The seams have been reinforced by strips of dark grain leather, seen around and down the set-in sleeves and criss-crossing on the back. The collar can be turned up and latched into place over the throat with a strap extending from the right side of the collar through a buckle presumably rigged under the left side of the collar.

The end of each sleeve has a zipper that can be unzipped to more easily fit the jacket over heavier layers, then zipped closed again for insulation. Three grommets under each armpit allow air to pass through to ventilate the wearer, which Rocky would have found particularly suitable during the rigors of his analog workouts.

Like its military forebears, Rocky’s shearling jacket closes with a straight front zipper, int his case brass with a brown leather pull tied onto the slider. As mentioned, a full belt also extends across the front of the jacket, positioned just above the waistline through a leather self-loop on each side. You can tell by looking at the belt buckles that more than one jacket was used; the primary jacket was made by the California company Golden Bear Sportswear (which uses the slogan “A Bear for Wear”) and closes through a squared brass single-prong buckle, while a secondary jacket has a more rounded, D-shaped buckle.

Warmly clad in his shearling bomber jacket, Rocky trains with saw and axe to organically develop the strength he’ll need to take down the Siberian Bull. Note the squared belt buckle of his more frequently worn Golden Bear jacket as he saws logs, while the jacket he wears while downing a tree with an axe has the rounded D-shaped belt buckle.

Stallone’s size 40 screen-worn Golden Bear sheepskin jacket was sold by Heritage Auctions in December 2015, with the listing including a personal anecdote from the actor, writer, and director:

I remember buying this jacket because I wanted it to represent the difficulty Rocky had training in Siberia, at such high altitudes. The jacket has a military feel and it was made for severe weather. It became an important story point because it represented how difficult Rocky’s training was in order to fight Drago. We were at about seven thousand feet in the Grand Tetons and it was freezing when I was doing the training montage, where I finally arrive at the top of the mountain and yell at Drago. Thank God I was wearing this coat or I woulda froze to death.

“Draaaagggggoooooooooo!”

Shop the jacket:

Many inexpensive copies of shearling jackets abound, often marketed as "sherpa" jackets with artificial fleece lining. In many cases, these can still be quality items (and in many cases, not), but true shearling sheepskin jackets are worth the investment.

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The Champ Sheepskin Jacket from Cockpit USA

Cockpit USA currently offers two sheepskin bomber jackets resembling the Rocky IV coat, with the description for "The Champ" suggesting it was directly inspired by the Italian Stallion:

• Cockpit USA The Champ Sheepskin Jacket Z21C101 ($1,360 on Cockpit USA)
• Cockpit USA R.A.F Sheepskin Bomber Jacket Z2109 ($1,380 on Cockpit USA)

Price and availability current as of Jan. 5, 2023.

From Philly to Russia

The fall weather is more temperate when Rocky leaves his Philadelphia estate, his shearling jacket merely flung over his left shoulder until he gets to the limousine that takes him to the airport.

Rocky wears a soft cream-colored sweater, possibly cashmere, with broken tic-stitched vertical stripes spaced about two inches apart across the body and set-in sleeves. The sweater is accented by a wide ribbed taupe bandolier that slants down from the right armpit across the torso, running perpendicular to two more sharply diagonal cream-ribbed bands that extend down from the left shoulder.

Outside the sweater’s round crew-neck, Rocky wears the short gold necklace with the boxing glove pendant that first appeared in Rocky III (1982) but wasn’t explained in-universe until Rocky V (1990) when Rocky’s trainer Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith) gave it to him, sharing that it had once been one of the real-life boxer Rocky Marciano’s cufflinks. According to a story Stallone shared in a Heritage Auctions listing for the screen-worn necklace, it actually did once belong to Marciano, who had given the pendant to Rat Pack comedian Joey Bishop, who—in turn—gifted it to Stallone in the late 1970s after being impressed by the first Rocky.

When not actively exercising or dressing in a suit and tie, Rocky typically spends Rocky IV wearing black gabardine double reverse-pleated trousers with on-seam side pockets, no back pockets, and straight-cut legs down to the plain-hemmed bottoms, perhaps best seen under the bright Vegas spotlights during the fatal Apollo Creed v. Ivan Drago match in Vegas.

He arrives in Russia with his feet adequately protected in a pair of heavy-duty black lace-up snow boots, constructed of vulcanized leather mid-calf uppers and heavy rubber soles with a narrow white band around the outsoles and lugs that provide traction in the snow and ice.

From the Keystone State to Krasnogourbinsk.

Rocky arrives in Russia wearing a soft paneled-crown newsboy cap woven in black-and-white that creates an overall gray effect, with the colorful flecks characteristic of Donegal tweed. He wore the same cap at the start of the movie, when his son Rocky Jr. (Rocky Krakoff) asked “where’d you get that hat?” to which his dad responded “a friend gave it to me, you like it?”

Rocky sports a pair of black leather gloves, presumably lined for additional warmth. Between the gloves and the substantial fur-covered cuffs of his jacket, we can’t see if Rocky wears any rings or watches. He also wears a gray scarf with super-soft fibers suggesting mohair, though angora and alpaca fleece are also possibilities.

Cold-Weather Training

Through the duration of his outdoor training montages, Rocky wears his shearling jacket zipped up over his invariably black workout gear. His intermediate top layer is a black cotton or cotton-blend pullover sweatshirt with a drawstring funnel-neck, like a hoodie without the hood. He appears to layer the sweatshirt over an off-white henley shirt and white thermal cotton long underwear.

Rather than the more fashionable peaked newsboy cap, Rocky keeps his head warm with a plain black ribbed-knit beanie.

Rocky works out in skin-tight black elasticized workout pants with a double black drawstring waist closure. The manufacturer can be identified by the gray chevron logo positioned over the left thigh, though I can’t discern who it is.

Rocky presumably tucks the bottoms of his workout pants into the tops of his boots, though his exercises in the heavy snow call for the addition of black polyester gauntlets around his calves that strap around the boots.

A Different Jacket

At the start of the movie, Rocky arrives home for Paulie’s birthday party wearing a similar waist-length brown leather jacket with a shawl collar faced in a beige fleece, over his black crew-neck sweatshirt, red-striped warmup pants, and white sneakers.

Rocky returns home at the start of the movie, excited to join his family in presenting Paulie with a birthday robot that he gradually falls in love with. When it comes to this part of Rocky IV, YMMV.
Note that he wears a brown leather jacket with a fleece-faced collar; whether this is a costume-related continuity error meant to be his later shearling jacket remains unknown.

How to Get the Look

Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV (1985)

When spending time in a place so chilly that it’s detrimental to Paulie’s sinuses, you’ll want a hardy outer layer from a time-tested fabric that will keep you warm and dry without sacrificing any of its own abilities to do so. Like generations of pilots who literally rose up straight to the top before him, Rocky relies on a sheepskin bomber jacket with military-informed details like a belted waist.

That said, sheepskin may not be the most practical workout gear for most people’s purposes… unless you’re training to fight a deadly boxer nicknamed the Siberian Express on his frozen home turf.

• Dark brown sheepskin shearling zip-up bomber jacket with beige natural fleece reverse side, broad collar with throat latch strap, brass zipper, full front belt, slanted welted hand pockets, and zip-back set-in sleeves
• Cream cashmere crew-neck sweater with V-shaped contrast ribbing
• Black gabardine double reverse-pleated straight-leg trousers with straight/on-seam side pockets and plain-hemmed bottoms
• Black vulcanized lace-up mid-calf snow boots with heavy lugged rubber soles
• Black-and-white Donegal tweed newsboy cap
• Dark gray mohair scarf
• Black leather gloves
• Gold necklace with boxing glove pendant

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The Quote

I just wanted to get away from things, you know?

The post The Rocky IV Shearling Jacket appeared first on BAMF Style.

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in Elvis (2022)

Vitals

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley, country rock guitarist and singer

Shreveport, Louisiana, January 1955

Film: Elvis
Release Date: June 23, 2022
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Costume Designer: Catherine Martin
Tailor: Gloria Bava

Background

Elvis Presley was born 88 years ago today on January 8, 1935. Little introduction is needed for the King of Rock and Roll, who remains one of the most significant cultural figures of the last century even nearly 50 years after this death. Several movies have been made about Presley’s life and musical career, the most recent being the highly publicized Elvis, released last year with an astounding and immersive lead performance by Austin Butler that has been touted as a likely contender for an Academy Award.

Some audiences were polarized by director and co-writer Baz Lurhmann’s signature spectacle or by Tom Hanks playing Presley’s financially abusive manager Colonel Tom Parker like a bloated Bond villain (though others have argued this is exactly who Parker was), but Austin Butler’s portrayal of the King has been almost universally acclaimed, including praise from Presley’s wife Priscilla and daughter Lisa Marie. An Instagram post from the latter commended how Butler “channeled and embodied my father’s heart and soul beautifully. In my humble opinion, his performance is unprecedented and FINALLY done accurately and respectfully.”

Elvis‘ narrative focuses most directly on the tense relationship between the singer and Colonel Tom, a shady promoter whom we meet while representing tired country acts like Hank Snow (David Wenham) until Snow’s own son Jimmie Rodgers Snow (Kodi Smit-McPhee) excitedly plays Elvis’ first hit single, “That’s All Right”. The opportunistic Parker knows a gold mine when he hears it and sets out to catch Presley’s upcoming performance at KWKH radio’s “Louisiana Hayride”, which biographer Peter Guralnick describes as “the [Grand Ole] Opry’s more innovative rival in Shreveport.”

Presley had started performing at the Hayride in October 1954, just two weeks after his Opry debut, though Elvis includes some of the circumstances from his first appearance into the January 21, 1955 show depicted in Elvis where Parker first laid eyes on the singer in person and observes the sensational effect he and his trademark wiggle has on the crowd in attendance—specifically its younger female audience and the “feelings they were not sure they should enjoy.”

What’d He Wear?

Costume designer Catherine Martin explained in a call with Financial Times that, of the approximately 93 costume changes that Austin Butler went through as Elvis, the most substantial challenge was “finding that 1950s look that encapsulated Elvis’ rebelliousness and sexuality at that watershed moment—and then allowing Austin’s performance to fit his version of Elvis, rather than slavishly copying the originals.”

By the film’s chronology, Butler’s Elvis first takes the stage at the Louisiana Hayride in a suit that’s predominantly hot pink, a power color for the star who long idolized a pink Cadillac as a mark of success and which stands out among the drabber traditional country duds of his fellow musicians and presenters.

It has been well-documented that, especially in these early years of his career, the real Elvis Presley had favored pink and black clothing. This was mentioned by my friend Gary Wells, who published a thoughtful review of Elvis on his excellent blog Vintage Leisure by SoulRide and also directed me to the official site of Elvis’ backing guitarist Scotty Moore, which shares that—during the January 22, 1955 performance—a fan in attendance named Nick Gulli snapped a rare 35mm color photograph of the King wearing a vibrant pink suit and black shirt similar to how Butler dresses for the same concert in Elvis.

Dressed in his characteristic pink and black, Elvis brings the house down playing “Baby Let’s Play House,” an Arthur Gunter-penned song that the real Presley would release as a Sun Records single four months later in April 1955.

“The pink suit is a combination of this very drapey, fabulous wool fabric with a very specific soft, almost cardigan-like feel in the jacket,” Martin explained to Jazz Tangcay for Variety. “One of the interesting things about ’50s suiting is there was a lot of texture, a lot more texture than we have today,” she elaborated to Vanity Fair. “And that was really hard because you just spend your time looking through tailoring fabric books just hoping that you’re gonna find something that’s gonna match or fit what you want.”

Much as he often did in real life, Elvis depicts the eponymous singer and future style icon staring into the windows of Lansky Bros., a clothier on Memphis’ famous Beale Street that has capitalized on its connection to both Elvis the man and Elvis the movie. It’s in the Lansky Bros. storefront where Butler’s Presley admires the distinctively detailed pink suit he would eventually purchase and wear for this stage appearance on the Louisiana Hayride.

“For Elvis, though, it was the clothing, it was the styles, the bold fashions, that drew him in, as he gazed hungrily into Lansky’s windows,” wrote biographer Peter Guralnick in Last Train to Memphis, a reality that would be reflected on screen as Elvis ogles this pink suit while still dressed in his pre-fame uniform as a Crown Electric Company truck driver. “He made a definite impression on Guy and Bernard Lansky, the brothers who owned and operated the store. ‘He came down and looked through the windows before he had any money—we knew him strictly by face,’ recalled Guy.”

The jacket is less a traditional suit jacket and more a rockabilly evolution of the “Hollywood jacket” or “loafer jacket” style that was most popular through the 1940s and ’50s, a precursor to the oft-reviled ’70s leisure suit. Traditionally unstructured with a loose fit, this style of jacket would comfortably serve the range of motion Elvis needed for his gyrating performances.

The fabric is primarily the hot-pink wool gabardine as cited by Martin, with a contrasting charcoal shoulder yoke that runs straight across the back and chest with subtle white streaking. The edges are piped in a matching streaked charcoal, running continuously around the narrow camp collar, down the front on each side, and around the ventless back.

The single-breasted jacket has three black buttons, which Elvis wears completely unbuttoned for this first appearance… making it a little easier for the women in the front row to pull it off of him!

The sleeves are roped at the shoulders and loose through most of the arms but shirred at the wrists, where they’re gathered under each turnback (gauntlet) cuff, trimmed around the edge in charcoal and fastened with two black buttons arranged side-by-side, more like a shirt than a suit jacket. The only exterior pockets are a jetted pocket on each hip.

“Along with making reproductions of costumes or outfits that Elvis wore, Baz was also focused on how his costumes reflected his sexuality, his rebelliousness, and created a kind of wildfire among his fans,” Martin explained to Vanity Fair. “Like for instance, the lace shirts. Elvis in the mid-’50s wore a lot of lace shirts in different colors, and that kind of connected to what we know as kind of rock star today and also that interesting juxtaposition of the feminine and the masculine. Similarly, Elvis’s favorite color combination was black and pink. So finding a way of incorporating that and to be true to the boxy nature of the ’50s look, but at the same time, respect the body underneath.”

Elvis cycles through several similarly styled lace shirts during the scenes set across the mid-1950s, including a burgundy shirt while recording his first Sun Records single in ’54 and a pink lace shirt while mulling over the “New Elvis” controversy in the summer of ’56. As Martin shared, these were a staple of the real Presley’s wardrobe, like a white custom-made shirt that he was photographed wearing in the ’50s and later gave to his aunt before it was auctioned.

Under the pink-and-black suit, he wears a black lace shirt with a narrow collar. The tight and short sleeves and open lace—with no undershirt—both serve Martin’s stated purpose to “respect the body underneath”.

The trousers are solid hot-pink to match the suit, with an era-appropriate high-rise to Butler’s natural waist that work with the pleat-enhanced full fit to make his stage movements as “Elvis the Pelvis” more effective.

“Obviously his pants were important, and it was a lot about the drape, how the fabric worked,” Martin explained to Vanity Fair. “In these pants—that we coined the ‘squirrel pants’, because that’s one of the insults that was leveled at Elvis—it’s really about the balance of the back and front. More fullness in the front, how much pleat you have, where the pleats fall at the front, whether you move them more in towards the fly or you bring them more out towards the pocket. Our pants were quite bun-hugging at the back. That’s one of the specialties of our tailor Gloria Bava—she likes a nice bottom. And then it’s allowing enough fullness in the front so that you could get all that shake. And then we pegged the legs, as it’s called. So they narrowed toward the shoe. There’s more air in the top of the leg than there is at the bottom. And basically the pegging allows the top to move, but there’s a kind of anchor at the bottom.”

As Martin describes, the legs are very full through the hips and down to the knees, before they taper down to the plain-hemmed bottoms. Each side pocket opening aligns with the seam running down each side. The single reverse-facing pleats align with the first belt loop on each side of the fly. Elvis’ narrow belt is striped in bands of black, white, pink, and black that unites his sartorial palette, with black leather ends that buckle through a silver-toned single-prong buckle which he pulls off to the left.

Guralnick described the real Elvis’ clothing for his first Louisiana Hayride appearance on October 16, 1954 as “a typical black and pink outfit,” more specifically “a pink jacket, white pants, a black shirt, a brightly colored clip-on bow tie, and the kind of two-tone shoes that were known as correspondent shoes, because they were the kind that a snappy salesman or a correspondent in a divorce case might be expected to wear.” This two-colored footwear can also be known as spectator shoes.

Butler’s Elvis appropriately strides onto the stage in a pair of black-and-white leather cap-toe spectator oxfords, with the straight toe-caps, round laces and five-eyelet lace panels, and soles all black while the remaining vamp is white calf. The full break of his trouser bottoms tend to cover his hosiery, but Elvis’ frantic stage movements flash his lighter pink cotton lisle socks.

Later in ’55, Elvis joins Colonel Tom Parker on tour with Hank Snow, cycling through a few of his rockabilly outfits including this same suit seen in a brief vignette now worn with black-and-white penny loafers rather than lace-up oxfords.

Luckily, Elvis’ pink-and-charcoal loafer jacket survived being pulled off of him during the Louisiana Hayride so he could press the suit back into service as part of Hank Snow’s tour of the South, albeit with black-and-white loafers instead of lace-ups.

The early 1955 Elvis has yet to adopt any of his extravagant jewelry or rings, simply wearing a plain stainless steel wristwatch on a black leather strap.

How to Get the Look

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in Elvis (2022)

Elvis dazzles the audience—and his future manager—with not only a unique style of performing but also his totally individual way of dressing, in a rockabilly-styled pink loafer suit, black lace shirt, and spectator shoes, a relatively(!) subdued precursor to the bedazzled jumpsuits that would define his stage looks of the ’70s.

• Black lace short-sleeved shirt with narrow collar
• Hot-pink wool gabardine three-button loafer jacket with charcoal-trimmed edges and contrasting shoulder yoke, narrow camp collar, 2-button turnback cuffs, straight jetted hip pockets, and ventless back
• Hot-pink wool gabardine high-waisted single reverse-pleated trousers with belt loops, straight/on-seam side pockets, and plain-hemmed bottoms
• Black, white, pink, and black-striped narrow belt with black leather ends and silver-toned single-prong buckle
• Black-and-white calf leather 5-eyelet cap-toe spectator oxford shoes
• Light-pink cotton lisle socks
• Stainless steel wristwatch on black leather strap

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The Quote

I’m all geared up.

The post Austin Butler as Elvis: Pink-and-Black Rockabilly Suit appeared first on BAMF Style.

Matt Damon as Carroll Shelby in Ford v Ferrari (2019)

Vitals

Matt Damon as Carroll Shelby, automotive designer and former race car driver

Willow Springs, California, February 1963

Film: Ford v Ferrari
(Also released as: Le Mans ’66)
Release Date: November 15, 2019
Director: James Mangold
Costume Designer: Daniel Orlandi

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Automotive legend Carroll Shelby was born 100 years ago today on January 11, 1923 in Leesburg, Texas. His career included auto racing and design, working with Ford on the AC Cobra and the GT40, his involvement with the latter stylishly dramatized in the Oscar-nominated Ford v Ferrari starring Matt Damon as the iconic entrepreneur tapped to build an American-made race car to compete against Ferrari during the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The movie begins at the “fabled Willow Springs race track” in early 1963, after Shelby has retired from his successful racing career and has settled into automotive design, including the recent completion of the sporty Cobra roadster which Shelby’s pal, the temperamental British driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale), will be driving that day… pending an argument with a prickly SCCA official (Evan Arnold) about its trunk space. (Mad Men fans may recognize Arnold as the lonely Leonard from the series finale.)

Passed on on a bed full of bottle caps in an Airstream stinking of Wild Turkey, Shelby wakes up to his chief engineer Phil Remington (Ray McKinnon) rapping on his trailer door the morning of the race. He dresses quickly and fields autograph-seekers and European racing reps as he negotiates Miles’ future.

The real Carroll Shelby at Riverside, 1963, with an AC Cobra and Lori Campbell (Miss Calif Sports Car), with Ken Miles and John Surtees behind them.
Photo by Allen R. Kuhn

What’d He Wear?

Costume designer Daniel Orlandi’s extensive experience dressing characters for a mid-century setting includes Down with Love (2003), Frost/Nixon (2008), Saving Mr. Banks (2013), Trumbo (2015), and The Founder (2016), so I wasn’t surprised—but certainly dazzled—to see how stylishly he brought ’60s racing culture to life in Ford v Ferrari.

“Shelby was California cool with a Texan look,” Orlandi explained of the lead character to The Hollywood Reporter shortly before the film was released, recognizing the need to account for both of Carroll Shelby’s worlds, “hanging out with the guys and dealing with executives in the Ford boardroom.”

The first time we meet Shelby, he has a croc-booted foot in each of these worlds, in his comfort zone of a dusty racetrack surrounded by his trusty engineers and drivers yet hobnobbing with brass from racing teams like Brumos Porsche. The original screenplay by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, and Jason Keller comments only that Shelby looks “terrific” as he emerges from the Airstream, and indeed the on-screen execution neatly bridges the disparate formality of these worlds in a black striped short-sleeved button-down shirt tucked into casual beige jeans.

The black cotton shirt is pencil-striped in alternating slate and gray stripes with a low contrast against the dark ground. The shirt has a button-down collar, self-cuffed elbow-length sleeves, a breast pocket, box-pleated back, and a front placket that he wears with the top two buttons undone, occasionally showing just the top of his white ribbed cotton sleeveless undershirt (which differs from the short-sleeved V-neck undershirt he woke up wearing.)

Shelby’s dark striped short-sleeved button-down shirt tucked into beige jeans reminded me of John Cassavetes in The Killers (1964) as Johnny North, a former race car driver whose star has fallen to being enlisted as Ronald Reagan’s getaway driver for a postal truck robbery. Just before the heist, we briefly see Johnny wearing this outfit—right down to the requisite silver ID bracelet.

Shelby’s light beige cotton jeans have an era-appropriate long rise to Damon’s waist, where they’re held up with a narrow black leather belt that closes through a matte silver-toned box-style buckle.

Left: Johnny North (John Cassavetes) in The Killers (1964)
Right: A similarly dressed Matt Damon with Christian Bale behind the scenes of Ford v Ferrari (2019)

Orlandi sought to maintain the cowboy affectations associated with the real-life Shelby, including his black crocodile leather cowboy boots.

As mentioned earlier in connection with The Killers and also seen in contemporary racing movies like Grand Prix (1966) and Le Mans (1971), drivers typically wore silver ID bracelets with their name and blood type, a weighty reminder around their wrist of the dangers of their profession. Retired from racing, Shelby continues wearing his sterling silver chain-link bracelet though it’s more symbolic as the plate boasts not his identification but simply appears to be an oversized relief of a snake, either the appropriate cobra symbol used by Shelby American or a medical caduceus.

Shelby picks up the wrench thrown by Miles, offering a look at the Texan’s well-worn cowboy boots and racing bracelet.

With a watch enthusiast like Matt Damon in the lead role and the storied association between racing and horology, Ford v Ferrari audiences knew they could expect to see a significant timepiece on Shelby’s wrist. According to Danny Milton for Hodinkee, “TAG Heuer played an active role in helping find the right watches for the characters in the film,” providing a Heuer Carrera 7753SN for Damon to wear as Shelby. (For what it’s worth, Bale also wears a Heuer as Ken Miles, albeit an Autavia as worn in the ’60s by real-life racers Jo Siffert and Mario Andretti.)

The Jack Heuer-designed Carrera chronograph had been introduced in 1963 with a readily legible design and reliable Valjoux 7730 movement that made it popular among real-life racers of the decade as well as actor and motorsports enthusiast James Garner in Grand Prix. The specific ref. 7753SN worn in Ford v Ferrari would not have appeared until nearly a half-decade after the film’s timeline ends, but the cosmetic differences from a period-correct watch are hardly distracting.

The stainless steel-cased Carrera worn on screen has a light silver “Panda” dial with two black registers at the 3 and 9 o’clock positions and non-numeric silver bars indexing every other hour. Damon wears the watch on his right wrist on a black leather strap.

Shelby dodges Miles’ thrown wrench, only for the Cobra’s windshield to incur the brunt of his wrath.

In addition to his crocodile boots, Daniel Orlandi also made sure to visually incorporate Shelby’s Texan roots by topping his style with a cowboy hat, specifically a black felt custom-made Stetson with a cattleman’s-style crown.

For whatever sun couldn’t be kept from his eyes by the hat’s wide brim, Damon frequently and famously wears a distinctive pair of Entourage of 7 Beacon 1020-A sunglasses. Though the L.A.-based Entourage of 7 is a modern brand, founded relatively recently in 2007, the wayfarer-style frames featured on screen represent a trend contemporary to the ’60s timeframe. The translucent “vintage amber” Zyl acetate frames add extra character, paired with green nylon lenses.

“You like losing, Ken?”

What to Listen to

For a scene set in early 1963, the needle drops are slightly anachronistic but contribute to the overall atmosphere, beginning with the Animals’ 1966 single “Don’t Bring Me Down”, which could be interpreted as Shelby’s unspoken plea to Ken Miles. This track is followed by Del Shannon’s 1964 recording of “Handy Man”, originally recorded five years earlier by Jimmy Jones, which offers an obvious subtext among this field of mechanics and tossed wrenches.

“Handy Man” would again be covered in 1977, this time by James Taylor, who had previously played a race car driver in Monte Hellman’s 1971 road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, accompanied in his ’55 Chevy by his personal “handy man”, a mechanic played by Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson.

How to Get the Look

Matt Damon as Carroll Shelby in Ford v Ferrari (2019)

Born in Texas but working the race tracks of the Golden State, Carroll Shelby effects the look of a “California cowboy” with his Stetson and crocodile boots complementing his streamlined ’60s casual style.

• Black low-contrast pencil-striped cotton short-sleeved shirt with button-down collar, front placket, and breast pocket
• Beige cotton jeans with belt loops and five-pocket layout
• Black leather narrow belt with matte silver box-style buckle
• Black crocodile leather cowboy boots
• Black felt cattleman’s-style Stetson cowboy hat
• Entourage of 7 Beacon 1020-A wayfarer-style sunglasses with translucent amber Zyl acetate frames and green nylon lenses
• Heuer Carrera 7753SN stainless steel chronograph with silver “Panda” dial (with two black registers) on black leather strap
• Sterling silver ID chain-link bracelet

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

You can also listen to my friend Pete Brooker’s interview with costume designer Daniel Orlandi on his excellent podcast From Tailors With Love.

The Quote

Early bird gets the worm, pops.

The post Ford v Ferrari: Matt Damon’s Black Striped Shirt and Cowboy Style as Carroll Shelby appeared first on BAMF Style.

Karl Urban as Kirill in The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

Vitals

Karl Urban as Kirill, determined FSB assassin

Moscow, Winter 2004

Film: The Bourne Supremacy
Release Date: July 23, 2004
Director: Paul Greengrass
Costume Designer: Dinah Collin

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

After Wednesday’s post about Ford v Ferrari, today features another Matt Damon movie… but instead focused on one of his co-stars. In the spirit of Friday the 13th, let’s check out the style of one of the unlucky assassins assigned with exterminating the elusive Jason Bourne.

The Bourne Identity was followed by The Bourne Supremacy, a sequel that borrowed the title of Robert Ludlum’s follow-up novel but scrapped mostly the entire plot in favor of following a new direction more in line with the cinematic narrative, aside from beginning with Bourne living relatively happily with Marie—whom he had met during the events of the prior installment—until he’s called back into action.

The movie brings Bourne back into the fray with Marie’s death, the victim of an assassination attempt meant to exterminate both of them. Her killer, Kirill (Karl Urban), is an operative of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) who was independently hired by an oligarch to frame Bourne for an earlier attack and then take out the amnesiac agent himself. Once Kirill’s employer realizes the mission failed, Kirill is again ordered to hunt Bourne… a futile task, as a Paris safehouse full of dead CIA mooks can attest.

Naturally, Bourne gets the upper hand after an exciting pursuit through the streets of Moscow that results in the perhaps poetic catharsis of Kirill dying just as Marie did—in the driver’s seat of an SUV—though the slumped Kirill’s pained expression implies that he justifiably dies a slower, painful death than what he dealt to Marie.

What’d He Wear?

Like his target, Kirill dresses appropriately for the context of his missions, like a lightweight linen henley when hunting down Bourne and Marie in India. When chasing Bourne through the wintry streets of Moscow, he dresses in sleek, dark layers that enhance his lethal image.

Kirill’s Moscow look is anchored by a unique brown leather knee-length coat, every bit the prototypical “badass long coat” to compete with Bourne’s charcoal overcoat. The coat has four buttons extending from the neck to just below the waist, which is defined by a seam and covered by a full belt that Kirill lets hang loose throughout the sequence.

The two-button standing collar resembles that of a Harrington jacket, and the shoulders are each reinforced by a triangular piece of leather that flares out from the neck to the set-in sleeve tops. The sleeves are fastened with a long strap around each cuff that closes through a button, and the right sleeve has a flapped utility pocket on the forearm. There are four other flapped patch pockets on the front of the jacket: two over the chest, one on each hip.

Kirill in pursuit.

Kirill wears the same charcoal single-breasted sport jacket that he was likely wearing in the Moscow nightclub when Gretkov (Karel Roden) tracks him down again, the jacket providing an additional layer of concealment to cover the black shoulder rig holstering his Walther P99 under his left arm.

Under that, he wears a dark navy cotton zip-up hoodie, zipped up to mid-chest (and sometimes higher) and with the hood pulled out to lay flat over his coat collar.

Though he likely wears an undershirt, Kirill’s base layer is a brown V-neck sweater made from a soft-knit lightweight wool, likely merino.

Kirill wears very dark brown flat front trousers, conventionally styled and finished with plain-hemmed bottoms that break over the tops of his black calf leather derby-laced combat boots.

After wounding Bourne with a well-placed shot from his P99, Kirill follows Bourne’s trail of blood through a grocery store.

The Gun

Kirill carries a Walther P99, specifically a 1st generation model with a QPQ-finished steel slide that presents as a bright silver that contrasts with the black polymer frame. The recoil-operated P99 was introduced in 1997, featuring an internal striker rather than an external hammer, with a red-painted striker tip on the back of the slide indicating when the pistol is cocked. As a full-sized pistol, the P99 can carry high-capacity magazines with up to 17 rounds of 9x19mm Parabellum or 12 rounds of .40 S&W, though Walther offers expanded magazines that further increase the respective capacity.

Prior to the introduction of the 2nd generation variations in 2004, the same year that The Bourne Supremacy was released, the 1st generation P99 was exclusively a traditional double/single-action pistol with a decocker button on top of the slide, which would revert the pistol from single-action Anti-Stress mode back to a full double-action shot. This was reconfigured as the P99AS (Anti-Stress) with the development of the 2nd generation, which also included the new double-action only P99DAO and the Glock-style P99QA (Quick Action) variants.

The “QPQ” slide refers to Walther’s “quench, polish, quench” process that begins with a case-hardening nitrocarbonization, followed by polish, and finally an oxidization that results in a bright silver-finished slide.

Hardly inconspicuous but certainly determined, Kirill takes careful aim with his Walther P99 and hits Bourne in the shoulder, but the arrival of police—as happens when discharging firearms so publicly—disrupts his ability to score a fatal follow-up shot.

The Walther P99 was more prominently featured on screen at this time as James Bond’s favored handgun, beginning in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) when Pierce Brosnan’s 007 swapped out his aging and comparatively anemic .32-caliber Walther PPK for this innovative newcomer to the Walther lineup. This product placement continued through Daniel Craig’s double-O debut in Casino Royale (2006) until Quantum of Solace (2008), when Craig’s Bond evidently retired the P99 as he reverted to the more concealable and classic PPK.

Despite Bond always carrying all-black P99 pistols on screen, I remember a Bond-licensed airsoft pistol in the mid-2000s that was similarly designed, albeit with a duller gray plastic slide that hardly resembled the silver QPQ of a true P99.

Where to Get the Stuff

Karl Urban as Kirill in The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

Kirill’s leather coat may be a bit long for anyone who isn’t cosplaying Carlito’s Way, but I still appreciate the sleek yet rugged street-ready sensibilities of his leather-over-hoodie layers.

• Brown leather knee-length coat with fully belted waist, 2-button standing collar, four-button front, four flapped pockets, right forearm sleeve utility pocket, set-in sleeves with button-strap cuffs, and single vent
• Charcoal wool single-breasted 2-button sport jacket
• Dark navy cotton zip-up hoodie
• Brown merino wool V-neck sweater
• Dark brown flat front trousers with plain-hemmed bottoms
• Black calf leather derby-laced combat boots

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The post The Bourne Supremacy: Karl Urban as Kirill appeared first on BAMF Style.

Keith David in The Thing (1982)

Vitals

Keith David as Childs, skeptical research facility chief mechanic

Antarctica, Winter 1982

Film: The Thing
Release Date: June 25, 1982
Director: John Carpenter
Costume Supervisors: Ronald I. Caplan, Trish Keating, and Gilbert Loe

Background

One of my favorite movies to watch in the middle of winter is The Thing, a personal favorite of its director John Carpenter, who celebrates his 75th birthday tomorrow. For The Thing‘s 40th anniversary last year, I wrote about its lead protagonist—helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell)—though there’s plenty of unique wintry wardrobe choices among the research crew of U.S. Outpost 31.

Keith David made his major film debut as chief mechanic Childs, launching his prolific career in a versatile range of movies from the serious likes of Platoon (1986) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) to comedies like There’s Something About Mary (1998) and The Nice Guys (2016), most recently appearing in Nope (2022).

The Thing begins during the “first goddamn week of winter,” with the arrival of a seemingly benign wolfdog targeted by a Norwegian gunman. Without knowing much about the animal, the American research team locks it up among the dogs despite canine handler Clark (Richard Masur) warning that “it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.”

What’d He Wear?

Ever since Daniel Craig pulled on a British Army-inspired navy N.Peal drawstring-neck jumper for his finale as James Bond in No Time to Die, there has been a noted renaissance for commando sweaters.

Woolen sweaters and jumpers had long been worn by fighting forces around the world, but this distinctive military style likely originated during World War II as the United Kingdom sought to outfit its SAS commandos in a rugged layer that could resist cold weather and hard combat conditions. To meet these goals, sweaters were constructed from a heavy wool, ribbed to fit the wearer’s physique (which was typically athletic, given their occupation) and thus avoid flapping fabric that could snag and become a hindrance or liability. For additional resilience, the shoulders and elbows are reinforced with tightly woven canvas patches that prevent both tears and friction burns when carrying equipment or shouldering rifles.

Nicknamed the “woolly pully” for obvious reasons (they’re made of wool and you pull them on), these hard-wearing commando sweaters ultimately crossed the Atlantic to be adopted by branches of the United States military.

Childs’ sweater appears to be U.S. mil-spec, dyed navy blue rather than the more familiar olive drab (OD) green. The ribbed sweater has a high crew-neck, though we can still occasionally glimpse the neck of his white cotton undershirt, and navy canvas patches over the shoulders and elbows.

For an intermediate layer of warmth and protection, Childs pulls on a blue puffer vest with seven silver-finished snaps up the front from the straight waist hem to the neck for full chest coverage that could classify the garment as a gilet. The large patch-style pockets at hand level on each hip have a slanted entry.

I believe Childs is the only member of the U.S. Outpost 31 crew to wear jeans. The indigo blue denim continues the cyanic color palette established by the rest of his clothing, and—while it can be discerned that they’re styled with the now-standard five-pocket layout—there’s little other indicators of who made his jeans, though the cut doesn’t appear to be Levi’s or Lee, leaving Wrangler as a possibility among the “big three” American denim outfitters.

The only significant non-blue elements of Childs’ wardrobe are his hardy hiking boots, constructed with russet-brown leather uppers and lugged rubber soles. The plain-toe boots are derby-laced with the traditional red laces through five sets of gold-finished eyelets and three sets of speed hooks.

Out in the snowy, below-freezing Antarctic winter air, Childs benefits from the warmth of a blue heavyweight nylon parka with a fur-trimmed hood and filled with polyester down. A storm flap extends out over the silver-toned front zip to keep out the wind and chill, and the fur-trimmed hood has a black woven drawstring that would allow Childs to pull it tighter over his head. Large squared bellows pockets over each hip close with a snap-down flap.

Though there are mil-spec parkas authorized by the U.S. military, Childs’ thigh-length coat lacks the slanted chest pockets and additional button-closure of the contemporary “scrub snorkel” N-3B and is likely just a civilian parka. (If you’re interested in a blue N-3B, Alpha Industries would be the place to look first!)

The term “parka” has been used for centuries, but it didn’t enter its modern form until the mid-20th century following the separate contributions of Australian chemist George Finch, American outdoorsman Eddie Bauer, and English designer George James that resulted in the standard down-filled parka. Light-wearing yet highly effective against the cold, down jackets emerged as a favorite for extreme-weather expeditions.

Childs further protects himself out in the snow with dark blue polyester winter gloves and a dark blue knitted wool hood that extends down the back to cover more than a traditional watch cap, though it lacks the front facial coverage of a balaclava. He also wears a large set of snow goggles with a powder-blue rubberized frame around the one-piece lens.

How to Get the Look

Keith David in The Thing (1982)

Aside from his conventional brown leather work boots, Childs dresses exclusively in blue, though the contrasting shades and textures of his snow gear, sweater, and jeans are more visually interesting than the typical monochromatic apparel.

• Navy ribbed wool U.S. mil-spec “woolly pully” crew-neck commando sweater with canvas patch-reinforced shoulders and elbows
• Blue puffer gilet with 7-snap front and slanted-entry patch pockets
• Blue nylon thigh-length parka with fur-trimmed hood, zip front with storm flap, and squared bellows hip pockets with snap-down flaps
• Indigo denim jeans
• Russet leather plain-toe hiking boots with 5-eyelet/triple-speed hook derby-laced closure
• Dark blue knitted wool hood
• Snow goggles with powder-blue rubberized frame
• Dark blue polyester winter gloves

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The Quote

I just cannot believe any of this voodoo bullshit.

The post Keith David in The Thing appeared first on BAMF Style.

Howard Da Silva as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby (1974)

Vitals

Howard Da Silva as Meyer Wolfsheim, legendary gambler

New York City, Summer 1925

Film: The Great Gatsby
Release Date: March 29, 1974
Director: Jack Clayton
Costume Designer: Theoni V. Aldredge

Background

Though perhaps not as well known as his gangland contemporaries today, Prohibition-era racketeer Arnold Rothstein served as the basis for generations of fictional characters in pop culture for generations after his 1928 murder.

Born on this day in 1882, Rothstein began gambling at a young age, was reportedly a millionaire by the time he turned 30, and was most likely integral in the infamous “Black Sox Scandal” that accused eight members of the Chicago White Sox of throwing the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.

It may be coincidence that the Volstead Act became official nationwide on his 38th birthday, a gift for the visionary Rothstein who has been considered among the first to recognize the business potential of Prohibition. He was one of the most influential figures in organized crime during the roaring ’20s, forging a bootlegging empire that included notable mobsters like Meyer Lansky, “Lucky” Luciano, and Dutch Schultz, many of whom looked up to Rothstein as a mentor.

Despite these dangerous connections, it’s likely that Rothstein met his early end due to nothing more nefarious than a poker game. After racking up a debt of more than $300,000 due to what Rothstein called a fixed game, the 46-year-old gangster was shot during a business meeting at the Park Central Hotel on November 4, 1928, dying two days later.

Though directly portrayed on screen by the likes of F. Murray Abraham (in the 1991 film Mobsters) and Michael Stuhlbarg (in the first four seasons of Boardwalk Empire), Rothstein’s legacy also includes a bevy of fictional characters that he inspired, including Nathan Detroit in the musical Guys and Dolls and Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, as most clearly suggested by an exchange that cites the real Rothstein’s arguably most infamous “achievement”.

“Meyer Wolfsheim? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

“Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.

The idea staggered me. I remembered of course that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919 but if I had thought of it all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.

“He just saw the opportunity.”

“Why isn’t he in jail?”

“They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.”

— The Great Gatsby, Chapter 4

A significant if briefly featured character in the novel, Wolfsheim never factored into any of the half-dozen major screen adaptations until 1974, when he was perfectly portrayed by stalwart stage and screen veteran Howard Da Silva.

Interestingly, one of Da Silva’s last roles before he was blacklisted during the HUAC witch-hunt of the ’50s was playing the simple-minded garage owner George Wilson in Elliott Nugent’s 1949 adaptation of The Great Gatsby. (Before Nugent took over, the film was to be directed by John Farrow… whose daughter Mia would portray Daisy Buchanan in the 1974 version!)

George Wilson (Howard Da Silva) guns down Jay Gatsby (Alan Ladd) in his swimming pool at the end of The Great Gatsby (1949).

Wolfsheim: I can’t forget, as long as I live, the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table, Rosy had eaten and drunk a lot the whole evening. The waiter came over to him with a funny look, said “somebody wants to talk to you outside.” “Alright,” said Rosy, he starts to get up. I pull him down in his seat. “Let the bastards come in here if they want you, don’t you—so help me—make a move out of this room.” Then it was four o’clock in the morning. If you raised the blinds, we could have seen daylight.
Nick: Did he go?
Wolfsheim: Sure he went. He turned in the doorway, he said “don’t let the waiter take away my coffee.” They were on the sidewalk, they shot him three times in the belly, they drove away. I understand you’re looking for a business connection, eh?

While we only get one scene with Da Silva’s Wolfsheim, he makes a memorable impression on the audiences—and Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston)—as he and Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford) reminisce about old times and departed acquaintances, suggesting that the mysterious millionaire Gatsby could count himself among the many protégés like Lansky and Luciano who benefited from the tutelage of a popular and powerful racketeer.

What’d He Wear?

Wolfsheim comments on the not insignificant age difference between himself and his two younger lunch companions, and indeed he dresses in a considerably more old-fashioned manner with his wing collar and a businesslike but unseasonal dark gray chalk-stripe flannel suit.

Wolfsheim: “This is a nice restaurant, but I like across the street better.”
Gatsby: “It’s too hot over there.”
Considering that Wolfsheim is wearing a dark flannel suit over an odd waistcoat in the middle of a hot New York summer, I would imagine the heat of “the old Metropole” wouldn’t bother him much, especially when it comes with his treasured memories of a friend getting shot to death a decade earlier.

The angles presented on screen never show Wolfsheim below knee level, so the most we see of his dark gray chalk-stripe flannel suit is the single-breasted jacket, which—like many of the other men’s costumes—reflect an interpretation of 1920s fashions through a ’70s-cut lens, with peak lapels and pocket flaps broader than an old-fashioned gent like Wolfsheim would have worn.

The wide, sharp peak lapels roll to a single button appropriately positioned at Howard Da Silva’s waist, with four matching but smaller buttons “kissing” on each cuff. In addition to the welted breast pocket, the ventless jacket has straight hip pockets with wide rectangular flaps.

Unlike the contemporary turndown collars of his younger dining companions, Wolfsheim wears a striped shirt with a detachable stiff white wing collar. The cotton shirt body is striped in alternating scarlet and slate pencil stripes, with white single cuffs that contrast against the rest of the shirt. Wolfsheim wears a black silk tie, detailed with a field of white woven pin-dots and knotted in a half-Windsor.

“I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.”

I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now. They were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory.

“Finest specimens of human molars,” he informed me.

“Well!” I inspected them. “That’s a very interesting idea.”

— The Great Gatsby, Chapter 4

After Wolfsheim departs, the naïve Nick Carraway asks Gatsby—with not inconsiderable optimism—whether or not their companion is a dentist, prompting Gatsby to inform him that he’s a gambler…and one with some questionable connections, at that. Though it’s never outwardly stated, I like the implication that the otherwise affable Wolfsheim wears human teeth for cuff links as a sinister reminder to acquaintances the fate that could befall them if they cross him. (Of course, it could just be that Wolfsheim has a friend like Walter Sobchak who “could get you a tooth by three o’clock this afternoon.”)

Wolfsheim wears his peculiarly periodontal cuff links through the shirt’s single cuffs, a dressier alternative to double (French) cuffs that was typically reserved for formal evening wear, i.e. white tie and tails, by the 1920s.

“Finest specimens of human molars” are the kind of cuff jewelry that will get new lunch companions wondering if you’re a dentist.

Wolfsheim’s odd waistcoat (vest) also marks a departure from Gatsby and Nick in their matching three-piece suits. Though the suit and waistcoat are both gray flannel, Wolfsheim wisely wears a waistcoat in a significantly lighter shade of gray that couldn’t be perceived as a poor attempt to match a non-matching fabric, instead presenting as tasteful while somewhat dandified. You can read more about the practice of wearing odd waistcoats at Bond Suits.

Wolfsheim’s lapeled waistcoat fastens high to mid-chest with six charcoal buttons that Wolfsheim wears correctly with the lowest button undone over the notched bottom. In the right pocket of his waistcoat, Wolfsheim carries a gold pocket watch, connected to a gold chain that loops “double Albert”-style through a hole adjacent the waistcoat’s third button.

“Gatsby?” With one flash of his watch, Wolfsheim reminds his erstwhile protégé of a pressing call.

As Wolfsheim rises from the table, a waiter walks over with his hat and cane, a degree of service not afforded Gatsby, whose Panama hat joins those of fellow diners on a nearby rack. While the newer fedora style was gaining a foothold—or should I say headhold—among younger wearers through the 1920s, the traditional homburg with its “pencil curl” brim remained a a stalwart among distinguished wearers projecting an image of wealth and power… think the newly crowned Don Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in The Godfather. Wolfsheim wears a dark gray felt homburg with a wide black grosgrain band.

“You’re very polite, but I belong to another generation,” Rothstein announces as he departs, illustrating the point with his homburg and cane. “You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and your— as for me, I am sixty years old, and I won’t impose myself on you any longer.”

We can’t see Wolfsheim’s shoes, but a traditional choice for this outfit would be plain black leather oxfords. If he chose to lean into the image of an old-fashioned dandy, he may even dude up the shoes with a set of white spats, which I would have truly regretted not seen on screen.

How to Get the Look

Howard Da Silva as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby (1974)

Unlike his flashier dressed protégé Jay Gatsby who fashionably dresses for Jazz Age New York, Meyer Wolfsheim composes himself to old-fashioned perfection in shades of gray flannel with a wing collar and a degree of mystery that invites speculation… as wearing a set of teeth on your cuffs is wont to do.

• Dark gray flannel chalk-stripe suit:
  • Single-breasted 1-button jacket with wide peak lapels, welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, 4-button “kissing” cuffs, and ventless back
  • Flat front trousers
• Scarlet-and-slate pencil-striped white cotton shirt with detachable white wing collar and white single cuffs
  • Human molar cuff links(!)
• Black silk tie with white pin-dots
• Gray flannel single-breasted 6-button waistcoat with lapels, pockets, and notched bottom
• Black leather oxford shoes
• Dark gray felt homburg with black grosgrain band
• Gold pocket watch on gold “double Albert” chain

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie and read the original novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

You can also read more about the Rosenthal killing wistfully cited by Wolfsheim as an installment in Herbert Asbury’s sprawling chronicle Gangs of New York. If the name is familiar, this non-fiction volume would be partially adapted into a Martin Scorsese of the same name that starred Leonardo DiCaprio… who would later star as Gatsby in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel!

The Quote

Known him? I made him!

The post The Great Gatsby: Howard Da Silva as Meyer Wolfsheim appeared first on BAMF Style.

Noah Segan as Derol in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

Vitals

Noah Segan as Derol, carefree stoner who’s “going through some things”

Spetses, Greece, May 2020

Film: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Release Date: November 23, 2022
Director: Rian Johnson
Costume Designer: Jenny Eagan

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Derol is definitely having a moment right now! From articles in Variety to countless memes, the laidback loafer played by Noah Segan has quietly risen as a fan favorite among the star-studded cast of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery in the month since it premiered on Netflix.

Glass Onion is set in May 2020, two months into the global lockdown resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the nonchalant Derol reminds me of the vibe I had aspired to at this stage in lockdown: unbothered, staying in my lane, growing out my hair and chilling.

my brother in christ has mastered the art of minding your gd business. #GlassOnion pic.twitter.com/mcSzYfMtI4

— Brittani Warrick (@BrittaniWarrick) December 27, 2022

“There’s something about Derol living his truest self,” explained Noah Segan, who I had the privilege of speaking to last week about the character and his clothing. Indeed, Derol’s nonchalance may make him the most honest and honorable character in Glass Onion, even moreso than our heroic detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), whose very presence on the private Greek island owned by billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) is revealed to be part of a gambit—a well-meaning gambit, to be sure, but still deceitful.

And who is Derol, you ask? Derol is the answer to the question we’ve all asked ourselves: what if the Dude was dropped into Death on the Nile? Segan himself likens Derol to a slacker of the Kato Kaelin variety, whose role in the household remains unclear, though he arguably serves the dual narrative purpose of comic relief and red herring.

“He’s staying here, he’s going through some things, but he’s not part of the experience—at all,” Miles assures his handful of disruptor shithead guests after Derol strolls through their arrival with a case of Corona in hand. With approximately 60 seconds of screen time, Derol made a significant impact on audiences, to the point that Netflix even sanctioned a minute-long cut of Glass Onion… “but only Derol”, the cinematic equivalent of the delicious “Oops! All Berries” variety of Cap’n Crunch.

Segan is a familiar face to filmgoers, with his filmography including a role in all of Johnson’s feature films since the director’s 2005 debut, the high school-set neo-noir Brick. Aside from Daniel Craig (and another voice cameo by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Segan was the only actor to return from the first Knives Out, in which he played the fresh-faced Trooper Wagner. In Glass Onion, Segan returned as the delightfully mysterious Derol, based on Johnson’s real-life friend Derol Frye, whom Segan described to me as “a real fun-loving, happy-go-lucky, easygoing Southern California dude.”

Whether he’s playing a straitlaced, over-eager rookie cop or a laidback beach bum, Segan’s characters always find a way to end up right by Benoit Blanc’s side as the mystery unravels.

What’d He Wear?

Derol’s Clothes

One of the first hints of Miles Bron’s dishonesty comes from Derol’s very presence. Miles informs his old friends that the weekend guest list will be comprised of “just our gang… just us,” only for Derol to stride onto the beach behind him, announcing “hey, hey!” followed by his mantra of “I’m not here…” as he fades away as quickly as he arrived.

Derol’s wardrobe for the scene may have even been part of the impetus for the character himself. While at a barbecue together, Rian Johnson spotted the real Derol Frye wearing a T-shirt for his band, Little Petie & The Mean Old Men, and took a photo. “I think it was something as simple as that sparked the inspiration for that character and his look,” Segan explained to me. “In the movie, the first time you see me, I’m wearing one of Derol’s shirts.” (The real Derol now sells this T-shirt on Etsy!)

Johnson and Segan showed the T-shirt and some accessories for the character to costume designer Jenny Eagan, who built the rest of Derol’s wardrobe from these items and their collective vision. “If we break down Derol’s looks, there isn’t a ton of brashness… it’s a lot of earth tones and natural colors and natural dyes.”

For Derol’s introductory scene on the beach, Eagan paired the off-white T-shirt and its colorful, tie-dye effect graphic with a pair of faded and comfortably broken-in patchwork cargo shorts with sections in green stripe, solid brown, gold stripe, as well as an indigo cargo pocket covered by a burnt-orange flap.

“Hey, hey! … I’m not here.”

The next time we see Derol, he’s admiring the Mona Lisa as “classic!” while munching on some cereal, only for glares from Blanc and Helen (Janelle Monáe) to send him again shuffling from the room: “Hey! Not here.”

The screenplay had initially called for Derol to wear a bathrobe in this scene, but the costume was thoughtfully reimagined by Eagan in a manner that, according to Segan, “fit with both his beach bum look as well as clothing inspired by or local to the south of Greece… the vast majority of it was either custom-made by Jenny or vintage.”

Eagan’s costume design for the scene introduced a hemp pullover shirt, multi-striped in slate, navy, lavender, and sage, with a henley-style open top, breast pocket, short side vents, and long sleeves that Derol wears rolled up each forearm. Derol also wears baggy brown linen trousers that Segan described as “drop-crotch parachute pants”, which gather at the ankles above the same tan-strapped sandals that he had earlier worn on the beach.

Later, Helen frantically runs through the Glass Onion grounds and is shocked to find… Derol, living the campus stoner dream while reclining with a beer and a joint, his tan sandals kicked off in front of him. He wears the same brown pants but has changed his shirt into a unique short-sleeved camp shirt, patterned in a black-and-white leopard print overlaid with red and yellow flowers on green leafy stems.

“Wanna hang out… or?”

When Derol joins Blanc outside to witness the denouement, he pulls on a beige tribal-patterned poncho with fringed ends to comfortably sit back for a smoke and a beer while witnessing the fiery chaos of disruption.

Disruption…

Derol’s Accessories

Attahced to shark neoprene Croakies around his neck, Derol wears brown-framed OJM Solars by Old Jewish Men, another item that Segan brought to the character. Created by @oldjewishmen founder Noah Rinsky, these modestly priced wraparound sunglasses have long, ovular polarized lenses in the front as well as tinted temple lens panels, resulting in a product that Liana Satenstein affectionately described in Vogue as looking “like they were ripped from the glasses display case at Duane Reade.”

OJM Solars in black, though Derol wore brown-framed sunglasses on screen. (Source: Old Jewish Men)

One of the most distinctive pieces of Derol’s kit is his wristwatch from the Midwest-based Haven Watch Co., founded in 2019 by Segan’s friend Weston Cutter. The company was formed with a vision of creating distinctive, vintage-inspired watches “to be bought by weirdos who make art and do something,” as Cutter explained in a Hodinkee interview.

Haven debuted with the Chilton MK1, a colorful yet rugged and reliable manual-winding three-register chronograph “that takes its fun very seriously” and was named after singer-songwriter Alex Chilton of the Box Tops and Big Star. After 2020, Haven doubled down on the fun aspect of its watches with the Haven Chillllton model—that’s four L’s—powered by the same Sellita SW510 M b caliber movement and the same stainless steel 37.5mm case and matching five-piece link “engineer bracelet” as “the OG Chilton, but refreshed with the world’s only tie-dyed chronograph dial,” as Haven touts.

Given Derol’s hippie vibe and the tie-dyed decor in his room, the whimsical Chillllton was the perfect choice. Handmade in Minnesota, the watch was produced in a limited run of only 25 pieces.

Haven Chillllton (Source: Haven Watch Co.)

In addition to his puka shell necklace, trio of longer nut necklaces, and round nut-beaded bracelet that collides with the wristwatch on his right wrist, Derol also follows his host Miles’ example by wearing a red kabbalah bracelet. Wearing this scarlet-dyed woolen string emerged as a Jewish tradition by the early 20th century though, despite its religious association (the wearer is meant to recite the kabbalah prayer while knotting it seven times around the left wrist), the practice has also been appropriated by non-Jewish celebrities.

Segan pointed out to me that, not only does Miles appropriate the bracelet, he wears it on the wrong wrist! “This tracks with Miles, who comes across as this pedantic know-it-all but doesn’t really know anything, appropriating this cultural affectation and screwing it up.”  Considering that the bracelet is intended as a talisman to ward off misfortune, it’s fitting that the bracelet’s powers are lost on the poser Miles, while Derol—who wears it correctly on his left wrist—decidedly escapes tragedy by the end of Glass Onion.

Derol’s distinctive assortment of necklaces, bracelets, and watch can be seen in Vanessa McKee‘s colorful character portrait for Noah Segan during the end credits of Glass Onion.

What to Imbibe

Unlike his fellow island revelers who are introduced to Jared Leto’s hard kombucha, Derol maintains a steady tipsiness from long-necked bottles of Corona Extra, likely chosen as this pale lager reflects the real Derol Frye’s preference for Mexican beer, though it also calls to mind the odd perceptive associations that grew between Corona beer and COVID-19. Though a insignificant number of consumers drew an unfortunate parallel between the name of the beer and the coronavirus, Snopes reports that American sales of Corona actually increased by 5% at the start of 2020.

Helen stumbles into Derol’s pad, a quiet paradise for someone who loves weed and booze, surfing and strumming, fishing and Phish.

In Derol’s room, we also see bottles of Ketel One and Kahlúa perched on a shelf behind him. As fans of The Big Lebowski know, vodka and coffee liqueur are two of the three ingredients needed to make a White Russian, the signature drink of The Dude, whose personality, appearance, and lifestyle are not unlike Derol. (While Segan couldn’t confirm if the set dressing was a reference to El Duderino, he did praise production designer Rick Heinrichs for his impressive work on Glass Onion, right down to the details of Derol’s sanctuary.

Of course, vodka and coffee liqueur on their own can be used to mix a Black Russian, which happens to be my dad’s favorite cocktail and consists simply of a 5:2 ratio of vodka to Kahlúa, served on the rocks and often garnished with a lemon twist. The drink was said to be invented in Brussels in 1949, about fifteen years before development of the White Russian and during the early Cold War trend of vodka-based cocktails like the Moscow Mule named in tribute to the USSR.

What to Listen to

While chilling in his room, Derol listens to “Cool Change”, a 1979 single from the Australian rock group Little River Band’s sixth album, First Under the Wire. Segan explained to me that this song, “about a guy trying to find his way in the world through weird hippie beach shit,” served as additional inspiration for Rian Johnson while forging the Derol character.

How to Get the Look

Going through some things and need to crash at your billionaire buddy’s Greek island? Derol’s got you covered with a comfortable—and extremely casual—packing list that may disrupt what you’re used to packing for vacation but will serve your Corona-drinking, cereal-eating, and Mona Lisa-admiring purposes.

• White cotton short-sleeved T-shirt with your favorite band’s colorful logo
• Blue multi-striped hemp long-sleeve pullover shirt with breast pocket
• Black-and-white animal-print (with red/yellow floral pattern) short-sleeved camp shirt
• Patchwork cargo shorts
• Brown linen drop-crotch parachute pants
• Tan triple-strap sandals
• Black wraparound Old Jewish Men “OJM Solars” sunglasses with side lens panels
• Puka shell necklace
• Nut necklaces
• Nut-beaded bracelet
• Haven Chillllton manual chronograph with stainless steel 37.5mm-wide case, tie-dyed dial with sub-dials at 3, 6, and 9 o’clock, and steel five-piece link bracelet
• Scarlet-red woolen kabbalah bracelet

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie, now streaming on Netflix.

And, in a smokeless garden full of shitheads, be a Derol.

The Quote

Fuckin’ A.

The post Glass Onion: Noah Segan as Derol appeared first on BAMF Style.

Warren Beatty as John McCabe in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)

Vitals

Warren Beatty as John McCabe, enterprising gambler and pimp

Presbyterian Church, Washington, Fall to winter 1902

Film: McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Release Date: June 24, 1971
Director: Robert Altman
Wardrobe Credit: Ilse Richter

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

There are moments every January where I envy the idiosyncratic wardrobe of John McCabe, warmly swaddled in hefty furs as he trots into the humble hamlet of Presbyterian Church, Washington, scored by Leonard Cohen’s mournful baritone.

One of the most prolific pioneers of the “New Hollywood” movement that began in the 1960s, Robert Altman followed up his maverick success with MASH (1970) and his artistic experiment with Brewster McCloud (1970) by setting his sights on one of the most venerated genres in American cinema. Altman and Brian McKay adapted a 1959 novel by Edmund Naughton to deliver McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which the director would ultimately deem an “anti-Western” for its subversion of genre conventions and expectations.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller was filmed mostly in sequence during the last months of 1970 as fall turned to winter, just as it does over the course of the film’s narrative, with the set in British Columbia being built up to coincide with McCabe’s expansion of the fictional town on screen.

John McCabe was merely a gambler when he arrived in town, though he quickly capitalizes on his self-aggrandized reputation as a feared gunfighter to grow his leadership position in Presbyterian Church, including partnering in managing a brothel with the Cockney madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie), forming a business partnership that evolves into a romantic situation. Unfortunately, McCabe’s fame earns him the ire of a competing mine that often resorts to ruthless means to quash competition, including a trio of hardened bounty hunters led by Butler (Hugh Millais). “Never did fit in this goddamn town,” McCabe utters to himself as Butler’s gunmen arrive in Presbyterian Church, resulting in the film’s now-famous snowbound shootout that—like so much of McCabe & Mrs. Miller—defies Western gunfight traditions.

Despite an unenthusiastic initial response from critics and audiences, it had contemporary champions like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael and resulted in an Academy Award nomination for Christie’s performance as the semi-eponymous Mrs. Miller. Time has been kinder to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, now regarded not just among the best revisionist Westerns but considered by some to be among the best films ever made.

What’d He Wear?

Outerwear: Coat, Hats, and Gloves

Arguably the most memorable aspect of John McCabe’s wardrobe is the comically massive fur coat he wore for his arrival in Presbyterian Church and many subsequent scenes. The knee-length coat is a soft, light brown fur—perhaps bearskin, as opposed to the sealskin coat that McCabe admires draped around his business rival Eugene Sears (Michael Murphy). The coat is loosely and unevenly structured, more a swath of furry hide than tailored outerwear, with only the grand monastic sleeves and the addition of a somewhat darker fleece hood suggesting that it’s been adapted for human use.

Production still of Warren Beatty in McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

McCabe wears plain dark brown leather gloves that extend no farther back than his wrists.

McCabe raises a gloved hand to tip his hat as he rides into Presbyterian Church.

McCabe arrives in Presbyterian Church wearing an all-black felt derby hat, a style characterized by its round crown. The hat originated in London, where it was designed in 1849 by hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler, hence it being known predominantly as a “bowler hat” in England.

Despite its English origins, the bowler grew quickly popular across the pond to the degree that Lucius Beebe cited it as “the hat that won the West” due to its predominance in the American West.

McCabe had extracted his derby hat from the pouch on his saddle before doing business, which in this cases consists of negotiating the cost of three additional prostitutes from the town of Bearpaw. “$80 for a chippy? I can get a goddamn horse for $50.”

As McCabe establishes his leadership of the town, he adopts a new dark brown derby hat to replace the black one. This hat follows the same design and even has a black grosgrain band and edge trim.

As the snow falls, McCabe pokes his head around the corner of the church just in time to watch Butler draw first blood by blasting the shotgun-toting Reverend Elliot with his own shotgun.

Brown Frock Coats

McCabe cycles through two similarly styled brown frock coats over the course of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, beginning with one differentiated by its widely tufted woolen fabric (like a thick-waled corduroy) and narrow shoulders with significantly roped sleeveheads, reflecting period fashions.

Though it echoes similar design elements like the cutaway-style front and tails in the back with two decorative buttons at the waist, McCabe’s frock coat has a shorter length that’s consistent with the “lounge suit” jackets that were gradually becoming the norm in daily menswear. The single-breasted, three-button jacket has short peak lapels with swelled edges, a welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, and sleeves finished with two-button cuffs.

McCabe guides Mrs. Miller through Presbyterian Church’s muddy thoroughfare.

At the same time when McCabe debuts his new brown bowler hat, he has also evidently swapped out his jacket for another brown frock coat that—aside from its wider shoulders, smoother and lighter fabric, and three-button cuffs—follows generally the same design as his previous coat.

Since this frock coat only appears through the second half of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which we know Altman generally filmed in sequence, it’s possible that the first jacket was either ruined or misplaced at one point during the production and needed to be swiftly replaced by a relative lookalike. Or perhaps we’re just meant to understand that John McCabe is a fan of brown frock coats who fills his limited closet accordingly!

Shirts and Ties

McCabe rotates through a trio of shirts in varying degrees of formality. He arrives wearing a plain white cotton dress shirt with a front placket and two-button barrel cuffs. Per the standard practice for most men’s dress shirts in this era, the shirt itself is collarless with a neckband to which a detachable collar like McCabe’s stiff and sharp white wing collar could be attached, with brass studs in the front and black keeping the collar in place.

McCabe’s usual neckwear is a unique black satin silk cravat with a very short blade that extends just a few inches from his neck. The cravat is of the pre-tied variety, with its silver-toned metal clip visible from the back due to the exposed nature of the wing collar. Despite its almost comically short length, McCabe dresses the tie with a pearl stickpin.

In his stiff white wing collar and silk cravat, McCabe looks every bit the dandy compared to the hardscrabble denizens of Presbyterian Church.

McCabe’s second dress shirt is irregularly striped in pink and lilac against the white ground, though the neckband and two-button barrel cuffs are a contrasting solid white.

Wearing his pink-striped shirt, McCabe presses his teeth into service while evidently trying to mend a thread on his white shirt.

McCabe accessorizes the pink-striped shirt with both his usual short pointed black cravat as well as a now-conventional black four-in-hand tie, worn most prominently as he drunkenly stumbles through his initial meeting with Eugene Sears.

Finally, McCabe dresses down in a more utilitarian dark brown flannel shirt with an attached turndown point collar and a plain front that he buttons up to the neck.

Everything Else

McCabe wears a dark gray woolen waistcoat (vest), fastened with five black recessed buttons that close between the narrow notch lapels and the straight-cut bottom. The waistcoat has four jetted pockets, and McCabe keeps his gold pocket watch in one of the lower pockets, attached to a gold flat-link chain that droops across his mid-section to the fob in the opposing pocket.

McCabe regularly wears black-and-gray cashmere-striped “spongebag” trousers, a style now predominantly associated with old-fashioned morning dress. The “cashmere” nomenclature refers specifically to the specific track-stripe pattern rather than the fabric, which would have likely been wool.

When properly worn, these flat front trousers rise to Warren Beatty’s natural waist-line, where double sets of buttons around the outside of the waistband can be attached to suspenders (braces). McCabe holds up the trousers with wide cloth suspenders striped in black, tan, and white. The trousers have gently slanted “quarter-top” side pockets and jetted back pockets with a button-tab on the back left pocket. They are cut straight through the legs down to plain-hemmed bottoms.

A knife-wielding prostitute outside diverts McCabe’s attention from Sheehan’s attempt to negotiate a partnership with him.

McCabe wears black leather boots with tall shafts appropriate for riding and, as more of a city slicker than a cowboy, they have lower heels and less ornate shafts that remain covered by his trousers.

Befitting his reputation as a fearless gunfighter, McCabe responds to threats on his life by strapping a dark brown edge-stitched leather gun belt, his distinctive Gasser revolver holstered on the right side, with the requisite cartridge loops extending around the belt. As was the case for heavy-duty gun belts, the belt itself consists of a wide swath of leather that overlaps around the front of the waist, where a thinner overlaid strap buckles through a tall silver-toned single-prong buckle.

As McCabe dresses to get into bed with Mrs. Miller, we see that he wears an ivory cotton union suit, the full-length underwear that was most popular for men through the late 19th century into the early 20th century. McCabe’s long underwear lacks the “crap flap” on the back that allowed the wearer to relieve themselves without needing to fully disrobe.

“Once in a while, if you’d just learn to trust me, Constance… everything is going to be a lot easier. You’ll find that out.” McCabe celebrates his perceived success with Sears and Hollander by undressing to share a bed with Mrs. Miller, though she still asks him to pay for the privilege.

For the snowy final act, McCabe swaps out his fur coat for a dark oilskin slicker that serves more practical purposes and offers him significantly more mobility for the gunfight. Oilskin was a relatively new development at the time, pioneered in 1898 by a New Zealand sailor Edward Le Roy who painted old sailcloth with linseed oil and wax (hence “oilskin”) to produce a waterproof layer to be worn during rough weather at sea.

McCabe’s long oilskin coat extends nearly to his ankles, with four silver-toned hook latches between the neck and waist to close the front, similar to those on firemen’s jackets and would be later adopted for U.S. Navy deck jackets during World War II. The collared coat has raglan sleeves that smoothly slip over his hefty frock coat, and the back has a storm flap and single vent.

While his distinctive bearskin fur coat may have been warm, the oilskin allows McCabe a greater range of movement when darting through the snow-covered alleys and bridges of Presbyterian Church while fighting for his life.

The Guns

Montenegrin Gasser Revolver

“Say, do you know what kind of gun that was? That was a Swedish gun,” Sheehan’s patrons gossip of the newly arrived John McCabe at the start of the movie. While the low-rent denizens of Presbyterian Church are accurate that his European-made revolver wasn’t one of the Colt, Remington, or Smith & Wesson six-shooters they’d be familiar with, the distinctive revolver holstered in McCabe’s gun belt is actually an Austrian design.

“The final years of the 19th century saw innovations in the way pistols and revolvers were designed,” summarizes The Complete World Encyclopedia of Guns by Will Fowler, Anthony North, Charles Stronge, and Patrick Sweeney. “Among them were firearms made by Leopold Gasser who operated factories across Europe, which reputedly turned out 100,000 revolvers annually in the 1880s and 1890s.”

McCabe carries a Gasser M1880, also known as a “Second Pattern Montenegrin” in tribute to its Balkan target market. The weapon evolved from the original open-framed Gasser M1870 that had been adopted by the Austro-Hungarian military in August 1870. The Gasser M1870 had a gate-loading mechanism to load the cylinder with up to six rounds of the formidable 11.25×36mmR centerfire cartridge that was developed three years earlier for the Model 1867 Früwirth repeating carbine.

Gasser continued refining the design through the decades to follow, including a swing-out cylinder in the M1873 and M1870/74 models that was easier to load but reduced the capacity to five rounds. The M1870/74 was the first Gasser to be nicknamed the “Montenegrin”, a moniker that continued to the development of the Gasser M1880. This “Second Pattern Montenegrin” Gasser M1880 differed from its predecessors with its top-break mechanism that made it even easier to load than the swing-out variations. “A star-shaped automatic ejector [pushed] cartridges out of the cylinder when the barrel was tipped down for reloading,” described Martin J. Dougherty in Small Arms Visual Encyclopedia.

The break-top “Second Pattern Montenegrin” Gasser M1880 can be differentiated from the previous M1870/74 “Montenegrin Gasser” by the hinge in front of the cylinder and the addition of a top-strap that both allow the top-break functionality.

The weapon’s history grows more complex in 1910, when King Nicholas I of Montenegro decreed that all male citizens were thus members of a national militia with not only the right but a duty to own at least one Gasser Pattern revolver. While it makes sense that a Balkan country would be so focused on national defense in the “powder keg” era leading up to World War I, it was also rumored that the king’s partial ownership in Leopold Gasser Waffenfabrik may have significantly influenced his specific stipulation. That said, the immediate demand placed on Leopold Gasser resulted in the Austrian manufacturer needing to outsource production of the “Montenegrin Gasser” pattern revolver to other European firms, most often in Belgium and Spain, resulting in a wide range in operational quality from excellent to dangerous and significant differentiations like barrel lengths, five- vs. six-round cylinders, or single- vs. double-action triggers.

“The revolvers became status symbols among the Montenegrin population,” wrote Phillip Peterson for Gun Digest, and the variety of cottage companies churning out Montenegrin Gassers allowed owners to modify their appearance to their specific taste, including silver and gold inlay on the engraved frames or finishing the distinctively rounded “broomhandle” grips in ivory or bone.

McCabe’s bone-handled Montenegrin Gasser was likely produced at some point during the 1910s after King Nicholas’ proclamation, making it slightly anachronistic for the turn-of-the-century setting, though this pattern had existed since 1880 and it could be argued that an eccentric like McCabe may have made his own modifications to a period-correct revolver to further his reputation as a gunfighter.

Fortified by yet another raw egg dropped into whiskey, McCabe braces for his last stand with his Montenegrin Gasser in hand.

The Derringer

After McCabe’s unsuccessful attempt to negotiate with Butler upon their first meeting, Patrick Sheehan (René Auberjonois) assures Butler of McCabe’s killer reputation by telling that he shot Bill Roundtree “with a derringer,” prompting Butler to respond “That man? That man never killed anybody…”

In a twist of delicious irony, McCabe uses his dying energy to kill Butler by shooting him with a derringer. The term emerged in the 1860s after it was widely reported that John Wilkes Booth had killed President Lincoln with a Deringer, at that time a specific brand of muzzle-loaded single-shot .41-caliber pocket pistol that had been manufactured by Henry Deringer of Philadelphia since 1825. Like “Kleenex” and “Xerox”, the misspelling “derringer” became a synecdoche for easily concealed pocket pistols that widely varied in design, including two- and four-barrel models by Remington and Sharps (respectively) that shared little in common with the single-barrel Deringer.

The small size of derringers made them popular backup or “holdout” weapons in the old west, particularly associated with gamblers like McCabe who may have been dissuaded or disallowed from wearing their guns to a game but would need a quick means of defense when accused of cheating. The derringer that McCabe produces while covered in snow has a silver-toned frame and a single barrel, similar to the Colt Theur and Iver Johnson Eclipse models that were produced through the second half of the 19th century.

Downed by a mighty blast from Butler’s large-bore long gun, McCabe surprises the killer by quickly raising his derringer and making efficient use of its single shot to dent Butler’s forehead.

The Shotgun

While anticipating the confrontation against Butler’s gunmen, McCabe takes a long double-barreled shotgun to the church, stashing it when he ascends to look out on the town from the steeple. He climbs back down to find the shotgun in the hands of Reverend Elliot (Corey Fischer), who protests that “this is a house of God!”

“Uh, that there’s my shotgun… could I have it please?” McCabe meekly asks. In response, Elliot cocks both exposed hammers and raises the shotgun, demanding that McCabe “get out!” The mixup proves briefly fortuitous for McCabe, who escapes just as Butler kicks in the door and—mistaking the shotgun-toting reverend as an enemy combatant—immediately blasts him, naturally causing the dead Elliot to drop his oil lamp and start a fire that burns in the background of the ensuing chase.

What to Imbibe

“Uh, I’ll just have my double whiskey and a raw egg,” McCabe orders from saloonkeeper Sheehan, though he also drinks plenty of straight rye without mixing the egg in. If you’re curious about McCabe’s go-to whiskey brands, the most common label appears to be the fictional “Jonathan Collier” brand that also appeared in Westerns like 3:10 to Yuma (1957), How the West Was Won (1962), 5 Card Stud (1968), Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969), True Grit (1969), Unforgiven (1992), and the first episode of the Black Hills-set series Deadwood, as well as the noir Criss Cross (1949).

McCabe’s trademark drink seems like a waste of an egg, especially these days when eggs would probably be more expensive than whiskey! However, the combination has a long tradition as a “hair of the dog” hangover cure known as an Amber Moon, albeit often with the addition of Tabasco sauce for taste as prominently seen when the dutiful butler Beddoes (John Gielgud) arrives with his murdered master’s Amber Moon “pick-me-up” in the 1974 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. McCabe foregoes McIlhenny’s famous Louisiana hot sauce, simply drinking a raw egg dropped into double shots of whiskey.

Eggs? In this economy?

McCabe frequently smokes stogies pulled from his frock coat’s breast pocket, identified by the box in his room as Marsh Wheeling, a product of M. Marsh & Sons. cigar company.

Mifflin M. Marsh started his business in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1840, making it the oldest cigar manufacturing company founded in the United States. The National Road had arrived in Wheeling more than 20 years earlier, linking the Ohio River to the Potomac and establishing the city—then still part of the Commonwealth of Virginia—as a major transportation hub. Marsh reportedly capitalized on this location and found early success peddling his cigars to many frontiersmen, merchants, and settlers who were traveling west on wagons and steamboats during this age of western expansion.

Eight years into his business, Marsh developed the now-iconic Marsh Wheeling Stogie, a longer and thinner alternative to traditional cigars that measured seven inches long with a 34-ring gauge. Marsh named his new products “stogies” in tribute to the Conestoga wagons that carried many of his new customers west. Already affordable at less than a penny a piece, Marsh ensured that he would develop a customer base by liberally distributing free samples of his product, including issuing free stogies to Union soldiers during the Civil War. (When the Civil War began in 1861, Wheeling was part of the Confederacy in Virginia, though West Virginia split from its home state in 1863 to be admitted to the Union.)

Marsh Wheeling Stogies emerged as a favorite among smokers like P.T. Barnum, Abraham Lincoln, Annie Oakley, Mark Twain, John Wayne, and Ulysses Grant, who smoked up to twenty per day according to Frank Seltzer for Smokeshop Magazine.

McCabe bites off the end of one of his many Marsh Wheeling stogies.

How to Get the Look

Warren Beatty as John McCabe in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)

John McCabe cuts a distinctive figure in the small mining town of Presbyterian Church, not just for his city dude duds of a frock coat, striped trousers, wing collar, and tie, but also the hefty hooded fur coat that keeps him warm in the wintry climate of the Pacific Northwest.

• Brown bearskin fur knee-length hooded coat
• Dark brown wool single-breasted 3-button frock coat with short peak lapels, welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, 2-button cuffs, and tails with decorative 2-button back
• White or pink/lilac-striped cotton neckband shirt with front placket and white contrasting 2-button barrel cuffs
  • White stiff wing collar
• Black satin silk short-pointed cravat
  • Pearl stickpin
• Charcoal wool single-breasted 5-button waistcoat with narrow notch lapels, four jetted pockets, and straight-cut bottom
  • Gold pocket watch on gold flat-link chain
• Black, gray, and white “cashmere”-striped wool flat-front “spongebag” trousers with waistband suspender buttons, quarter-top side pockets, jetted back pockets, and plain-hemmed bottoms
• Black, tan, and white-striped cloth suspenders
• Black leather riding boots
• Ivory cotton full-length union suit underwear
• Black or dark brown felt derby hat with black grosgrain band and edges
• Dark brown leather gloves
• Dark brown leather gunbelt with ranger-style buckle and cartridge loops

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The Quote

If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much.

The post Warren Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller appeared first on BAMF Style.

Colin Farrell as Ray in In Bruges (2008)

Vitals

Colin Farrell as Ray, conflicted contract killer

Bruges, Belgium, Winter 2007

Film: In Bruges
Release Date: February 8, 2008
Director: Martin McDonagh
Costume Designer: Jany Temime

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Shortly thereafter, the instructions came through: “Get the fook out of London youse dumb fucks. Get to Bruges.” I didn’t even know where Bruges fuckin’ was. It’s in Belgium.

Despite it being directly up my alley, I somehow went 15 years without seeing In Bruges, Martin McDonagh’s critically acclaimed hit that opened the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. For his performance as the exiled hitman Ray, Colin Farrell received his first Golden Globe Award for In Bruges, fifteen years before winning his second this year for his performance in The Banshees of Inisherin, which re-teamed him with McDonagh and co-star Brendan Gleeson and also landed Farrell his first Academy Award nomination as announced this morning.

Following a botched first job in which he assassinates a priest and, tragically, a young boy in the path of one of his bullets, the inexperienced and irritable Ray is sent with his good-natured and literal partner-in-crime Ken (Brendn Gleeson) to Bruges, where they’re to lay low and await further instructions from their profane boss Harry Waters (Ralph Fiennes). Much to Ray’s particular dismay, the only available accommodation is a shared twin hotel room as the rest of the “shithole” berg is fully booked for Christmas.

Wracked with guilt from the boy’s death, Ray grows on Ken’s nerves as “the worst tourist in the world,” though he grows more genial after downing a few beers—specifically, six pints and seven bottles—and striding onto a Dutch film set where he makes a date with the charming Chloë Villette (Clémence Poésy).

“I shoot people for money,” Ray confesses during their first dinner date, “priests, children… you know, the usual.” His cheeky tone may suggest to Chloë that he’s joking, but she’s equally transparent when she immediately reveals that her role on the film set consists of selling hard drugs to the crew. It’s only the first of several revelations over the course of the unorthodox date, as he later describes to Ken:

My date involved two instances of extreme violence, one instance of her hand on my cock and my finger up her thing, which lasted all too briefly—isn’t that always the way?—one instance of me stealing five grams of her very high-quality cocaine, and one instance of me blinding a poofy little skinhead… so, all in all, my evening pretty much balanced out fine.

Before their cocaine binge with a race war-obsessed dwarf actor (Jordan Prentice) and a duo of prostitutes, Ken receives the long-awaited call from Harry who explains the true purpose of their reason to Bruges: eliminating Ray.

What’d He Wear?

Unlike his voluble companion Ken who rotates through a few tasteful suits and sport jackets, Ray never changes his clothing through the duration of In Bruges, aside from a few variations in how he wears his shirt.

Ray’s wardrobe is anchored by a thigh-length topcoat in a wide-scaled black-and-gray herringbone woolen tweed that presents an overall charcoal finish. It’s a warm enough layer, though perhaps not enough for winter in Belgium, as Ray often sinks himself into the buttoned-up coat, visually representing how over his head he is as a novice hitman.

Ray doesn’t share Ken’s enthusiasm for observing Bruges from its chilly canals.

The single-breasted coat has padded shoulders, a single vent, and notch lapels with dark blue felt around the undercollar. There are three flat black buttons up the front to close the jacket—which Ray wears both fully open and fully closed—which match the single button that closes the semi-strap around the cuff of each sleeve. The side pockets are widely welted and on a gentle slant that keeps them from being totally vertical.

Nor does Ray share Ken’s enthusiasm for being forgiving of their fellow tourists.

Ray wears a distinctive ice-white cotton shirt by DKNY, printed in what the Prop Store calls “a jazzy pattern of black geometric shapes” against a subtle tonal texture, all “a bit over-elaborate” just as Ray had described their hideout situation. The spread-collared shirt has a front placket and barrel cuffs that each fasten with white buttons.

It’s no Dan Flashes, but DKNY showed that they could still make a hell of a complicated pattern.

Ray’s undershirt is a long-sleeved henley in pale-ecru cotton, with a five-button top that closes over a slate track-striped inner placket.

Ray makes a date with Chloë. When joining her for dinner the following evening, he would dress the same but forego the henley undershirt.

With just a few exceptions, I associate solid black suits with death, either worn to funerals or by movie hitmen. Ray is obviously the latter, running through Bruges in a black suit made from a gently napped lightweight cloth that’s prone to wrinkling.

The single-breasted suit jacket has a two-button front, which Ray typically wears undone but wears fully fastened when he also uncharacteristically buttons his shirt to the neck in preparation for his aborted suicide attempt. The jacket has notch lapels with pick stitching, padded shoulders, four-button cuffs, a welted breast pocket, and straight flapped hip pockets.

“A great day this has turned out to be. I’m suicidal, me mate tries to kill me, me gun gets nicked, and we’re still in fookin’ Bruges!”
The playground setting makes Ray look even more the chastened schoolchild after Ken prevents him from committing suicide with the revolver he stole from Chloë and her skinhead ex.

Held up by a black leather belt that closes through a squared silver-toned single-prong buckle, the black flat-front suit trousers have side pockets, button-through back pockets, and turn-ups (cuffs) on the bottoms.

Ray maintains the color palette by wearing black leather side-zip ankle boots.

What’s black, white, and red all over?

While the rest of his outfit is predominantly black and white, Ray shows some rare color in his socks, which are primarily dark gray but with red and white bands across the top that, like the shirt, are also in complicated patterns.

Ray shows us his best attempt at a butterfly pose.

When not wearing his contact lenses, Ray pulls on a pair of tortoise-framed glasses in the narrow rectangular shape that was so popular through the early-to-mid 2000s.

Being a movie assassin may sound like an intriguing job, but even that entails the droll nighttime routines of taking out contact lenses and brushing your teeth.

The Guns

Beretta 92S

As Ray and Ken theorize that they’ve been sent to Bruges on a job rather than simply to sightsee, Ray worries that “we haven’t got any guns,” until Ken reassures him that “Harry can get guns anywhere.” Ken’s prediction proves to be true enough when Harry calls and directs him to a man named Yuri at Raamstraat 17, where Ken is ordered to pick up the gun he’ll use to murder Ray. Yuri provides Ken with a Beretta 92S semi-automatic pistol and a suppressor that “might be necessary”.

Beretta developed the 92S in 1977 as the first improved variant of the original Model 92 that was introduced just two years earlier. These pistols evolved from a half-century of Beretta innovation, retaining the alloy frame and open-slide design with a traditional double-action (DA/SA) trigger and double-stacked magazines that could feed 15 rounds or more of 9x19mm Parabellum ammunition. To meet the specifications of certain law enforcement agencies hoping to authorize the pistol, the new Beretta 92S included modifications that would be present through the rest of the series like a slide-mounted combined safety/decocker, though this was still only located on the left side.

Ray looks over the silenced Beretta 92S that Ken had been given to use to kill him. The lack of a decocker present on the right side of the frame, as well as the butt-positioned magazine release we see when Ken takes the pistol back, informs us that this could only be the 92S variant.

When Beretta evolved the pistol into the Model 92SB introduced in 1980, this became an ambidextrous control with a lever on each side of the slide, in addition to the magazine release button relocated from the bottom of the butt to the increasingly more conventional location aside the trigger. These first variants in the Beretta 92 series all feature a rounded trigger guard, which would be more squared with the development of the Model 92F/FS in 1984, which would be made cinematically famous through its use in the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon franchises and remains one of the most commonly seen firearms in movies and TV.

The screen-used pistol shows plenty of wear, appropriate given its age (Beretta stopped producing the 92S by 1982) and the fact that Ken was likely intended to dispose of it after the job was complete.

Ken pockets the suppressor issued with his Beretta as Ray pulls the Rossi revolver from his waistband. Note the magazine release on the Beretta’s butt that, combined with the decocker lever, informs us that the pistol has to be a Beretta 92S.

Rossi Model 88

When Chloë’s jealous boyfriend Eirik (Jérémie Renier) threatens Ray with a snub-nosed Rossi Model 88 that is revealed to be loaded with blanks, Ray disarms Eirik of the weapon and fires it in his face at such close range that he blinds him in his left eye, leaving the man screaming on the floor about his lost vision. “Of course you can’t see, I just shot a blank in your fuckin’ eyes!” Ray explains.

Given the potential danger awaiting him in the form of his erstwhile partner-in-crime being assigned to kill him, Ray fortuitously keeps the weapon and swaps out the blank ammunition with five live rounds of .38 Special that he finds in Chloë’s apartment… though, ultimately, Ray proves to be his own biggest danger as he contemplates suicide.

Note “AMADEO ROSSI S.A.” clearly etched on the barrel’s left side.

Unlike semi-automatic handguns and submachine guns that need to be specifically modified to fire blanks (despite how simple Die Hard 2 made it look), revolvers typically need no such modification so Ray being able to swap out blanks for live rounds would be possible in real life.

Comparing his found sidearm to the silenced pistol assigned to Ken, Ray complains that “mine’s a bloody girl’s gun,” though I’d argue there’s hardly anything emasculating about a snub-nosed .38 Special. Ken ends up pocketing the revolver as Ray is “a suicide case,” a very responsible duty for a friend of someone undergoing a mental health crisis… even if that friend just moments earlier was attempting to carry out a hit on their pal.

Ken places Ray’s commandeered Rossi in a drawer in his hotel room.

IMFDB currently identifies Ray’s revolver as a Smith & Wesson Model 60, which likely served as an obvious inspiration for the Rossi Model 88. Not only are both stainless steel-framed .38 Special revolvers with five-round cylinders and two-inch barrels, but the similarities in the front ramp sight, cylinder release, and grips make it very clear why one may think the S&W revolver was used on screen. (Check out this brief Youtube video if you want to further compare each revolver’s respective design.)

Smith & Wesson 5903

In the flashback to Ray’s hit in London that resulted in the death of a priest (as intended) and a little boy (as not intended), we see that the gun Ray referenced being tossed into the Thames was a Smith & Wesson 5903 pistol.

The Model 5903 was developed as part of Smith & Wesson’s third and final generation of fully metal-framed semi-automatic pistols, produced through the ’90s. In addition to lines in .40 S&W, .45 ACP, and 10mm, Smith & Wesson offered the full-size 5900 series and the smaller single-stack 3900 and double-stack 6900 series, all chambered in the universal 9x19mm Parabellum.

Each model number described what made each pistol unique; the “59” referred to being a part of the full-size 9mm lineup, while the “0” indicated a traditional double-action (DA/SA) trigger, and the “3” indicated an aluminum alloy frame as opposed to the heavier all-steel frame of the otherwise similar 5906.

Ray executes a priest (Ciarán Hinds) with his heavy stainless S&W 5903. Note that Ray wears the same herringbone topcoat he takes to Bruges, but he has evidently changed out of the white button-down collared shirt and light gray crew-neck sweater he wore during this hit.

The 3900, 5900, 6900 series and their differently chambered counterparts ended production by 2000 as Smith & Wesson shifted the focus for its semi-automatic pistols toward lighter polymer frames like its Sigma and M&P series pistols.

What to Imbibe

Bored to tears in their shared hotel room, Ray talks Ken into joining him for some nighttime sightseeing, knowing that Ken would be interested in the medieval architecture while Ray can content himself with taking pulls from a bottle of Leffe Blonde, an appropriately Belgian-produced abbey beer. Over the course of the same evening, Ray reports to having six pints and seven bottles of the 6.6% ABV beer, “and I’m not even pissed!”

Having baited Ken out of their room on the promise of admiring Bruges’ architecture, Ray entertains himself with a bottle of Leffe Blonde.

The following evening, Ray takes Chloë out to dinner, where they are poured from a 1998 bottle of Château Haut Pingat, a relatively inexpensive Bordeaux produced from Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes with a “silky and smooth” palate, according to EWGA Wines.

A Canadian woman (Stephanie Carey) at their neighboring table wields a bottle of the same to retaliate against Ray for punching out her boyfriend (Zeljko Ivanek), inadvertently triggering Ray’s anti-bottle defensive reflexes.

How to Get the Look

Colin Farrell as Ray in In Bruges (2008)

Ray illustrates how a black-and-white color palette doesn’t have to be boring, shaking up what could have been a somber black-suited dynamic with a frivolously printed shirt that he wears insouciantly untucked and with the top few buttons undone to show his henley.

• Charcoal herringbone woolen tweed single-breasted 3-button thigh-length topcoat with notch lapels, slanted welt side pockets, single-button strap cuffs, and single vent
• Black lightweight wool suit:
  • Single-breasted 2-button jacket with pick-stitched notch lapels, welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, 4-button cuffs, and single vent
  • Flat-front trousers with belt loops, side pockets, button-through back pockets, and turn-ups/cuffs
• White (with black geometric print) tonal-textured cotton shirt with spread collar, front placket, and button cuffs
• Pale-ecru cotton long-sleeved henley shirt with 5-button top and slate-striped inner placket
• Black leather belt with squared silver-toned single-prong buckle
• Black leather side-zip ankle boots
• Dark-gray cotton lisle socks with dark red and white patterned bands
• Tortoise rectangular-framed glasses

For reference, you can see Ray’s bloodied suit and topcoat displayed by the Irish Costume Archive Project.

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The Quote

You can’t sell horse tranquilizers to a midget!

The post In Bruges: Colin Farrell as Ray appeared first on BAMF Style.

Tom Selleck as Matthew Quigley in Quigley Down Under (1990)

Vitals

Tom Selleck as Matthew Quigley, taciturn sharpshooter from Wyoming

Western Australia, early 1870s

Film: Quigley Down Under
Release Date: October 17, 1990
Director: Simon Wincer
Costume Designer: Wayne A. Finkelman

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

I only recently learned that January 26 is observed as Australia Day, a national holiday that commemorates the landing of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788 and is celebrated today by presentations of the Australian of the Year Awards and announcement of the Australia Day Honours. Since at least 1938, which was the 150th anniversary of the landing, there has been a movement led by Indigenous Australians to redefine the observance as Invasion Day or Survival Day, a Day of Mourning for the British arrival that resulted in often violent colonization.

Given the movie’s setting and themes of a protagonist who refuses to engage in violence against Aborigines, the unique 1990 Western Quigley Down Under felt like an appropriate choice to write about today.

As suggested by the latter two-thirds of its title, Quigley Down Under follows the tradition of predecessors like The Sundowners (1960) and Ned Kelly (1970) as an Australian-set Western, or “meat pie Western”. The eponymous Quigley is Matthew Quigley (Tom Selleck), a cowboy with a penchant for riflery. He arrives in the west—western Australia, that is—after answering an advertisement from rancher Elliott Marston (Alan Rickman).

Along the way, Quigley encounters a woman dismissed as “Crazy Cora” (Laura San Giacomo), pulled onto the wagon for the days-long journey to the Marston ranch. Quigley’s skills with his legendary Sharps rifle are enough for Marston to extend him a job offer… which Quigley swiftly refuses—by tossing Marston through a window—upon learning that he’s been hired to hunt Aboriginal Australians. Marston’s men drive a battered Quigley and Cora out to die in the Outback, where Quigley regains the upper hand and sends both attackers back to befuddle their employer. In waning health, Quigley and Cora are rescued by Aborigines, amongst whom Quigley soon grows respected for defending them against predators like Marston. (Cora consistently refers to Quigley as “Roy”, the name of her estranged husband, making this the second time in two years that a villain played by Alan Rickman faced off against a dangerous yet heroic gunman who was occasionally called “Roy” despite that not being his name.)

Though some promotional copy vaguely refers to a setting of “1860” and the British presence in Australia suggests the second half of the 19th century, no more specific time-frame is given for Quigley Down Under. References are made to recent inventions by Samuel Colt (who died in 1862), “Wild Bill” Hickok (who rose to fame after 1865), and Dodge City, Kansas (founded in 1872), not to mention that Quigley’s signature Sharps is technically the 1874 model… which actually debuted in 1871. For those interested, I imagine this narrows down the setting to sometime between the late 1860s and mid-1870s, though I’ll avoid further pedantry but merely noting that the production is set sometime during “the old west era” and leave it at that. (Evidently, some of the murky timelines had been the result of Ian Jones updating John Hill’s screenplay to include a setting revised from the 1880s to the 1860s… okay, now I’ll leave it alone.)

Hill started his screenplay around 1974, inspired by reports of aboriginal genocide in 19th century Australia. The script languished in various states of ownership, at one point intended for Steve McQueen, though his death in the 1980s sent production back to square one. Toward the end of the decade, Tom Selleck was wrapping up his star-making seven seasons on Magnum, P.I. when he was tapped for the leading role of Matthew Quigley, launching a new phase of his career centered around Westerns like Last Stand at Saber River (1997) and Crossfire Trail (2001). Selleck’s performance as the legendary marksman also launched his popularity among recreational shooters as professional events like the Matthew Quigley Buffalo Rifle Match have emerged in the decades since the movie’s release.

What’d He Wear?

From head to toe, Matthew Quigley projects the quintessential image of the American cowboy.

The Hat

Quigley wears a beige 4X beaver felt with a tall, pinched-front crown and a wide, dramatically curved brim.  The tan suede hat band was once decorated in an “X” pattern that has all but faded from long days on the sun-drenched trail, leaving only the assorted sets of small white beads arranged in sets of two across the band’s top and bottom, presenting like the four corners of a square at each interval. A thin brown braided leather stampede string wraps around the back of the crown and down through a small hole on each side of the hat base, dangling down on each side past Quigley’s face where they intersect at a slider and tassel around his mid-section.

As usual for large-scale productions by this time, there were likely multiple hats used as WorthPoint features a screen-used hat said to be a genuine John B. Stetson while Larry McQueen’s Collection of Motion Picture Costume Design includes a hat made by the Australian hatmaker Akubra. The movie’s popularity has inspired a wave of replicas from hatmakers like Az Tex Hat Company, Bernard Hats, Knudsen Hat Company, The Last Best West, and Staker Co.; the dimensions of these replicas range from 5¾”-7″ crowns and 4½-5″ brims.

Shirts and Kerchief

Quigley also wears the requisite neckerchief, a substantial swath of faded, raw-edged red cotton with a hand-painted floral and paisley print in yellow and green. He showcases the many purposes of these iconic kerchiefs, wearing it not just as a sweat-catching bandana but also to cover his nose and mouth when escaping a hotel fire and, later, as a tourniquet after he’s shot in the right thigh.

When Quigley arrives in Australia, he wears a faded turquoise-blue tunic-style “popover” shirt made from a boiled-looking linen. The shirt has a long V-shaped integrated front bib with a button-up closure and two stacked buttons to close at the neck. The shirt also has a short, widely spread attached collar, a shirred back, and long “balloon”-style sleeves with button cuffs.

After he’s initially hired by Elliott Marston and invited to dine with his new boss, Quigley changes into a new shirt, made from a vivid indigo-blue cloth, which may be the “raw silk” mentioned in the McQueen Collection listing. The base of the shirt recalls the earlier with its attached spread collar, two-button neck and V-shaped under-bib, and voluminous sleeves with button cuffs, but it differentiates itself with the addition of a broad flap across the chest, detailed with two parallel columns of five nickel “buffalo head” buttons each.

These double-breasted, double-front “bib shirts” were popularized by John Wayne in his westerns of the ’40s and ’50s, though the style itself likely dates back to mid-19th century firefighters on both sides of the Atlantic, according to a 2009 blog post by Robin Chapman. When the Civil War broke out, the handsome yet rugged practicality of woolen “firemen’s shirts” appealed to whoever was choosing uniforms for the Union Army. After Appomattox, soldiers returned home and normalized their practical G.I. duds in civilian life, just as we saw with khakis and field jackets a century later. Of course, the style itself “re-upped” after the Civil War and remained in use among Cavalry units (think Custer), which is what likely inspired Duke’s cinematic cowboy costumes.

Note the nickel-toned straight-tack connected to Quigley’s watch-chain, here looped through the inside of the third buttonhole on his left side. He also wears a thin blue-and-white braided garter over his left sleeve.

Trousers and Accoutrement

Quigley tucks his shirts into light taupe flat-front fitted trousers with era-correct details like recessed metal suspender buttons around the waistband, a button-up fly, and a short two-piece back strap with two stacked grommets on each side. He wears a wide dark brown leather belt worn around his waist on the outside of his trousers, as they—correctly for the mid-19th century setting—do not have integrated belt loops.

The trouser bottoms have loops that button closed under each foot to secure that Quigley can smoothly slide his boots over each leg; though not seen directly on screen, these straps are mentioned in the McQueen Collection listing that also describes the Western Costume Co. label inscribed “2963-3, Tom Selleck, Waist 37.”

In a slit-style pocket on the right front side of his trousers, Quigley carries a nickel pocket watch with a hunter-style hinged cover, attached to a silver-toned chain and a nickel bar-tack that he loops through the third buttonhole down on the left side of his bib shirt.

Quigley holds up his trousers with a set of tan tonal-printed cloth suspenders (braces) with faded olive border trim. Each suspender strap adjusts with a dulled silver-toned slider buckle, and they have sueded double-ear hooks that connect to the buttons along the outside of the trouser waistband.

Belts and Chaps

Influenced by Spanish “zahones” that made their way north from Spanish America in to American cowboy culture, traditional chaps are hardy leather leggings designed to protect a wearer’s legs, fastened around the waist through an integrated belt.

Quigley wears tan leather chaps with long-fringed sides and a curved “cargo pocket” over the left thigh with rawhide-laced trim and a rounded flap that closes through a bone toggle. The wide brown basket-woven leather integrated belt stretches around the back and dips down in the front over the crotch, where the two sides are rawhide-laced together.

As Quigley doesn’t regularly carry a revolver, instead favoring a rifle, he wears a cartridge belt in lieu of a traditional gun belt. This hefty, 45″-long russet-brown leather belt is best described in the comprehensive words of Phil Spangenberger, who appraised it in March 2007 prior to being auctioned:

This is a 3 5/8-inch wide, rifle-type cartridge belt, medium brown in color, with 21 cartridge loops (laced through the slots rather than sewn to the belt) to hold the large 45-110 Sharps cartridges. The loops are set up as follows: three (3) loops at each end of the belt and 15 loops centered at the back of the belt. In between each section of cartridge loops is a strip of leather bearing a basket-type design. There are 13 dummy cartridges in the cartridge loops. Several of the dummy rounds are paper patched. The belt’s buckle is a squared brass “garrison” style of single tang buckle, while the billet end is a short, tapered tab with just three (3) holes for adjustable fit.

Though he doesn’t carry a handgun, Quigley still holsters a knife, specifically a Bowie knife custom-made for Selleck by Chuck Stapal and carried in a uniquely beaded two-piece buckskin sheath with a large loop to slide it over the right side of the cartridge belt, also described as part of Spangenberger’s appraisal:

Attached to the belt is an Indian-style knife and scabbard. The knife is a skinning-type knife with a stag handle, a white metal (German silver?) capstan and cross guard, and an 8 3/8-inch clip-point Bowie-style blade. It appears to be custom made.

The sheath is of tattered buckskin with red, blue, white, and green beadwork and a faded woven design of a red, blue, and yellow geometric Indian pattern.

Quigley holsters his knife before setting sail for Australia.

Boots and Spurs

Quigley wears light-brown suede cowboy boots that are mostly unornamented from the plain-toe up the knee-high shafts, aside from the pull tabs sewn onto each side of each boot’s straight top.

As expected of any cowboy worth his boots, Quigley wears a set of spurs. Each spur has a 18-pointed silver rowel secured to a silver shank that extends from the brown leather heel-band, personalized for this particular wearer with a silver “Q” affixed to each side. Rather than a swing arm, the outside features a large ornamental silver button against a brown leather base with a silver-toned single-prong buckle and matching keeper that connect to a narrow leather strap that wraps around from a large leather piece worn against the other side of the boot.

Quigley’s spurs get their time to shine as Tom Selleck’s name appears during the opening credits.

Outerwear

Quigley occasionally pulls on a tan cotton duster that extends to from his calves. These long coats were designed to fully cover the wearer and protect from dust kicked up while riding, made from a loose, light, and unstructured cloth so that it wouldn’t wear heavy or burden the wearer’s range of motion.

Quigley’s collared duster has three large buttons positioned along the front, two pockets with large flaps, and a single vent to be compatible on horseback.

Quigley protects his hands with a set of wheat-colored deerskin leather work gloves.

Underwear

Quigley’s underwear consists of a matching henley-style shirt and “long johns”, which I had originally imagined was a one-piece union suit until the McQueen Collection listing confirmed that the “dark pink over-dyed” cotton underclothes were actually a matching set.

The ribbed cotton long-sleeved shirt is a traditional henley-type shirt with a two-button placket that extends down to mid-chest. The thermal cotton “long johns” have a lace-up, flap-front fly.

New Duds for Departure Day

After Quigley’s clothing gets destroyed by bullets, beatings, and horse draggings, he presents himself in the finale dressed in all new clothing, though closer inspection reveals that these are merely different-colored versions of his usual bib shirt, neckerchief, and trousers.

Perhaps in tribute to Cora telling “Roy” that red was her favorite color when she asked him to go dress-hopping for her, Quigley wears a red version of the blue boiled bib shirt. He had arrived wearing a blue shirt and red bandana but now leaves wearing a red shirt and a blue bandana. His dark slate-blue trousers appear to be the same fitted style as his previous trousers, also detailed with suspender buttons though he foregoes actually wearing suspenders.

Though he needed new clothes, Quigley continues wearing his trusty old boots, belts, chaps, and hat.

The Gun

Sharps Rifle

A secondary star of Quigley Down Under is Matthew Quigley’s Sharps Model 1874 Long Range rifle, nearly establishing a Western equivalent to the famed .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver used by Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry series. A total of three Hartford-model 1874 Sharps rifles, each weighing about 13 pounds, were custom-built for the production by the Montana-based company Shiloh Rifle Manufacturing, which continues to include the 1874 Quigley model among its rifle lineup.

“The legendary Sharps,” Elliott Marston notes to Quigley, who responds with a comprehensive description: “You know your weapons. It’s a lever-action breech-loader. Usual barrel length’s 30 inches, this one has an extra four. It’s converted to use a special .45-caliber, 110-grain metal cartridge with a 540-grain paper patch bullet. It’s fitted  with double-set triggers and a Vernier sight. It’s marked up to 1,200 yards, this one shoots a mite further.”

“An experimental weapon with experimental ammunition,” Marston comments. “Let’s experiment.”

Quigley shows off his “legendary Sharps” with its customized 34-inch barrel to Marston and his gathered ranch hands.

“Patented by Christian Sharps in 1848, the Sharps breechloading rifle achieved immediate popularity because it was powerful and quick to load,” describes the American West Chronicle, curated by Walter Nugent, Ph.D. and William Deverell, Ph.D. “In 1854, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher shipped Sharps carbines to fellow abolitionists in Bleeding Kansas. The crates were marked ‘Bibles’, and the carbines became known as ‘Beecher’s Bibles’. More than 100,000 were purchased for the Union Army during the Civil War.”

In the early 1870s, Sharps began manufacturing hunting rifles that grew quickly popular among Western frontiersmen and buffalo hunters like the young Teddy Roosevelt, future lawman Bill Tilghman, and and Canadian-born gentleman gunfighter Bat Masterson, who carried a Sharps rifle while serving as sheriff of Ford County, Kansas in late 1878.

Arguably the most famous contemporary usage of the Sharps rifle would have been in the hands of bison hunter Billy Dixon during the Second Battle of Adobe Walls in June 1874. Dixon and nearly 30 others were sheltered in the Texas hunting outpost when a group of hostile Native American warriors were spotted approaching from about a mile to the east. Concerned that his own .45-90 Sharps wouldn’t be up to the task, Dixon borrowed a .50-90 Sharps and fired a single fatal shot that felled a warrior from a distance of more than 1,500 yards.

Though the prospect of shooting indigenous people actually results in Quigley refusing Marston’s job offer, Dixon’s sharpshooting achievement may have inspired the character’s ability to shoot his Sharps “a mite further” than the suggested range of 1,200 yards. The 34-inch octagonal barrel (four inches longer than standard) and the accuracy afforded by a ladder-elevated Vernier rear sight, hooded Lyman Beach globe front sight, and double-set triggers would have also helped.

In addition to the 4″ ladder-elevated Vernier rear sight and the double-set triggers that Quigley mentions on his Sharps, note the gold-wired “M.Q.” inside a gilt-inlaid oval on the right side of the receiver.

The earliest Sharps rifles produced during the 1850s typically fired a .52-caliber projectile until 1867, when they were standardized for .50-70 Government cartridges. The development of the Sharps 1874 hunting rifle and carbine series opened up a wider possibility of ammunition, including the U.S. Army’s .45-70 Government round and the more substantial .45-110 cartridge fired from Quigley’s 34mm-barreled sharps, though Quigley also informs a gunsmith that he can substitute .450 British No. 2 musket lead to refill his ammunition in a pinch.

Following a recommendation to the production team by firearms expert Phil Spangenberger (as explained in his True West article), Shiloh built three identical Sharps rifles for Tom Selleck to use on screen, including one primary rifle to be fired, a backup, and a third that would be used as a club during fighting scenes. “Sporting a steel military-style butt plate, the straight-grained, custom-fit American walnut stock was fitted with an extra-long length of pull for Selleck,” Spangenberger later wrote, adding that each rifle “wears a color case hardened patchbox, and a pewter-tipped forearm.” Selleck kept all three after the production, later signing and auctioning two of them while donating the third—with its fringed leather scabbard—to the Brownell’s Family Museum.

The tanned buckskin scabbard is 62″ long, just about a foot longer than the overall length of the Sharps rifle he stores inside. The scabbard tapers from eight inches wide at the butt-end to about three inches wide at the muzzle-end, which is also decorated with buck-stitch laced fringe up about a third of the length of the scabbard. Like the knife sheath he wears on his belt, much of one side of the scabbard is decorated in Native American designs of red, green, and white beads.

Quigley slips the extra-long octagonal barrel of his Sharps rifle into its soft buckskin scabbard before traveling Down Under.

You can read more about Quigley’s famous Sharps at IMFDB, Rock Island Auction, and True West as well as the Bidsquare auction listing for the screen-used Shiloh Sharps with serial no. 8887.

Colt Revolvers

Unlike the quintessential big-screen gunfighters who always keep a six-shooter strapped to their thigh, Quigley quips to to Marston that “I never had much use for ’em.” Still, Marston praises his Colt Model 1860 Army single-action revolver, prompting Quigley to acknowledge that “God created all men… they say Sam Colt made ’em equal. More or less.”

The maxim is proven true enough when Marston later insists on the two of them facing off with his pair of Colt Army revolvers, rather than allowing Quigley a chance to grab his prized Sharps rifle for their final showdown. Marston smugly comments, “I seem to remember you’re not too familiar with Colonel Colt’s revolver, so this’ll be your first lesson.” After three fast and well-placed .44-caliber shots in less than two seconds, Quigley approaches a now-dying Marston and the two dead henchmen on each side of him, to correct his previous misstatement: “I said I never had much use for one, I never said I didn’t know how to use it.”

The Model 1860 Army was the most widely used revolver of the Civil War and one of the last open-top percussion revolvers developed by Colt before the introduction of the Single Action Army “Peacemaker” in 1873, when production ended on the Model 1860 Army after more than 200,000 were produced. These six-shot revolvers fired .44-caliber cap-and-ball ammunition, with later models converted to fire .44 Colt metallic cartridges. Colt Model 1860 Army revolvers presented a distinctive look when compared to their predecessors, with the barrel rounded and smoothed into the frame. The brass trigger guard and front-strap contrasted against the blued frame, barrel, and back-strap, with Colt’s usual handsome one-piece walnut grips.

Quigley keeps Marston’s Colt Army revolver tucked into the front of his belt.

After the final duel, Quigley also arms himself with an engraved nickel and ivory-gripped Colt Model 1851 Navy “U.S. Marshal” revolver from Marston’s now-departed henchman Dobkin (Tony Bonner). With a production span running nearly a quarter century, the Colt Model 1851 Navy revolver (originally “Colt Revolving Belt Pistol”) was the most widely produced full-sized Colt revolver during the pre-cartridge era, popularized by users like “Wild Bill” Hickok, “Doc” Holliday, and Clint Eastwood’s unnamed character in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Colt 1851 Navy revolutionized handguns upon its introduction in the mid-19th century for balancing a manageable weight of 2.6 pounds with the reasonable power of its .36-caliber cap-and-ball ammunition (until .38-caliber metallic cartridge conversions were made available). Detailed on the smooth cylinders with Waterman Ormsby’s engraving of the Second Texas Navy’s victory at the Battle of Campeche, the standard Colt 1851 Navy revolver measured a total of 13 inches long with a 7.5-inch octagonal barrel. However, shortened versions of the Model 1851 Navy revolver were also produced, like the “U.S. Marshal” variant with its 5-inch barrel and half-fluted cylinder that lacked any engraving.

Both of Quigley’s commandeered Colt revolvers appear to be percussion cap-and-ball revolvers, lacking the telltale ejector rod tubes and loading gates of contemporary cartridge-converted models.

How to Get the Look

Tom Selleck as Matthew Quigley in Quigley Down Under (1990)

Matthew Quigley initially doesn’t disappoint his new employer, who was hoping for a quintessential American cowboy and received exactly what he ordered in the form of the gloriously mustached sharpshooter with a tall-crowned cowboy hat, faded bib shirts and kerchief, cartridge belt and chaps, and well-traveled boots with jangling spurs.

• Blue raw fiber popover tunic with spread collar, 2-button neck and V-shaped under-bib, double-breasted 5×2-button bib of nickel buttons, shirred back, and long sleeves with button cuffs
• Red paisley-and-floral print cotton neckerchief
• Light-taupe flat-front trousers with suspender buttons along waistband, slit-style watch pocket, and buttoned under-boot straps
• Tan tonal-pattern cloth suspenders with dulled silver-toned slider-buckle adjusters, and leather hooks
• Brown leather belt with brass-finished single-prong buckle
• Russet-brown basket-woven leather cartridge belt with brass-finished single-prong garrison buckle, 21 .45/110 cartridge loops, and multi-color beaded tan suede knife scabbard
• Light-brown suede knee-high cowboy boots with pull tabs
• Tan cotton calf-length 3-button duster with large flapped hip pockets
• Wheat leather work gloves

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The Quote

I’m new here, so I ain’t rightly certain. Is everybody in this country as butt ugly as you three?

The post Tom Selleck in Quigley Down Under appeared first on BAMF Style.

Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell in The Mummy (1999)

Vitals

Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell, American adventurer and former Legionnaire

Egypt, Summer 1926

Film: The Mummy
Release Date: May 7, 1999
Director: Stephen Sommers
Costume Designer: John Bloomfield

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

A quarter-century after its release, The Mummy is finding renewed love among audiences, no doubt due to star Brendan Fraser who has been enjoying a own career renaissance following his Oscar-nominated turn in The Whale that has already won the actor more than two dozen awards.

Directed and written by Stephen Sommers, The Mummy updated Karl Freund’s 1932 thriller of the same name, released among a wave of Universal’s now-iconic horror films including Dracula and Frankenstein. Sommers’ adaptation retained the supernatural elements while playing down the horror in favor of a more lighthearted adventure story inspired by Errol Flynn’s screen swashbucklers and the classic serials that influenced the character of Indiana Jones, to whom Fraser’s roguish Rick O’Connell has been likened.

The story begins in 1923, while Rick is serving as a captain in the French Foreign Legion. A battle against the Medjai led by Ardeth Bey (Oded Fehr) reveals to Rick the location of Hamunaptra, the city of the dead. Three years later, Rick is condemned to death in a Cairo prison when he receives a visit from the charming yet clumsy librarian Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) and her cheeky brother Jonathan (John Hannah), a thief who had once stolen from Rick a puzzling trinket that includes a 3,000-year-old map leading to Hamunaptra with its buried treasure… and juicy mummies.

Evelyn: You were actually at Hamunaptra?
Rick: Yeah, I was there.
Evelyn: You swear?
Rick: Every damn day.

After securing Rick’s release, the Carnahan siblings make a deal with the former Legionnaire to guide them to the cursed city, in the interest of Evie’s scholarly pursuits and Jonathan’s hunt for riches, though what they unearth could threaten the entire world.

What’d He Wear?

In contrast to his understandably unkempt appearance in prison, Rick meets Evelyn and Jonathan at the port of Giza wearing a clean jacket, styled with a contextually appropriate safari influence that hints at the adventure to follow. I’ve read auction descriptions that alternately refer to the lightweight tan cloth as linen or cotton; it may be a blend of each, but the appearance with its subtle slubs and proneness to wrinkling suggests linen as the predominant fabric.

Rick joins Jonathan and Evy at the dock just in time to catch her insulting him.

The jacket has a crowded design, with four buttons on the single-breasted front and a total of five outer patch pockets, all with button-down flaps: each side has a large pocket over the hip, with a smaller rounded-bottom pocket just above it that’s positioned an inch or two closer to the center of the jacket. There is an additional patch pocket over the left breast.

Each shoulder is reinforced with a matching fabric squared patch, and a horizontal yoke extends across the upper back from shoulder to shoulder. Below the yoke, five evenly spaced pleats run down the length of the back, briefly collected under the half-belt around the back of the waist before flaring out again toward the bottom of the ventless back. Each sleeve has three vestigial buttons at the cuff.

At the time of the mid-1920s setting, sport jackets were still primarily reserved for specific activities, such as leather-patched shooting jackets for hunting or hacking jackets with long single vents for horseback riding. They were often made of heavy woolen tweed for sturdier construction during these outdoor pursuits, but Rick’s jacket—sourced from the venerated London costume house Angels & Bermans—illustrates a variation for warmer weather that would have served him comfortably while navigating the Sahara… if only he hadn’t had to abandon it to be presumably destroyed aboard the burning ship.

Rick finds Jonathan playing poker with a group of cocky Americans who wish to bet they’ll make it to Hamunaptra first.

Rick’s off-white cotton twill shirt echoes the adventure-oriented detailing worn by his spiritual predecessor, Indiana Jones. Also from the Angels & Bermans costume house, the ivory shirt has military-style shoulder straps (epaulets) with a pointed end that buttons to the shoulders against the neck and two box-pleated chest pockets that each close through a single button on a pointed flap. The shirt has a point collar and long sleeves that close with button cuffs, though Rick almost always wears them undone and rolled up to his elbows.

An interesting period-accurate detail of the shirt is that the five-button front placket doesn’t extend all the way to the hem, though it does go down as far as Brendan Fraser’s abdomen, where it ends with a point. While it may look like a now-conventional button-up shirt and these had existed by the 1920s, “popover shirts” like this were also still en vogue before full button-up shirts became the menswear standard.

A menagerie of “British tan” brown leather crosses over and around Rick’s torso, adding to the utilitarian ruggedness of his kit. The simplest of these is a narrow Sam Browne belt, which he uniquely wears straight up the front on the left side of his chest, then crossed down and hooked to his belt in the center of his back. Rick’s Sam Browne belt has a brass-finished single-prong buckle (like a traditional waist belt) and is connected via D-rings on each end to the large leather loops that hook over his belt in the front and back, worn under his shirt’s left epaulet.

The Sam Browne belt was inspired by how a one-armed British Army general of the same name modified his uniform with an additional belt to more steadily hold his scabbard in place. As Rick doesn’t carry a sword, I’m not sure why this piece was added—and so curiously worn—to his wardrobe, especially as Sam Browne belts earned the disparaging (but perhaps deserved) nickname of “suicide belts” for their potentially fatal liability to their wearers.

Rick’s hefty brown leather double shoulder rig serves a much clearer purpose, with two open-top holsters for his Chamelot-Delvigne service revolvers that allow him to quickly perform his frequent double cross-draw that brings both into firing position. Each side of the holster consists of a wide leather harness that goes around the shoulder, with six double sets of unfinished eyelets that lace the top section over the bottom in a manner that can be adjusted for different fits. The holsters connect via two parallel straps running across his upper back, each with two brass rivets and a snap closure. He secures the rig in place by pulling his waist-belt through the large loop behind each holster, tying the rawhide laces that hang down on each side for additional support.

Rick wears his hefty but doubtlessly well-traveled double shoulder holster over his curious Sam Browne belt.

Rick wears khaki moleskin twill flat-front trousers with an era-correct rise to Brendan Fraser’s waist and a close but comfortable fit through the hips and thighs, similar to some contemporary riding breeches (though obviously not the jodphurs with dramatically flared thighs.) Photos of the auctioned screen-worn trousers illustrate that these are full ankle-length trousers with five grommets at the back of each plain-hemmed bottom, presumably to be laced tightly to keep the legs in place when he slips his boots over them.

The trousers have slanted front pockets where he keeps spare ammunition for his revolvers as well as a button-through back right pocket with a jetted entry just below the belt. Though nearly ubiquitous today, belt loops on trousers were still a relative rarity in the 1920s, still mostly relegated to non-formal work trousers like Rick’s breeches. He wears a wide belt made from the same shade of “British tan” brown leather as his holster, with a dulled brass single-prong buckle and matching brass keeper.

Consistent with some of his military-informed gear, Rick knee-high field boots echo a contemporary design that was popular among British Army officers during World War I through the early interwar period depicted in The Mummy. Appropriately, Rick’s boots are the shade of light brown leather often called “British tan”.

This boot pattern is characterized by a straight toe-cap and derby-style lacing that extends up to mid-calf, under the smooth shafts that rise to just below the knees. Most period examples I’ve seen of actual boots from the era have between six and nine pairs of lace eyelets, though Rick’s boots have a staggering 13 sets of eyelets. (See for yourself at Blighty Militaria, Blighty Militaria (yes same site, but different boots), IWM, and 1st Dibs.

Rick uses his own boot to jam Jonathan’s foot down on the accelerator in their commandeered Humber 16/50 touring car.

Rick wears a British tan leather shooting cuff that secures around his right wrist with a strap through a gold-toned single-prong buckle on each end, with the straps and buckles worn on the inside of his forearm.

When Rick traverses farther into inland Egypt across the Sahara desert, he knots a large navy-blue muslin scarf that serves both as a sweat-catcher as well as a makeshift turban while on camelback. Muslin is a thin, plain-woven cotton named for Mosul, Iraq, where it had was first manufactured and was recorded by Marco Polo as early as the late 13th century.

Rick salutes the end of an ally whose life ended in aerial action just as he hoped it would.

Much like Indiana Jones with his established gear and garb that appeared across each of his movies, Rick would wear a version of the same costume in the 2001 sequel The Mummy Returns, though with subtle differences like heavier-duty suspenders with cartridge loops and a double-prong belt. John Bloomfield was the costume designer for both movies.

A complete outfit of Fraser’s screen-worn clothing from both The Mummy and The Mummy Returns has been auctioned several times since the latter film’s completion, including once in 2009 (per this LotSearch listing) and again in 2017 (per PropStore). Note that the 2009 auction description describes both the jacket and shirt as linen while the 2017 description describes both as cotton. The auctioned suspenders and belt are both also from The Mummy Returns.

The Guns

Rick developed his skill with firearms while serving with the French Foreign Legion, as we watch him shouldering a Lebel 1886 bolt-action rifle in battle before abandoning it for the—not one, not two, but—four handguns in his belt, first a brace of the appropriately French MAS 1873 revolvers before tossing them aside for a pair of appropriately American M1911 semi-automatic pistols. Three years later, Rick would again choose both models as his sidearms, befitting his familiarity with them in combat.

“Did I miss something? Are we going into battle?” questions Evelyn after Rick rolls out his weapons, including a new pair of Mle. 1873 revolvers, another M1911, a Winchester Model 1897 pump-action shotgun, and plenty of ammunition for them all. “Lady, there’s something out there,” he responds while loading them. “Something underneath that sand.”

Chamelot-Delvigne Modèle 1873

The start of The Mummy establishes Rick’s service with the French Foreign Legion, which has traditionally equipped its troops with the same weaponry as the French Army. Rick’s preferred sidearms—both during his service and after—are a pair of Chamelot-Delvigne Modèle 1873 revolvers. These would have been about three decades out of date for the French Army by the time of Rick’s 1923 battle at Hamunaptra as front-line troops had long adopted the Mle. 1892 as a standard service revolver, though it’s not unrealistic to see the Modèle 1873 in action as they were still in considerable use during World War I and even issued to reserve units as late as 1940, according to IMFDB.

When Rick needs to draw a weapon, he rarely pulls just one, instead preferring to fire both his Chamelot-Delvigne revolvers akimbo when faced with a threat.

The 1870s was a pioneering era for revolvers, as metallic cartridges and double-action operations were leaving the era of single-action percussion revolvers behind.

Designed by Belgian gunsmith Timothée Chalamet J. Chamelot and French soldier-turned-inventor Henri-Gustave Delvigne to meet a need for updated weaponry during the early years of the French Third Republic, the Modèle 1873 became the first double-action revolver used by the French Army when it was issued to non-commissioned officers in 1873, followed by the generally similar Modèle 1874 introduced for commissioned officers that differed only with its blued finish and fluted cylinder as opposed to the Modèle 1873’s bare silver-toned finish and round cylinder. With 4½-inch barrels, the Modèle 1873 were around 9½ inches long overall and weighed just over two pounds unloaded.

“Although a robust and heavy gun, the Chamelot-Delvigne revolver fired a short, low-velocity cartridge of mediocre performance,” writes Martin J. Dougherty in Small Arms Visual Encyclopedia. Indeed, both models fired a proprietary 11x17mmR rimmed black powder cartridge that has been likened to .32 ACP as far as corresponding power. The six-round cylinder is loaded through a rear-pulling loading gate on the right side of the frame, though the 17.8mm-long case reportedly made the rounds difficult to load.

Though the 11mm French Ordnance revolver round may have its detractors, Rick is arguably the best-armed of his group, compared to Jonathan’s small double-barreled derringer and his old enemy Gad Hassan (Omid Djalili) with his own six-shooter.

In reference to their production at the state-owned Manufacture d’armes de Saint-Étienne (MAS), this model has also been referred to as the MAS 1873 revolver. Nearly 340,000 were produced between 1873 and 1887, when production ended.

Colt M1911

While Rick may have grown accustomed to the French-made Chamelot-Delvigne while serving in the French Foreign Legion, our all-American hero also packs a classic .45-caliber Colt M1911 pistol, carried in the front of his waistband rather than in a proper holster.

John Browning had designed several semi-automatic pistols for U.S. government testing to replace its aging stocks of revolvers before delivering the single-action Colt pistol that would be formally adopted for Army service as the “Model of 1911”, loaded with box magazines carrying up to seven rounds of powerful .45 ACP ammunition.

Some fine trigger discipline from Brendan Fraser, who keeps his finger off the trigger while loading his M1911 aboard the Nile ship.

With their extended triggers and flat mainspring housing, the 1911-style pistols that Rick fires during the French Foreign Legion combat scenes are clearly the period-correct M1911 model rather than the M1911A1 that was introduced later in 1926 and would have been incorrect for a battle set three years earlier and arguably difficult for Rick to obtain in the year it was introduced.

Note the longer trigger and flat back mainspring housing characteristic of the original M1911, which indeed would have been the only model available in 1923.

In The Mummy Returns, set seven years later in 1933, Rick adopts his as his preferred sidearm, now carrying two M1911A1 pistols in his shoulder rig with nary a French revolver to be seen.

Winchester Model 1897

The screenplay describes Rick pulling an “elephant gun” out of his gunny sack and using it during sustained combat against Imhotep, despite Ardeth Bey’s warning that mortal weapons cannot kill him. This weapon is represented on screen in the form of the venerable Winchester Model 1897 pump-action shotgun, characterized by its external hammer that was maintained from the prior Model 1893 iteration.

Over its original 60-year production timeline, the Model 1897 was available in a variety of features, frames, and barrel lengths based on its intended usage, such as the 12-gauge Trench model with a heat shield, bayonet lug, and sling swivels that saw considerable military usage through the 20th century to the extent that the Germans actually protested their use during World War I.

Rick’s Model ’97 is the 12-gauge Riot model, configured with a 20-inch barrel like the Trench model but lacking its heat shield and bayonet lug.

Rick’s Model ’97 is likely one of the limited run of Riot models that have integrated sling swivels, as he wisely keeps his shotgun equipped with a sling.

Lewis Gun

While not part of his arsenal, Rick briefly wields an aircraft-mounted Lewis gun when he, Jonathan, and Ardeth Bey (Oded Fehr) hitch a high-flying ride with the bloviating Royal Air Corsp Captain Winston Havelock (Bernard Fox) and come face-to-well, face with Imhotep’s sandstorm.

Though this light machine gun was designed by U.S. Army Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis in 1911, conflicts within the Ordnance Department led to Colonel Lewis’ eventual retirement and relocation to Europe, where he finally had the opportunity to produce his gun in small numbers in Belgium before the English company Birmingham Small Arms (BSA) purchased a license to manufacture Lewis guns in England ahead of a hotly anticipated war.

After hostilities commenced in 1914, Lewis’ agreement with the British proved to be mutually beneficial as he quickly grew wealthy from the royalties while the Commonwealth was well-positioned to authorize an effective gas-operated machine gun that fired .303 British rifle rounds at a rate of 500-600 rounds per minute—increased to 800 per minute for the aircraft-mounted models that benefited from a recoil enhancer.

Ardeth Bey and Rick prepare to take flight in Captain Havelock’s plane, with the unfortunate Jonathan strapped to the opposing wing with considerably less enthusiasm than Ardeth Bey.

After the plane crashes into the quicksand, Ardeth dismounts the Lewis gun and carries it himself.

What to Imbibe

Jonathan finds a bottle of The Glenlivet 12-Year-Old single malt Scotch whisky in the late Gad Hassan’s shoulder bag. “Well, he may have been a stinky fella, but he had good taste,” Jonathan comments before taking a swig from the bottle’s broken neck. Jonathan keeps the bottle in hand and Rick’s M1911 in the other while battling the Medjai who swarm them at Hamunaptra, though the combat distracts a tipsy Jonathan from Rick’s nemesis Beni Gabor (Kevin J. O’Connor) sneaking over to take a pull for himself.

Jonathan passes out with the bottle cradled in his arms, though that doesn’t stop Rick and Evie from enjoying some Glenlivet for themselves… or at least Evie, who is inspired by the booze to pronounce her pride in her profession:

I… am a librarian!

“Unlike my brother, sir, I know when to say no.”

Later, Rick joins Jonathan at a Cairo bar for shots of whiskey, though the bottle’s yellow label appears to be a fictional prop creation, with a red logo reading something like “BRODHILL”.

How to Get the Look

Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell in The Mummy (1999)

Rick O’Connell dresses for an adventure in the Sahara with his rugged but light-wearing layers. The guts of his wardrobe—specifically the khakis and two-pocket martial shirt—may recall Indiana Jones, but Rick takes the look in a different direction with his many additions of British tan leather from his hefty double shoulder holster rig to his knee-high officer’s boots.

• Tan linen safari-influenced single-breasted 4-button sport jacket with notch lapels, five patch pockets (with button-down flaps), 3-button cuffs, and half-belted ventless back
• Ivory cotton twill popover shirt with point collar, shoulder straps/epaulettes, long 5-button front placket, two box-pleated chest pockets (with button-down flaps), and button cuffs
• Khaki moleskin twill flat front trousers with tall belt loops, slanted front pockets, button-through back-right pocket, and 5-grommet plain-hemmed bottoms
• British tan leather Sam Browne belt with brass single-prong buckle
• British tan leather belt with brass single-prong buckle and keeper
• British tan leather knee-high British Army officer’s cap-toe field boots with 13-eyelet derby-style lacing
• Navy-blue muslin scarf
• British tan leather shooting cuff with two buckled straps, right wrist
• British tan leather open-top double shoulder holster rig, for two service revolvers

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie. Death is only the beginning… and by that I mean there’s two more sequels after the villain “dies” at the end of this one.

The Quote

I only gamble with my life, never my money.

The post Brendan Fraser in The Mummy appeared first on BAMF Style.

Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

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Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum, hedonistic patriarch

New York City, Fall to winter 2001

Film: The Royal Tenenbaums
Release Date: December 14, 2001
Director: Wes Anderson
Costume Designer: Karen Patch

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Happy 93rd birthday to Gene Hackman, the versatile two-time Oscar-winning actor born January 30, 1930 in San Bernardino. Hackman’s prolific career began during the “New Hollywood” era with excellent performances in films like Bonnie & Clyde, The French Connection, and The Conversation, with many more hits in the decades to follow. Before he retired from acting in 2004, Hackman delivered one of his most memorable performances as the eponymous estranged patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums.

I’ve always been considered an asshole for about as long as I can remember. That’s just my style.

The Royal Tenenbaums is Wes Anderson’s third movie and became one of the filmmaker’s defining works, introducing more audiences to his unique signature style. Inspired by the works of Louis Malle and Orson Welles’ sprawling family chronicle The Magnificent Ambersons, the movie centers around the dysfunctional Tenenbaum family, consisting of the separated parents Royal (Gene Hackman) and Etheline (Anjelica Huston), their three children who had all been promising young prodigies in the spirit of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and various acquaintances that grew attached to the household over the years.

Evicted from his suite at the Lindbergh Palace hotel, Royal learns that Etheline may be engaged to marry her business manager, Henry Sherman (Danny Glover). With the help of his trusty valet Pagoda (Kumar Pallana), the remorseful Royal conspires to return to his family’s good graces and—22 years after walking out on them—shows up on the doorstep, claiming to have “a pretty bad case of cancer” and wishing to make up for more than two decades of lost time.

What’d He Wear?

Karen Patch received the Costume Designers Guild Award for Excellence in Contemporary Film in 2001 for her work on The Royal Tenenbaums, crafting a unique wardrobe-informed identity for each member of the Tenenbaum household, from the matching tracksuits that the obsessive Chas (Ben Stiller) dresses his family in to the famous furs that Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) has worn since childhood.

Royal dresses in a colorful quasi-peacock style that recalls a 1970s sensibility from the era he likely considered his own glory days before he abandoned his children (and was subsequently sued by one of them!)

The Suit

“Royal rides down in the elevator at the Lindbergh Palace. He is dressed in a gray double-breasted Savile Row pinstripe suit, a dark pink shirt, a red-and-pink-striped tie, and Aristotle Onassis-style wrap-around sunglasses,” Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson described in their screenplay.

Aside from flashbacks and his issued uniform while briefly working as the Lindbergh Palace’s elevator attendant, Royal anchors all of his style around a single suit, made from a light stone-gray chalkstripe woolen flannel.

Though it is uniquely tailored in a ’70s-influenced style, the suit’s relatively neutral color palette allows him to effectively wear it with a rotation of colorful shirts and striped ties like this pink shirt and coordinated tie that costume designer Karen Patch translated from the screenplay.

Royal’s double-breasted jacket represents many trends of early ’70s menswear, such as the Regency-style peak lapels with long, straight gorges and a collar almost as long as the lower half of the lapels, similar to an ulster collar not commonly found on suit jackets. The six marbled gray flat plastic buttons are arranged like a naval uniform in two neat columns of three buttons each (6×3), with all three buttons on the right able to be buttoned though Royal leaves the lowest undone.

The ventless jacket has a somewhat flared skirt, which looks even more dandified with the jacket’s shorter length that doesn’t fully cover Hackman’s backside as a more traditionally tailored suit jacket should. The shoulders are straight and padded through to the roped sleeveheads, and the sleeves are finished with three buttons on each cuff. The jacket has a welted breast pocket and flapped hip pockets positioned just above the lowest row of buttons.

Royal receives some unwelcome news.

Other than the medium rise that was consistent with falling waistlines on ’70s menswear, Royal’s flat-front suit trousers are otherwise conventional with their straight side pockets, button-through jetted back pockets, and plain-hemmed bottoms. He holds them up with a black leather belt that closes through a gunmetal-toned single-prong buckle.

Like any thoughtful assailant, Pagoda treats Royal’s knife wound… where Pagoda had just stabbed him, for at least the second time in their acquaintanceship.

Royal wears black leather cap-toe derby shoes and black dress socks.

Royal allows his grandsons to develop the same cherished childhood memories as he provided for his own son.

Shirts and Ties

The first of Royal’s shirt-and-striped tie combinations is primarily pink. His pink shirt has a semi-spread collar and double (French) cuffs that he fastens with a set of round red cuff links. His magenta silk tie is patterned with a series of balanced “downhill”-direction bar stripes in a shade of pink similar to his shirt.

As Royal works on reintegrating himself with his family, his shirts and ties rarely show as much coordination, instead bringing as color as possible to his outfits without too much clash. On a day that begins at the cemetery and continues with Royal introducing his grandsons to the respective joys of gambling, go-karts, garbage-truck rides, and shoplifting, he wears a light sage-green shirt—similarly styled with semi-spread collar and French cuffs, though now with gold cuff links—and a bar-striped tie in alternating lilac and lavender “uphill”-direction stripes, with the lighter lilac stripes each bisected by a narrow pink stripe.

In what I believe is a brief continuity error, a scene that begins with Royal arguing with Chas in the family’s game closet and ends with his reuniting with his taxidermied javelina head, Royal’s fancy-striped tie is swapped out for a one with a balanced “downhill” pattern alternating between lavender and sage-green bar stripes that coordinates with his shirt in the same way his first pink shirt-and-tie combination did.

“There you are.”

During Etheline and Henry’s wedding and his ultimately fatal garbage truck ride with Chas, Royal wears a sky-blue shirt and a silk tie with coral and gold “downhill”-directional bar stripes, each separated by a narrow white bordering stripe.

Chas grasps Royal’s hand before he dies tragically while rescuing his family from the wreck of a destroyed sinking battleship. Note Royal’s suit jacket laid beside him.

Everything Else

Royal wears tortoise-framed sunglasses with a narrow profile despite their thick frames and wide arms, detailed with four silver pins on each temple.

As Royal is confronted by his family, note the watercolor on the wall behind him that shows him dressed almost identically as when he returned to them with his pink shirt and coordinated striped tie.

Royal’s black-framed Dior sunglasses are shaped similarly to his clear-lensed eyeglasses, albeit with more squared corners. (You can also see the screen-worn sunglasses at Your Props, with “PARIS MOSCOU 95x 56-19 130” visible etched along the silver-finished inside of the left arm.)

In their respective sunglasses and camel-colored topcoats, Royal reunited with Pagoda to consider his next moves.

I love Royal’s elegant town-and-country overcoat, which blends the city sensibilities of a classic Chesterfield coat with an agrestic tweed body. As defined by Sir Hardy Amies in ABC of Men’s Fashion, published in 1964, the traditional Chesterfield “was single-breasted, close-fitting and shaped at the waist, velvet-collared and very long, often down to the ankles.”

Royal’s knee-length coat is constructed of brown-and-tan herringbone woolen tweed, the notch lapels defined by an elegantly contrasting collar in softly brushed camelhair. The coat has a long single vent, welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, and set-in sleeves finished with four-button cuffs. The three-button front is covered by a fly.

Royal was always closer to his son Richie than any of the rest of his children, and the two look united in their khaki-hued earth tones while Chas and his family present a dramatic contrast in blazing red tracksuits (which, despite being Adidas-branded, were specifically designed and built for the production by costume designer Karen Patch’s team.)

The text of the fictional novel chronicling the Tenenbaum family describes Royal’s “wool cap” at the start of the fifth chapter, and indeed he does wear a handsome flat cap made of dark brown herringbone Donegal tweed, characterized by the imperfect flecks of colored thread woven throughout the fabric.

Despite wearing the same hat, coat, and even suit throughout The Royal Tenenbaums, Royal cycles through two different pairs of three-point gloves, first wearing a pair of pebbled russet leather before switching to a smooth leather lined pair as the season shifts into winter.

What to Imbibe

Due to the fictional stomach cancer that has Royal convalescing on the top floor, he must steal away to the games closet to indulge in a Martini with Pagoda. While it’s never stated whether Royal prefers gin or vodka, he garnishes his martini with a single olive dropped into his cocktail glass.

How to Get the Look

Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Royal Tenenbaum illustrates the versatility of a neutrally toned suit—even one so uniquely styled as this—that can be enhanced with a rotation of pastel shirts and striped ties.

• Light stone-gray chalkstripe woolen flannel ’70s-cut suit:
  • Double-breasted 6×3-button jacket with straight-gorge peak lapels, welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, 3-button cuffs, and ventless back
  • Flat-front trousers with belt loops, straight/on-seam side pockets, button-through jetted back pockets, and plain-hemmed bottoms
• Pastel pink, green, or blue solid shirt with semi-spread collar and double/French cuffs
• Paslte-striped silk tie
• Black leather belt with gunmetal single-prong buckle
• Black leather cap-toe derby shoes
• Black dress socks
• Dark brown herringbone Donegal tweed flat cap
• Brown-and-tan herringbone tweed knee-length Chesterfield coat with notch lapels (with camelhair collar), covered three-button front fly, welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, 4-button cuffs, and long single vent
• Russet-leather or black leather three-point gloves
• Tortoise-framed eyeglasses
• Black-framed sunglasses

Want to see my similar suit?

Longtime BAMF Style readers may recall that I spent my high school years making amateur (very amateur!) movies that aspired to chronicle sordid tales of crime and corruption, all filmed within the suburban confines of my parents' comfortably finished suburban basement.

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One of these elaborately soundtracked-and-costumed adventures was a Blow-meets-Goodfellas ripoff called Red Light District, in which I played a sleazy pimp in early 1970s L.A. whose wardrobe included a gray double-breasted suit with 6x3-button front and unique lapels not unlike Gene Hackman's suit in The Royal Tenenbaums, albeit detailed with a black pinstripe rather than Royal's ivory chalkstripe.

Yours truly, wearing the aforementioned gray double-breasted vintage suit over a tight black turtleneck and chain, acting out two poorly lit scenes with my very patient high school friends Brad and Julia.

The suit itself is likely buried among the mass of costumes somewhere in my parents' attic, but I'll try to fish it out the next time I'm visiting my folks to add photos to this post and/or list that vintage bad boy on my Poshmark!

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie, then grab a couple of burgers and hit the cemetery.

The Quote

I’m very sorry for your loss, your mother was a terribly attractive woman.

The post Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum appeared first on BAMF Style.

Jonathan Majors as ENS Jesse Brown in Devotion (2022)

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Jonathan Majors as ENS Jesse L. Brown, groundbreaking U.S. Naval Aviator

From Quonset Point, Rhode Island to the Korean coast, Spring to Fall 1950

Film: Devotion
Release Date: November 23, 2022
Director: J.D. Dillard
Costume Designer: Deirdra Elizabeth Govan

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

February is Black History Month, a fitting occasion to highlight the life and career of trailblazers like Jesse Brown, the first African-American aviator to complete the U.S. Navy flight training program.

Jesse LeRoy Brown was born on October 13, 1926, perhaps coincidentally sharing a “birthday” with the U.S. Navy itself as this was exactly 151 years to the day after the Continental Navy was founded in 1775. Two years after he enlisted in the Navy, Brown received his pilot wings in October 1948 and was commissioned as an ensign (OF-1) six months later. Ensigns Brown stationed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Leyte when it was ordered to Korea at the start of the war in the summer of 1950, ultimately flying 20 combat missions in an F4U-4 Corsair, a propeller-driven fighter whose fatalist nicknames of the “Ensign Eliminator” and “Widowmaker” never deterred the courageous aviator.

On December 4, 1950, ENS Brown took off from the Leyte with a six-aircraft group tasked with supporting USMC ground forces fighting the Chinese during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. Damaged by enemy ground fire, Brown’s Corsair began trailing fuel until it crashed into a valley along the borders of the Chagang and South Hamgyong provinces in North Korea. When Brown’s wingman, Lieutenant Junior Grade Tom Hudner, noted that Brown was unable to escape his downed aircraft, Hudner intentionally crash-landed his own Corsair and attempted to free his friend and fellow flier from the wreck. His leg pinned into the wreckage and increasingly losing consciousness, 24-year-old Brown was unable to be extracted from the plane and died in the wreckage after giving Hudner a message for his wife: “Tell Daisy I love her.”

Jesse L. Brown was posthumously awarded the Air Medal, Purple Heart, and Distinguished Flying Cross, becoming the first African-American to receive the latter distinction, and Hudner received a Medal of Honor for his valiant attempt to save Brown.

Jesse Brown (1926-1950), as presented in the end credits of the 2022 war biopic Devotion.

Jesse Brown’s naval career and his friendship with Tom Hudner were recently depicted in the 2022 film Devotion, directed by J.D. Dillard who has explained his connection to the material as he was a self-described “Navy brat” whose father was a Navy flight officer and the second African-American chosen to fly with the elite Blue Angels.

To the best of my knowledge (and what I learned from the website History vs. Hollywood), Devotion presents a generally accurate depiction of the final year in Brown’s life, beginning in March 1950 at the Quonset Naval Air Station in Rhode Island, where LTJG Hudner (Glen Powell) first meets ENS Brown (Jonathan Majors) upon being newly stationed to the VF-32 squadron, led by LCDR Dick Cevoli (Thomas Sadoski), who amps the fliers up by concluding a briefing with:

There is not a pilot on this planet who can wipe the ass of a United States Naval Aviator, and I truly believe that.

Though Brown recalls the racism he had faced during his training, his fellow aviators treat him with the respect he deserves, particularly Hudner, assigned as his wingman. The squadron is placed on high alert after a downed Navy plane in the Baltic suggests that the Cold War is heating up, though the group still gets in some shore time in Cannes where Brown surprises his fellow aviators by befriending no less than Elizabeth Taylor (Serinda Swan), and, yes… this really happened!

“The Reds are about to strike, we’re partyin’ in France,” observes an amused Hudner, though the following morning’s report of North Korea crossing the 38th Parallel and invading Seoul prompts the “Fighting Thirty-Two” to set sail for Korea.

What’d He Wear?

Devotion rotates ENS Brown through U.S. Navy uniforms like dress whites, service khakis, and aviation greens, though he and the rest of the Fighting Thirty-Two spend most of the film’s run-time dressed in their flight suits, often layered under fur-collared leather flight jackets.

Brown’s clothing also differentiates him from his fellow aviators, as he continues wearing his green flight-suit while serving in Korea while most of his colleagues opt for the khaki flight-suit that he had also worn for the earlier scenes set at Quonset NAS.

G-1 Flight Jacket

The aviators wears the iconic fur-collared, zip-up leather flight jackets that had first entered U.S. Navy service in the late 1930s as the M-422 and which underwent several rounds of wartime modifications until the 55-J-14 specifications was standardized as the G-1 in 1947, the year before Jesse Brown received his pilot’s wings.

Leather had been the favored fabric for flight jackets since the early days of aviation, though advances in garment-making by mid-century resulted in the integration of nylon into new jackets like the B-10, B-15, and MA-1 for a fabric that may have been lighter and more weather-resistant but arguably lacked the dashing romance of their leather forebears. Luckily, even three quarters of a century after its introduction, the G-1 remains in service among authorized fliers in the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps, its popularity and status solidified after Tom Cruise wore a much-patched G-1 in Top Gun.

Made from durable leathers like goatskin that has been tanned to a dark brown shade, the original G-1 jacket is characterized by a real mouton fur collar, shoulder straps (epaulets), patch-style pockets with single-button flaps, and dark ribbed-knit wool cuffs and waist hem. The bi-swing back allows for a greater range of arm movement, while the half-belted back pulls in the waist to prevent excess fabric that would be discomfortable while crammed in the cockpit of a Corsair.

“I gave him his bomber jacket after we aged it, dyed it, and distressed it,” costume designer Deirdra Elizabeth Govan told USA Today about her process working with Jonathan Majors. “For a period of time, he was just wearing it to grasp and embody the character.”

In Devotion, ENS Brown’s G-1 has a slightly lighter mouton fur collar than his fellow fliers.  Each man wears the large round dark-blue VF-32 insignia patch over their right breast, comprised of a pale-blue shield with a yellow bar crossing diagonally from right-down-to-left, overlaid with a yellow, sword-wielding lion facing the left atop a smaller dark blue shield with a yellow fouled anchor embroidered inside it. Pale-blue scrolls flank the shield, with the top scroll embroidered with the motto “Deus et patria” (“God and country”) and the bottom scroll embroidered “Fighting 32” for obvious reasons. On the opposing left breast, each aviator wears the standard brown leather patch with their stamped gold rings, name and rank; on Brown’s jacket, this reads “J.L. BROWN” on the top row and “ENS USN” on the bottom.

Shop the jacket:

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• Buzz Rickson's Type G-1 Spec 55J-14 A.Pritzker Brown (Clutch Cafe, $2,100)
• Cockpit USA Avenger G-1 Bomber Jacket Z21P007 (Cockpit USA, $640)
• Cockpit USA U.S. Navy Lambskin G-1 Flight Jacket Z201035M (Cockpit USA, $800)

Prices and availability current as of Jan. 30, 2023.

Flight Suits

While stationed at Quonset, Brown matches his fellow aviators in their khaki cotton flight suits, designated “Suit, Flying, Summer” to MIL-S-5390B specifications. These one-piece coveralls have a long zipper that runs up from crotch to collar, and adjustable three-button tabs on each side of the waistband cinch the fit as needed. Each side of the chest has a mitred-corner patch pocket with a rectangular button-down flap, and similar pockets are positioned on the front of each calf just above the plain-hemmed bottoms. The set-in sleeves have a single-button closure, and the left sleeve has a vertical zip-entry utility pocket over the bicep with four inset pen-pocket slots.

A brown leather utility clip is sewn onto each left thigh, and the back echoes the G-1 flight jacket with bi-swing pleats behind each shoulder.

The khaki-clad aviators line up at Quonset NAS.

After VF-32 is deployed to the Mediterranean in May 1950 aboard USS Leyte, Brown switches out of the khaki into an olive-green nylon flight suit that he would wear through the rest of the movie, including during aerial combat in Korea.

Designated “Suits, Flying, Nylon, Lightweight”, these green nylon flight suits are styled similarly to the khaki cotton ones with the crotch-to-collar zipper, three-button adjuster tabs on the waist, and pairs of pockets over the chest and calves, though the green flight suit lacks the thigh-positioned utility clip and the sleeve pocket is a simpler design consisting of only a trio of pen slots.

I haven’t been able to find as much other information about these green nylon coveralls, aside from their use by USN and USMC aviators during the 1950s and that they were made under contract by companies like Alda Mills (contract no. A(S)3867) and Willis & Geiger (contract no. A(S)3926), as evident by the historical examples of this flight suit you can find at Bells Aviation, eBay, and WorthPoint. By the time of the Vietnam War, these coveralls would evolve into the currently authorized CWU-27/P flight suit made from flame-resistant Nomex.

Under his flight suits, Brown wears a plain white cotton crew-neck T-shirt as an undershirt.

Footwear and Headgear

Brown regularly wears “boondockers”, the tan roughout leather ankle boots adopted by the Navy in 1943, inspired by the field shoes introduced by the Marine Corps two years earlier. Officially designated the N-1 deck shoes (specification 72-S-2), these were generally prescribed for utility wear overseas, regardless of climate. (You can read more about these boots at USWW2Uniforms.com.)

Boondocker uppers are chrome-tanned cowhide, and the soles are a cording-infused reclaimed rubber. The derby-style lacing ranges between seven and nine sets of eyelets—Brown’s boondockers have seven lace eyelets.

Brown’s rubber-soled boondockers allow him to softly step out of the stall after hiding until the rest of his squadron has left the bathroom prior to their carrier-landing tests in the Mediterranean.

Brown wears a khaki cotton twill utility cap evolved from the WWII-era N-3, with a plain, six-paneled soft crown devoid of pleats, grommets, or any other adornment, unlike the contemporary MIL-C-3000B.

When trying to free Brown from the wreckage of his downed Corsair, Hudner keeps him warm by giving him the navy ribbed-knit wool watch cap that they had previously joked about.

Flight Gear

While in flight, Brown wears a white fiberglass Type H-1 flying helmet, which became the Navy’s first issued hard helmet when it was standardized in 1948. Edged in black rubber, these round helmets were designed to accommodate the issued Polaroid B-8 flying goggles, which consisted of a one-piece polarized plastic lens and were the first to use rubber frames instead of metal. Earphones were built into the helmet’s styrofoam rubber lining, which was padded in chamois leather for the aviator’s comfort, and an M-6A/UR microphone was mounted for use under 10,000 feet. Five snaps on each side of the front opening allowed for the attachment of an A-13A or A-14 oxygen mask as well as a white cloth chin strap. You can read more about early Navy flying helmets at Andrea Salimbeti’s blog U.S. Military Aviation.

Brown also wears the standard summer-weight brown leather B-3A flying gloves with extended semi-gauntlets designed to cover the wrists, originally adopted by the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1943 and designated “MIL-C-9087A”. The gloves were unlined and made from soft leather like capeskin and deerskin that allowed aviators full dexterity while at the controls, but these offered only limited protection and would be replaced in 1967 by sturdier gloves made from flame-resistant Nomex.

The aviators’ dashing white silk scarves were introduced to avoid chafing against their neck, with white specifically chosen to quickly show where oil had been wiped off the plane, according to Jalyn Eaton at Linea Germania.

Brown and his fellow aviators wear the orange Mk 2 life preservers nicknamed the “Mae West” in reference to its ability to transform a wearer into resembling the famously voluptuous entertainer. In use from World War II through the Vietnam War, these vests were made from a bright-colored rubberized nylon that could be easily spotted in emergency situations.

The design evolved over the course of the 20th century, with Brown’s Korean War pattern vest characterized by a reinforced blackened steel double-snap closure over the chest, flanked on each side by a narrow equipment pocket and a lower CO₂ canister slot on each side below it. Other attachments include a strobe light strapped to the upper right chest, a black packet that could release a shark chaser (an ultimately ineffective blend copper acetate and nigrosine dye intended to repel sharks), and an orange packet containing a dye marker (which could be released to brightly color the sea around a downed pilot.) A black rubber tube on the left side of the chest could be used to manually inflate the vest to its full buoyancy.

Dressed for action in his heroic white silk scarf, flight jacket, shoulder holster, and the Mae West vest, Brown prepares for what will be his final mission.

Personal Effects

Brown cycles through two watches over the course of Devotion, beginning with a mil-spec pilot’s watch on a steel bracelet. With its 38mm steel case and matte steel dial with luminous radium Arabic numeral hour indices, Brown’s timepiece echoes contemporary G.I.-issue watches made by Bulova, Elgin, Hamilton, and Waltham, specifically the Type A-11 developed during the 1940s. (The details pre-date 1950s military watches like the A-17 pilot’s watch and “general use” MIL-W-3818A that would each incorporate an inner 24-hour track not yet present on the A-11.)

DEVOTION

After Brown’s unsanctioned heroism gets him a slap on the wrist from the Navy, the frustrated flier is approached topside on the Leyte by seaman Archie Fambrough (Akil Jackson) who—on behalf of the carrier’s Black sailors—gifts him a beautiful Rolex Oysterdate Precision, which they had collectively purchased for him nearly six months earlier in Cannes and engraved “Above All Others” on the case-back.

Anchored to a black leather strap, the Rolex has a 34mm stainless steel case and a simple white dial detailed with non-numeric hour markers and flat acrylic crystal, save for the white cyclops date window at the 3 o’clock position. Danny Milton of Hodinkee suggested a ref. 6694, which would be anachronistic by more than a decade as this didn’t enter production until the 1960s, though it does have an elegant period look.

The date window correctly shows the 3rd of the month as this scene is set on December 3, 1950, the day before Brown’s fatal final mission.

“Above all others”

Brown’s personal jewelry consists of a wide plain silver bangle bracelet on his right wrist and his gold wedding ring on his left hand.

The Gun

During his combat missions, ENS Brown arms himself with a Smith & Wesson Model M&P revolver, carried in a russet-brown leather shoulder holster similar to the M3 holsters issued to U.S. Army tanker crews. The holster has cartridge loops for the revolver’s .38 Special ammunition across the chest and a long retention strap secured behind the revolver’s hammer that snaps in place.

“A leather hip holster was also made for these revolvers, but the shoulder holster was generally preferred by pilots due to space constraints in the cramped cockpits,” wrote Bruce N. Canfield in an American Rifleman article that comprehensively chronicles the U.S. Navy’s wartime usage of Smith & Wesson revolvers.

The Navy contracted Smith & Wesson revolvers for its servicemen early during World War II, seeking secondary handguns to supplement its then-standard M1911A1 that would soon be in much demand from ground forces like the Army and Marine Corps. The result was a substantial order of 4″-barreled Smith & Wesson Model M&P revolvers chambered in .38 Special, a predominant law enforcement sidearm through much of the 20th century that had earned a reputation for reliability.

Though Smith & Wesson marketed all of the .38-caliber revolvers it produced during World War II as the “Victory Model”, that nomenclature now specifically refers to those produced for the Navy under the oversight of the U.S. Ordnance Department, characterized by four-inch barrels, parkerized frames, lanyard rings attached to the butt, and a “V” (for Victory!) prefix before the serial number.

True “Victory Model” Smith & Wesson revolvers typically had smooth wooden grips rather than the medallion grips on Brown’s revolver, suggesting that he may carry a commercial Smith & Wesson Model M&P or a pre-1942 Victory Model that retained the checkered walnut grips.

The one-handed operation required to fire a loaded revolver made these more practical for aviators, who would have little need to use a sidearm unless grounded, in which case they may have sustained wounds that would make it more difficult to use their second hand to perform the additional step of racking the slide of a single-action semi-automatic pistol like the M1911A1 if a round was not already chambered. Brown never actually removes his revolver from its holster, though LT Hudner draws his when approaching Brown’s downed plane after crashing his own.

Shortly after the Korean War ended, Smith & Wesson renamed all of its models to be designated by a specific number so the K-framed .38 Special service revolver became the Smith & Wesson Model 10.

ENS Brown’s Flight Uniform

Jonathan Majors as ENS Jesse Brown in Devotion (2022)

• Dark brown goatskin leather G-1 flight jacket with tan mouton fur collar, zip-up front, patch-style hip pockets with single-button flaps, bi-swing back with semi-belted waist, dark brown ribbed-knit wool cuffs and waist hem
• Olive-green lightweight nylon flight suit coveralls with rounded collar, front zipper, two chest pockets (with button-down flaps), lower-leg pockets (with button-down flaps), and left-sleeve triple-slot pockets
• White cotton short-sleeved undershirt
• Tan roughout leather plain-toe derby-laced N-1 ankle boots (“boondockers”)
• Khaki cotton twill utility cap
• White silk flying scarf
• Brown leather B-3A unlined semi-gauntlet flying gloves
• Silver bangle bracelet
• Gold wedding ring
• Stainless steel mil-spec A-11 service watch with black matte dial and luminous hour indices on steel bracelet

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie, currently streaming on Paramount Plus.

In addition to Brown’s stirring story, the heart of Devotion are the excellent performances and chemistry between Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell, the latter of whom had scored yet another Naval Aviation-themed hit last year in Top Gun: Maverick. Though there are certainly some shades of Top Gun in Devotion, the setting and intimacy of the story also recall The Bridges of Toko-Ri, another high-flying chronicle of “The Forgotten War”.

The Quote

You just ruined a perfectly good Corsair, Lieutenant. I think that’s going in the mission report.

The post Devotion: Jonathan Majors’ Flight Suit as Jesse Brown appeared first on BAMF Style.

Chris Pine as Henry Pelham in All the Old Knives (2022)
©Click News and Media

Vitals

Chris Pine as Henry Pelham, CIA “clandestine case officer extraordinaire”

London, Winter 2020

Film: All the Old Knives
Release Date: April 8, 2022
Director: Janus Metz Pedersen
Costume Designer: Stephanie Collie

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

On one hand, I appreciated All the Old Knives‘ dedication to a le Carré-esque depiction of spywork as more of a subdued, slow-burning investigation rather than the action-packed world of James Bond and Ethan Hunt. On the other hand, does “subdued” necessarily have to feel so… subdued?

Nearly eight years after the disastrous terrorist attack of Turkish Airlines Flight 127, the CIA reopens its investigation with the secret information that the hijackers may have been assisted by a mole within its Vienna station. Agent Henry Pelham (Chris Pine) is assigned to the case by his chief Vick Wallinger (Laurence Fishburne), who advises him not to tread lightly even if the clues should point to Pelham’s former fellow agent and paramour Celia (Thandiwe Newton).

Two weeks before he reunites with Celia, who is now living an idyllic family life along the California coast, he’s in London tracking former agent Bill Compton (Jonathan Pryce), whose office phone had been linked to a suspicious call to Tehran on that fateful day eight years earlier.

What’d He Wear?

All the Old Knives intrigued the style blogger in me when a number of its publicity materials led to believe we’d be seeing plenty of Three Days of the Condor-style espionage featuring Chris Pine darting through side streets in a stylish peacoat, though the finished film only features this style for a few brief minutes of its run-time. Still, I love seeing the coat worn over a turtleneck, a particularly appropriate look on days like today where we’re forecasted to have a low temperature of 9° F and a high that remains below freezing.

The classic peacoat evolved from a design that’s now more than three centuries old, possibility originating from the Dutch, whose term pijjakker refers to a short coat (“jakker”) made from a heavy dark blue woolen twill called “pij” and later known as “pilot cloth” by the U.S. Navy, who followed the example set by navies across the Atlantic by issuing these double-breasted reefer jackets to its seafaring service members. Made famous by their military usage, pea jackets have been increasingly popular over the last half-century as a practical, durable, and stylish cold-weather coat.

Henry Pelham walks through London in a handsome dark-blue peacoat, visually identifiable as a commercially made jacket by a few differences in cut and styling, most noticeably the buttons. Unlike the four or five rows of large, anchor-motif buttons on a Navy peacoat, Pine’s coat has standard jacket buttons arranged in a relatively spacious 6×3-button formation, or rather a 6×2.5-button formation as the top row could technically button closed though the flared spacing and the neat roll of his ulster-style lapels down to the middle row suggests that it’s not meant to be worn with the top row closed.

The only pockets on a military peacoat have long been hand-warmer pockets positioned low on the chest with straight jetted entries, though newer commercial variants often added a set of flapped hip pockets. Pine’s jacket follows the traditional example with its pair of hand pockets only, though these are updated with a slightly slanted welted entry.

With his graying stubble and upturned peacoat collar, Henry completes his seafaring image with a light-gray cashmere turtleneck sweater that has a shaker-stitched body and a substantially ribbed roll-neck.

Henry wears very dark indigo denim jeans with a trim, straight fit through the legs with only the copper-toned contrast stitching around the hems to indicate that they’re jeans. Neither the jeans nor his brown leather derby-laced plain-toe hiking boots are seen on screen, only visible in behind-the-scenes location photos like those shared by the Daily Mail in January 2021.

©Click News and Media

Henry wears a Seiko Presage “Cocktail Time” SRPE43, distinctive for its uniquely textured and gradated dial that is a signature of the “Cocktail Time” series. Currently, Seiko offers three Cocktail Time watches, each named after a classic concoction: the red-dialed “Negroni” (SPRE41), the green-dialed “Mojito” (SPRE45), and the blue-dialed “Old Clock” as worn by Chris Pine in All the Old Knives.

The 23-jewel Presage has both automatic and manual winding capabilities, with a polished stainless steel 38.5mm case and a dark blue edge-stitched leather strap to match the dial. The hour indices alternate between odd numbers represented by plain silver-toned bars and the even numbers as Arabic numerals in a typeface reportedly inspired by old liquor bottles, with a black date window at the 3 o’clock position.

Henry’s watch goes unseen under the thick sleeves of his turtleneck, but we get a few close looks when he’s interviewing Celia at the seaside restaurant in Carmel.

Shop the watch:

• Seiko Presage "Cocktail Time" SPRE43 in "Old Clock" blue dial (Amazon, $325)

Price and availability current as of Feb. 2, 2023.

What to Imbibe

Henry catches Bill off-guard in a London pub to confront him with Vick’s suspicions about an insider during the hijacking. “It’s, uh, a single malt,” Bill explains of his whisky when Henry asks what he’s drinking. “I’ll join you!” Henry proffers, strolling up to the bar to order his own dram.

While I’ll always endorse enjoying a glass of Scotch, let’s have a little more fun and try to see what Seiko was getting at with that watch model name, “inspired by the classic Old Clock cocktail” according to their website. I’ve scoured all my bartending books and even Googling only shows results for the watch. A helpful Redditor cited WatchPatrol’s explanation that “the Old Clock focuses on the luxurious sky bar environment: unwinding while drinking a well-crafted cocktail and appreciating the bright Japanese skyline drift into dusk.”

That’s great… but I need a drink! Some additional Googling finally found a relatively simple recipe at Cocktail Log, dated October 22, 2022, perhaps not exactly “classic” a cocktail as the martini or Manhattan, but that is the day I got married, so I consider it a sign. Our anonymous mixologist proposes a combination of:

• 4 parts vodka
• 1 part blue curaçao
• 1 part maraschino liqueur

…all stirred in a mixing glass, then poured into a chilled cocktail glass and garnished with a maraschino cherry dropped in the center. I suspect you may just be better off finding inspiration from Bill’s single malt whisky.

How to Get the Look

Chris Pine as Henry Pelham in All the Old Knives (2022)
©Click News and Media

Henry Pelham presents a simple yet stylish solution for dressing warmly, layering staples like a dark peacoat over a turtleneck and jeans with boots worn to a comfortable patina completing this cold-weather confluence of form and function.

• Navy-blue wool peacoat with 6×2.5-button double-breasted front, ulster-style lapels, slanted welted hand pockets, single vent
• Light-gray cashmere turtleneck sweater with a heavy ribbed roll-neck
• Dark-indigo denim jeans
• Brown roughout leather derby-laced plain-toe work boots
• Seiko Presage “Cocktail Time” SPRE43 stainless steel 38.5mm-cased watch with gradated blue textured dial (with 3:00 date window) on dark blue edge-stitched leather strap

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie, streaming on Amazon Prime, as well as the source novel by Olen Steinhauer, who adapted his own work into the screenplay.

The Quote

You do not want to end up on the wrong side of my investigation.

The post All the Old Knives: Chris Pine’s Peacoat appeared first on BAMF Style.

Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga in A Star is Born (2018)

Vitals

Bradley Cooper as Jackson Maine, substance-abusing country-rock star

Los Angeles, Spring 2017

Film: A Star is Born
Release Date: October 5, 2018
Director: Bradley Cooper
Costume Designer: Erin Benach

Background

As the 65th annual Grammy Awards are tonight, I wanted to revisit a request from my friend @thestyleisnotenough to write about the country rock style from Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, the third remake of A Star is Born. I’ve already waxed poetic about his tan Runabout Goods trucker jacket, so—in the spirit of tonight’s music industry awards—let’s dive into the suit that Jackson Maine (Cooper) wears for the 2018 movie’s in-universe Grammys where his wife Ally (Lady Gaga) is being honored as the Best New Artist… quite possibly the very worst opportunity for a drunk and drugged-up Jack to clamber onto the stage and pee his pants as she accepts the award.

Hilariously, the movie was barely two years old when a viral joke tweet convinced far too many people that Bradley Cooper had indeed pissed himself during that year’s Grammy Award ceremony.

What’d He Wear?

Invited to perform as part of a tribute to Roy Orbison, Jackson Maine may have been best-served by following the Big O’s sartorial example and wearing black instead of the lighter fawn suit that more clearly shows the urinary byproduct of his excess. Then again, few people dressing for public events consider the potential risk of pissing their pants in front of millions of viewers around the world.

Consistent with his hard-rocking image, Jack foregoes traditional evening-wear in favor of a well-tailored fawn worsted wool suit, tonally coordinated to an open-neck light stone cotton shirt, worn with the top two buttons of the front placket and the mitred button cuffs left undone.

Bradley Cooper is known to be a fan of Tom Ford suits, so it’s possible that his character Jackson Maine also wears Tom Ford on the rare occasions that call for more formal apparel than his usual trucker jackets and jeans. This fawn suit may have been made in the Tom Ford “O’Connor” model that Cooper has favored in real life.

The single-breasted suit jacket features Tom Ford’s signature curved “barchetta” breast pocket and flapped hip pockets that slant gently rearward, including a flapped ticket pocket on the right side. The two-button jacket is visually distinguished by its unique lapels, which include a traditional notch lapel on the right while the left is uniquely extended with a “dog-ear” that fills the space which would normally be notched, detailed with a second buttonhole suggestive of a throat latch often found on classic sports coats. The jacket also has straight shoulders, “kissing” four-button cuffs, long double vents, and front darts.

The ill-fated suit trousers have a flat front, plain-hemmed bottoms, and an extended waistband that closes through a hidden hook-and-bar. Likely rigged with slide-buckle side adjusters, the waistband lacks any belt loops that also prevent Jack from wearing a big honkin’ country belt buckle.

You can give all you want, but claiming these are Calico Cut Pants can’t get you out of this one, Jack.

Jack may not wear his usual buckled-strap engineer boots, but he hardly brings out any polished oxfords either. Apropos his cowboy persona, Jack still wears boots with plenty of patina to the leather, in this case a pair of russet-brown leather Chelsea boots as characterized by the matching elastic side gussets.

The Orbison tribute marks one of the few instances where Jack wears his trademark cowboy hat for the performance, taking the stage in a wide-brimmed dark brown felt hat with a narrow golden tan woven leather band, built for the production by costume designer Erin Benach’s team.

Under his shirt, Jack wears his usual silver-chain necklace with a silver rectangular pendant etched with a trio of flowers growing from a single stem as well as a plain gold ring.

How to Get the Look

Bradley Cooper as Jackson Maine in A Star is Born (2018)

Do you consider yourself reasonably in control of your faculties? If so, this sandy monochrome look could work well for you! If you’re not as confident in your bladder, then 1) get that checked out and 2) I’d suggest at least wearing darker trousers until you can mitigate the risk of public accidents.

• Fawn worsted wool suit:
  • Single-breasted 2-button jacket with notch lapels (with dog-eared throat latch), curved “barchetta” breast pocket, slanted flapped hip pockets and right-side ticket pocket, 4-button “kissing” cuffs, and long double vents
  • Flat-front trousers with extended waistband, slide-buckle side adjusters, side pockets, and plain-hemmed bottoms
• Light stone cotton shirt with point collar, front placket, mitred button cuffs
• Russet-brown leather plain-toe Chelsea boots
• Dark brown felt cowboy hat with narrow woven tan leather band
• Silver necklace with silver pendant and gold ring

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie as well as its Grammy-winning soundtrack.

The post A Star is Born: Bradley Cooper’s Grammy Awards Suit appeared first on BAMF Style.

Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in Die Another Day (2002).
Photo sourced from thunderballs.org.

Vitals

Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, smooth British government agent

Iceland, Winter 2002

Film: Die Another Day
Release Date: November 20, 2002
Director: Lee Tamahori
Costume Designer: Lindy Hemming

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Keep warm on this chilly 00-7th of February! Some of 007’s cinematic adventures are ideal “summer movies” (looking at you, Thunderball) while other adventures that follow Mr. Bond into snowy surroundings feel more appropriate to watch around this time of the year. Pierce Brosnan made his fourth and final appearance as James Bond in Die Another Day, which—with its Icelandic ice palace and cozy turtlenecks—clearly falls into the latter.

For his first MI6 mission as a reactivated double-0 agent after being released from North Korean captivity, Bond arrives in Iceland to investigate the mysterious millionaire Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), who was modeled after the villainous Hugo Drax from Ian Fleming’s third Bond novel Moonraker though Graves also shares a few biographical similarities with Jay Gatsby, whom Stephens had portrayed in a 2000 A&E TV movie.

His relationship with fellow agent Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) appears to have warmed since her initially chilly reception, as she spends the night with Bond in his room at Graves’ ice castle. He awakes to continue looking into Graves’ operation, connecting with NSA agent Giacinta “Jinx” Johnson (Halle Berry) along the way. Just as Bond thinks he and Miranda have the drop on Graves, the latter reveals that he’s had an ace in the hole… or under the sheets.

What’d He Wear?

Die Another Day continues James Bond’s sartorial tradition dating back to Goldfinger where 007 dresses in all black for sneaking around a villain’s compound. While adapted for a wintry climate with multiple layers and a bulky sweater, Mr. Bond couldn’t have hoped to be too inconspicuous by wearing all black against the snowy grounds of Gustav Graves’ ice palace… after all, it’s not like Q R equipped him with adaptive camouflage like his Aston Martin!

Bond’s outer layer is the dark navy polyester insulated coat that he had worn for his arrival the previous day. The thigh-length coat recalls military field jackets, particularly with its shoulder straps (epaulets) and the flapped pockets over the hips that snap closed. It closes with a straight plastic front-zip and a fly with covered snaps (poppers) for additional insulation against the wind, plus two additional covered snaps to close the large collar when turned up over Bond’s neck.

Bond’s outer jacket is the first item he abandons after drilling a hole in the ice to submerge himself, bringing the Thunderball-era rebreather back into service.

Bond takes off his outer jacket to reveal a waist-length diving jacket made of black neoprene, a synthetic foamed rubber material favored for aquatic clothing due to its water resistance and light-wearing insular properties that keep the wearer warm even when diving in cold water.

The jacket has a straight front zip up to the base of the standing collar that overlaps, covering the top of his turtleneck. A full-chest flap covers the torso, secured in place by a black-piped zipper that arcs across the upper chest. A black inflation valve is positioned at mid-chest, and the jacket also appears to have two zip-entry pockets at hand level.

Bond prepares to dive another day.

After Bond drops into Graves’ greenhouse, he slips out of the diving jacket to show the heavy, widely ribbed charcoal cashmere turtleneck that elevates his outfit from strictly task-driven tactical-wear. Perhaps more than any Bond film before it, Die Another Day strove to incorporate many callbacks to 007’s previous cinematic adventures, and this may have been selected as the cold-weather update to the black turtleneck and trousers worn by Roger Moore in Live and Let Die.

The screen-worn turtleneck was made by Ballantyne, a Scottish knitwear label founded in 1921 that “uses only first-rate natural cashmere yarns” sourced from Mongolian goat herds, according to James Bond Lifestyle, where you can read more about this sweater and the company.

Production photo sourced from Thunderballs.org.

Bond wears black neoprene flat-front diving trousers that match his jacket, styled with front pockets with black-piped openings that curve out from under the belt-line. The calves, knees, and back-thighs are reinforced in a tightly woven black, blue, and white that presents a low-contrast charcoal finish. The trousers have very wide loops around the waistband, through which Bond wears a belt of black heavy-duty nylon webbing that fastens through a black plastic “quick-release” slide buckle.

Production photo sourced from Thunderballs.org.

Bond wears Gore-Tex hiking boots with lugged black rubber outsoles that would provide better traction on the ice. These mid-calf boots follow a black, gray, and blue color scheme that coordinates with the rest of his outfit, with charcoal sueded uppers, lighter gray collars, and slate-gray rubberized toecaps that arc around the front of each boot with matching mudguards on the sides. The round black laces cross over dark blue tongues, anchored through a “quick-laced” system of four black vinyl side loops rather than traditional eyelets.

The Bond series has been linked with dive watches ever since Sean Connery strapped on his Rolex Submariner in the first movie, Dr. No, and it’s refreshing to see him wearing a diver while actually… diving! After decades of brand shifts between Rolex and Seiko, the Brosnan era introduced Omega as 007’s watch of choice, a product placement deal that has continued through Daniel Craig’s portrayal of Bond.

While Craig’s Bond would rotate through multiple Omegas over the course of one movie, Brosnan’s Bond switched only once, updating his quartz-powered Seamaster in GoldenEye to the automatic Omega Seamaster Professional 2531.80.00 that he would wear from Tomorrow Never Dies through Die Another Day. (You can read more about the Brosnan-era Seamaster 2531.80.00 at James Bond Lifestyle.)

Omega introduced the Seamaster in 1948 as a water-resistant dress watch, expanding the line over the centuries to include dive watches in the ’50s, updated with the introduction of the sporty Diver 300M series in 1993, named in reference to their water resistance down to 300 meters.

Brosnan’s screen-worn Seamaster Diver 300M features a 12-sided uni-directional rotating bezel and wave-motif dial both colored blue, suggesting both the dive watch’s maritime associations and Commander Bond’s naval background. In lieu of numeric hour indices, the watch has luminous markers in addition to a white date window at the 3 o’clock position, with the hour, minute, and second hands each detailed with a luminous end. The five-piece link bracelet is rhodium-plated 316L stainless steel to match the 41mm case, with its helium release valve jutting out from 10 o’clock and a screw-down crown at 3 o’clock… though the Die Another Day Seamaster has been reconfigured by Q Branch with a laser integrated into the crown that allows Bond to literally break the ice.

They say a nice watch can be an ice-breaker, but really, 007!

On his “standard-issue ring finger”, Bond wears what R (John Cleese) had dubbed an “ultra high-frequency single-digit sonic agitator unit”… in other words, a glass-breaking ring that should come in handy if a villain would ever be holding you at gunpoint against a glass surface. (You can find a replica of the ring at Your Props.)

The gold band consists of ten panels, separated by a rope-like detail, with a silver-toned knob jutting out from each panel. The ring’s high-frequency sonic agitation can evidently be activated by quickly rotating the ring around the wearer’s finger, resulting in a high-pitched whirr that precedes the ring breaking through whatever glass surface it happens to be contacting.

Like so many self-aggrandizing LinkedIn posters, Bond prepares to break the glass ceiling.

Thanks to help from Q Branch’s Glass-Breaking Ring Division and Die Another Day‘s CGI effects team that granted Mr. Bond the ability to windsurf through an arctic storm, 007 para-sails back to land and into the cockpit of his latest Aston Martin, where he engages not just the “adaptive camouflage” but also the heating system, pulling off his turtleneck to show yet another dark layer: a black mid-weight pullover with a snap-fastened quarter-top that extends up to the standing collar. He pushes the set-in sleeves up his forearms before speeding across the ice.

Being a secret agent in an invisible car with ice-traction tires is no excuse not to wear a seatbelt, especially in the 21st century!

You can read more about 007’s wintry layers in Die Another Day at Bond Suits.

The Car

“Aston Martin calls it the Vanquish, we call it the Vanish,”… and Harry Potter called it an invisibility cloak. The latest development from Q Branch equips Bond with an invisible car, a highly improbably technology that many lambasted as a low mark for the series, including the late Sir Roger Moore, who quipped “I thought it just went too far—and that’s from me, the first Bond in space!”

The latter half of Bond’s “KE02 EWW” registration plate echoes many fans’ sentiments about the inclusion of an invisible car.
Production photo sourced from thunderballs.org.

Of course, that’s not to criticize the car itself, a stunning silver 2002 Aston Martin V12 Vanquish, a sleek sports tourer that had just been unveiled at the 2001 Geneva Motor Show. The Vanquish became Aston Martin’s flagship car through the early 2000s, boasting a naturally aspirated 5.9-liter V12 engine mated to a six-speed automated manual transmission that generated 460 rated horsepower, accelerating from 0-60 mph in 4.5 seconds with a top speed exceeding 190 mph.

In addition to its stock performance, Q Branch has modified Bond’s Vanquish with “all the usual refinements” including an ejector seat, torpedoes, and target-seeking shotguns that 007 immediately employs to “shoot through” the manual, though the “adaptive camouflage” capabilities remain its most-associated aspect.

And to think some say rear-wheel drive cars aren’t great in snow!

2002 Aston Martin V12 Vanquish

Body Style: 2+2 grand tourer

Layout: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive (RWD)

Engine: 5.9 L 48-valve V12

Power: 460 hp (343 kW; 466 PS) @ 6500 rpm

Torque: 400 lb·ft (542 N·m) @ 5000 rpm

Transmission: 6-speed automated manual

Wheelbase: 105.9 inches (2690 mm)

Length: 183.7 inches (4665 mm)

Width: 75.7 inches (1923 mm)

Height: 51.9 inches (1318 mm)

According to a Bonhams auction listing for one of the screen-used Aston Martins, “EON Productions commissioned three production Vanquishes, chassis nos. ‘172’, ‘173’, and ‘174’ to become ‘hero’ cars for the close-ups of Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. Strikingly presented in Tungsten Silver livery with charcoal leather interiors, Linn audio systems and brushed aluminum centre consoles… these three cars had a relatively easy life during filming and were used exclusively for close-ups, being spared the dramatic and punishing stunts and chase sequences which were the province of vehicles commissioned by EON special effects department. These were four-wheel drive, Ford Explorer-based vehicles with Vanquish coachwork. Two of the special effects vehicles survive, remaining the property of Aston Martin Ltd. and neither can be sold or registered for road use.”

The Explorer-based Aston Martins had their V12 engines swapped out for 300-horsepower V8 engines and four-wheel-drive systems that functioned better for stuntwork on the ice.

The Gun

As the Bond series evolved to keep up with modern action cinema in the ’90s, so did his choice of armament. Bond’s iconic Walther PPK had been originally designed nearly 70 years before Pierce Brosnan starred as 007 for a second time in Tomorrow Never Dies, so EON and Walther worked together to arm the world’s most famous secret agent with their most innovative handgun, the Walther P99.

Promotional photo of Pierce Brosnan wielding his suppressed Walther P99 against a green-screen background, sourced from Thunderballs.org. Note that he’s wearing the base-layer black quarter-snap with his neoprene diving pants and Gore-Tex boots.

The striker-fired, recoil-operated P99 was developed in response to trends established by competition from manufacturers like Glock, which had revolutionized semi-automatic pistols in the late 20th century with their polymer-framed, high-capacity handguns. The first generation of P99 pistols operate with a traditional double-action/single-action (DA/SA) system, though with a decocker rather than an external hammer; for the second generation of P99 pistols, this would become the P99 AS (Anti-Stress), in addition to the new P99 DAO (Double-Action Only) and Glock-style P99 QA (Quick-Action) variants.

The P99 has been produced in both 9x19mm Parabellum and .40 S&W versions, the former more common while the second was in response to prevailing American law enforcement needs of the era. Depending on the age of the pistol, the P99 can carry magazines with up to 15 or 16 rounds of 9mm, with an additional round in the chamber.

Though considerably larger and with double the ammunition load (of a heavier, more powerful ammunition, no less), the P99’s polymer frame meant that the weapon generally equalled the weight of the all-metal PPK when unloaded.

“My defense mechanism is right here.”

His hesitation to shoot former sexual partners softened after the events of The World is Not Enough, Bond indicates that he would have very willingly shot Miranda in the face after she reveals herself to be a double agent… but his gun simply clicks empty! The deceptive Miranda reveals that she took advantage of Bond sleeping with his gun under the pillow (as established in Tomorrow Never Dies) by swapping out his P99’s loaded magazine with an empty one.

In my opinion, this is a bit ridiculous, especially for a gun like the Walther P99 that becomes about 30% heavier (from 24.75 ounces empty to about 32 ounces loaded) when fully loaded with 15 rounds of 9mm ammunition. Such a scenario may have been possible if Bond still carried his PPK, as the weight of a PPK’s full magazine is somewhat more negligible against the full-metal PPK’s overall mass, but you would still expect a trained agent to immediately tell the difference. Of course, Bond has been out of practice for about a year and a half thanks to the North Koreans; the VR sequence further illustrates that, in that time, MI6 increasingly relied on digital rather than practical training, perhaps to the detriment of real-life lessons like being able to tell whether or not your gun is loaded.

I’ll allow the possibility that Miranda—whom, as a fellow MI6 agent, carries her own P99—had specially prepared a magazine full of snap caps or dummy rounds that she slipped into Bond’s P99 while he was sleeping, to some degree making up the difference in weight vs. a fully empty magazine.

Miranda hands Bond his own Walther P99, intending on serving her own brand of death for breakfast.

The Walther P99 starred as Bond’s preferred sidearm from 1997 (Tomorrow Never Dies) until 2006, when Daniel Craig carried it for his debut as Bond in Casino Royale before reverting back to the PPK series from Quantum of Solace onward.

How to Get the Look

Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in Die Another Day (2002).
Photo sourced from thunderballs.org.

Bond’s turtleneck and trousers alone would be attractive après-ski apparel, though you may want to introduce a touch of color so that your fellow après-skiers don’t think you’re cosplaying as a secret agent… or don’t blow your cover if you actually are one!

• Dark-navy polyester thigh-length field jacket with zip/snap-up front, shoulder straps (epaulets), and flapped hip pockets
• Black neoprene waist-length diving jacket with standing collar, arced chest-zip flap with integrated valve, and zip-entry hand pockets
• Charcoal cashmere wide-ribbed turtleneck sweater
• Black soft quarter-top pullover shirt with snap buttons
• Black neoprene flat-front diving trousers with wide belt loops, straight front pockets, and blue/gray-woven reinforced knees, thighs, and calves
• Black nylon webbed belt with black plastic “quick-release” sliding buckle
• Black, gray, and blue Gore-Tex mid-calf hiking boots
• Gold-paneled and silver-knobbed ring
• Omega Seamaster 300M Chronometer 2531.80.00 with 39mm stainless case, blue bezel and dial (with 3:00 date window), and stainless link bracelet

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The Quote

So you live to die another day.

The post Die Another Day: Bond’s Turtleneck and Diving Gear in Iceland appeared first on BAMF Style.

Today’s post about an iconic screen badass was written by the curator of the popular Instagram account @jamesbondswardrobe. Enjoy!

Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (1984)

Vitals

Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800, an “unassuming” cyborg sent back in time to assassinate an unassuming waitress

Los Angeles, May 1984

Film: The Terminator
Release Date: October 26, 1984
Director: James Cameron
Costume Designer: Hilary Wright

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

The same year that he was filming Conan the Destroyer, rising film star and retired bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger—along with his agent—was sent a script penned by James Cameron that was simply titled The Terminator. His interest piqued, the eight-time Mr. Olympia later met the aspiring director, ostensibly to be cast as Kyle Reese. However, Arnie’s own musings on how the titular villain ought to be played stirred Cameron’s imagination, who began to sketch his likeness on a notepad, coming to the conclusion that, instead of Reese, “he’d make a hell of a Terminator.”

The eponymous cyborg arrives from the future on the roof of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, at 1:52 AM. Taking in the magnificent cityscape (while butt-ass naked), the hulking machine makes its way down to Griffith Park, where its path crosses with three unfortunate thugs… including Bill Paxton in a cameo role!

After seamlessly killing the thugs (terminating them, haha!) and taking one’s clothes (whose, by the way, were way-oversized for him if they fit Arnold nicely), the cyborg does what any hitman-from-2029-stuck-in-1984-without-any-photo-reference-of-their-frickin’-target would do; go through a local phone book, and begin “visiting” each (very unfortunate) woman whose name happens to be Sarah Connor… but not before nonchalantly stealing a large amount of deadly weaponry from the nearby Alamo Sport Shop.

Unfortunately (yes, this word will be used a lot) for our villainous robot, its actual target won’t be as easy a hit as the other victims were; for at her protection is the weaselly—but very resourceful—Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a human resistance fighter also sent back in time, specifically to curtail the Terminator’s efforts. He also proves to be more than a nuisance for the cyborg, mildly damaging the Terminator’s left eye during a nightclub skirmish and forcing it to retreat so it can perform some cosmetic “surgery” on its human shell.

Having ripped out its entire left eye (and gotten a surprisingly good “haircut”), the Terminator’s red cybernetic eye focuses, letting its presence be known. Unfortunately (wahaha) for our cybernetic assassin, this wound is perhaps a little too obvious for infiltration purposes, so it improvises with some tasteful eyewear and a new outfit that’s hashed-up from its previous one.

What’d He (It?) Wear?

“The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human… sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. I had to wait ’till he moved on you before I could zero him,” Reese explains to a scatterbrained Sarah (Linda Hamilton), while they hide from the cyborg in a stolen car.

Being forced to come up with a new outfit because your previous field jacket and cutoff shirt got ruined by a few shotgun blasts and some fire can be frustrating, but the Terminator makes no fuss (except when telling off a suspecting citizen), and dons a black leather zip-moto jacket and a stone-gray cutoff.

This jacket, heavily inspired by designs crafted in 1928 by Irving Schott, co-founder of the New York City-based outerwear company The Schott Bros., had already become a symbol of outlaws and bikers around the world, along with general badasses. It helps if you happen to be a towering, unfeeling cyborg too, I guess.

The Terminator is told his target friend isn’t taking any visitors at the moment.

The rest of its outfit sustaining, the automaton also dons a pair of black sunglasses, which are just large enough to hide its gaping eye wound. Casually strolling up to the local police station (and past a criminal psychologist who had just concluded that the detained Reese was but “a loon”), the Terminator asks the desk sergeant if it could see Sarah, insisting that they’re friends.

The black zip moto jacket pictured above features a cropped, comfortable fit, with the famous D-pocket, zipper pockets and wide lapels designed to snap down, or fold over each other and zip all the way up. Worn over a speckled stone-gray cutoff with olive-green combat pants and bejeweled black leather boots, the Terminator looks every bit the mid-80s badass.

The “Perfecto”, the original zip moto jacket that was apparently named after its creator’s favorite cigar, remains a registered trademark of Schott NYC. Interestingly, brown was the most popular color in the garment’s early years; the black variation only really took off in the 1950s during the rise of the greaser movement. Speaking of greasers, the jacket has Marlon Brando to thank for sealing its iconic “bad boy” status with the 1953 film The Wild One, in which he donned a skull-and-bones-stamped Perfecto for the role of Johnny Strabler, leader of the “Black Rebels Motorcycle Club” (BRMC).

Maintaining its popularity well throughout the fifties and on up, the zip moto quickly found its way onto the torsos of other fellow cinematic badasses, such as Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky, of Mad Max fame and, of course, the Terminator.

The aforementioned stone-gray cotton cutoff with its black “specked” design serves purely as a layering garment for this (mildly successful) Terminator, having swapped out the previous black abstract-patterned cutoff for this police station shootout. Well, police station massacre.

The black sunglasses previously mentioned that the cyborg wears may look familiar to loyal BAMF Style readers, as they had been previously seen in both Sudden Impact and The Dead Pool, two mid-’80s Dirty Harry thrillers starring our real-life BAMF, Clint Eastwood. In fact, those sunglasses worn by Inspector Callahan proved so popular, it’s (indirectly) the reason why Arnie is wearing them in this movie!

The Gargoyle “ANSI Classics” also began the (admittedly tiring) trend of a sunglasses-laden Terminator strutting around, doing its thing, day or night. These Gargoyles sunglasses have been sold as the “85” model, though Gargoyle has recently ceased production of all of its products, so you may be better off scrounging for a pair on eBay.

The suspicious Terminator insists to the clueless desk sergeant that he will return momentarily.

On an unrelated note, near the end of the police station massacre, detective Hal Vukovich shoots the Terminator in the back with an automatic rifle before being quickly blown away. Vukovich, whose earlier repeated attempts to tell likely interesting stories were cut off by his boss, Traxler, was played by Lance Henriksen. Intriguingly, Henriksen was Cameron’s original choice to play the titular villain, even going as far to have the actor dress up in similar garb— fake cuts and all—for the chairman of Hemdale Film Corporation and his staff. This choice would’ve arguably been far more believable; for an infiltration unit, anyways. There’s even artwork out there done by Cameron, depicting Henriksen as the character.

Unfortunately for Henriksen, history didn’t play out like he had hoped. Cameron found a role for him in the film anyhow, considering he had been essential in finding finances for the film. He also probably felt a lot better about it when he ended up playing a dubious cyborg anyways, in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986).

There’s more to the casting of the Terminator that proves to be equally enthralling. Initially offered to already-iconic tough guys like Sly Stallone and Mel Gibson, the studio suggested to Cameron that he cast O.J. Simpson, who was at the peak of fame at the time. It answered Cameron’s supposed desire to cast someone more famous in the title role, but instead he shrugged the suggestion off, unironically believing that Simpson just didn’t seem believable as a cold and heartless killer.

While it may be easy to imagine all three of those other guys in the rather simple “bad boy” outfit that Arnie wears here, let’s not forget that his casting worked out in more ways than one, with Cameron musing on how the Austrian Oak’s accent, “had a strange synthesized quality, like they [Skynet] hadn’t gotten the voice thing quite worked out.”

The Terminator, doing Terminator things with its Windows ‘84 HUD.

Getting back on track, the Terminator manages a tiny bit of outfit continuity by re-wearing a pair of olive-green combat pants, detailed with a rather high rise with two button-closed back pockets, two patch pockets in the front (with the seam lining up perfectly with the belt loops), and two flapped cargo pockets on the sides. They are held up by a wide black leather belt with a square silver single-prong buckle.

The cyborg tucks its olive-green combat pants into a pair of black leather triple-strap calf-high “harness”-style boots. While looking undeniably 80s, the boots could easily hold up today, provided your look is leather-heavy, of course. Rumored to be made by Durango, the main identifying feature of these 11-inch boots is the uniquely-stitched panel that goes up the front center of the boot.

The Guns

As said earlier, our humble Terminator makes its way to downtown Los Angeles to begin its hunt for whoever may be named “Sarah Connor”. While it doesn’t technically need any sort of long-range weaponry, it would certainly make its job easier. Heading on over to the Alamo Sport Shop, it stocks up on what could be seen as “ideal for home defense”, or militia defense… or a whole resistance?

There, after examining an Armalite AR-18 with the stock removed, the android first selects a Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun, which the unsuspecting clerk mentions is Italian (which is actually accurate), and could go “pump or auto” (also accurate). Then it chooses a brand-new AMT Hardballer Longslide pistol, with a seven-inch barrel and a laser-lock sight (which was a one-off made a company that would later become SureFire).

Next, after being subtly denied “a phased plasma rifle in a 40-watt range”, it finishes up ‘shopping’ with a full-size and fully-automatic open-bolt 9mm Uzi. Interestingly, the Uzi presented would be an unrealistic purchase, given that civilian Uzis were semi-automatic carbines with 16-inch barrels. Of course, the whole gun shop scene is unrealistic, as it is. If the story is to be believed, Cameron insists that sometime during the course of the film, the Terminator may have converted the Uzi and the AR-18 into full auto weapons while “recovering” in its hotel room.

“So, uh, which’ll it be?” “Owl.”

Prior to the police station massacre, the Terminator had stashed its weaponry in the car that it plowed into said police station. Getting out of the car, unharmed of course, it arms itself with the remaining AR-18 and the SPAS-12, having lost the other weaponry over the course of the film. Unfortunately (thought I was finished with that one, did you?) for the innocent police officers, those two weapons are all this seemingly unstoppable cyborg needs to breach the perimeter and make its way to its intended target.

How to Get the Look

Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (1984)

After ditching some clothes that were admittedly more suitable for infiltration, the T-800 goes all out and further solidifies the zip moto as a symbol of the outlaw; ironically, too, given the situation.

• Black leather Perfecto-style motorcycle jacket with wide notched lapels (with collar snaps), an asymmetrical zip-up “lancer” front, snap-on epaulettes/shoulder straps, zip-up slanted hand pockets, zip-up slanted left chest pocket, left-side D-pocket (with a pointed single-snap flap), half-belt (with mitred-corner steel single-prong buckle), zip-up sleeves, and a bi-swing pleated “action back”
• Light stone-gray cotton cutoff shirt with a small black speckled pattern
• Olive-green combat pants with a high rise, two patch-style front pockets, two button-closed back pockets, and two flapped cargo pockets on the side
• Black wide leather belt with squared silver-toned buckle
• Black leather triple-strap calf-high harness boots
• Black Gargoyle “ANSI Classics” sunglasses

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The Quote

I’ll be back.

The post The Terminator: Arnie’s Leather Jacket and Gargoyle Sunglasses appeared first on BAMF Style.

Robert Shaw in Black Sunday (1977)

Vitals

Robert Shaw as David Kabakov, experienced Mossad agent and Major

Miami, January 1976

Film: Black Sunday
Release Date: April 1, 1977
Director: John Frankenheimer
Costume Designer: Ray Summers

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

It’s Super Bowl Sunday! To many of us, the Big Game (as the NFL would prefer us unlicensed folks call it) is an opportunity to spend a Sunday with friends, beer, and buffalo chicken dip while halfheartedly rooting for a team that we may not care about and catching a glimpse of some over-produced multimillion-dollar ad buys. For director John Frankenheimer, it’s an opportunity to yet again present the thrills and cynicism of ruthless criminals exploiting geopolitical dilemmas for their own gain with considerable human lives at stake. In short: Black Sunday.

After the Cold War had dominated culture of the ’60s, the zeitgeist shifted in ’70s toward anxiety around international terrorism, with events like the Munich massacre—an attack by the militant Black September organization that resulted in the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and a West German policeman during the 1972 Summer Olympics—still very fresh in global minds. This specific event inspired Thomas Harris to write his debut novel Black Sunday, which re-imagined the scenario by aligning Black September with a suicidal Navy veteran determined to crash his explosives-laden Goodyear blimp into eighty thousand attendees—including the President—during Super Bowl X.

The story was swiftly adapted into a screenplay by Ernest Lehman, Ivan Moffat, and Kenneth Ross, the latter of whom had penned the similarly themed The Day of the Jackal, also directed by John Frankenheimer. Bruce Dern and Marthe Keller respectively star as the self-destructive blimp pilot and the seductive Black September operative who team up opposite Robert Shaw as Major David Kabakov, a grizzled Mossad counter-terrorist whose hunt for them intensifies after the death of his colleague.

After the hunt leads Kabakov and his FBI counterpart Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) to Miami, Kabakov realizes that the plan likely involves an atrocity committed during the Super Bowl and meets with Miami Dolphins founder Joe Robbie, making a cameo as himself.

Kabakov: With Black September, there’s no way you can take every possible precaution. They know exactly what they’re going to do, why, and when. The only way we can take every possible precaution is to cancel the game.
Robbie: Cancel the Super Bowl? That’s the most ridiculous suggestion I’ve ever heard. That’s like canceling Christmas!

Joe Robbie cameos as himself in a brief scene with Robert Shaw, whose brown leather jacket I’ll have to write about in a later post.

Once the production was surprisingly supplied with a legitimate Goodyear blimp, the challenge arose to depict the Big Game itself. The NFL also cooperated with the production, allowing footage to be secured when the Pittsburgh Steelers faced the Dallas Cowboys during Super Bowl X on January 18, 1976; as a Pittsburgher, it’s cool to see coach Chuck Noll and players from the legendary ’76 team like Mel Blount, Terry Bradshaw, Lynn Swann, the late Franco Harris, and the famous “Steel Curtain” defensive line, all while fans bedecked in black and gold hoist their cans of Iron City.

Go Steelers!

A week and a half after the Steelers beat the Cowboys 21-17, the Miami Dolphins stepped in for additional shots, dressed in Cowboys and Steelers uniforms for continuity. Interestingly, the actor who briefly portrays “the President” more resembles Jimmy Carter than Gerald Ford, who was still in office at the time Black Sunday was filmed in early 1976.

There are certainly aspects of Black Sunday that felt bizarre—for instance, the climactic blimp explosion does not pay off for me—but I was otherwise impressed to see how Frankenheimer et al pulled this off, with plenty of gratuitous footage reminding us of the fact that we’re often watching an actual Super Bowl being played behind Robert Shaw on the sidelines. This felt especially impactful during the soaring shot that began with Dahlia driving her Delta 88 hitched to a speedboat full of explosives before cinematographer John A. Alonzo’s camera pulled back and panned over into the Miami Orange Bowl stadium full of Super Bowl fans, zooming onto the field where Kabakov stands vigilant.

What’d He Wear?

Major Kabakov arrived in Miami on New Year’s Day wearing the brown leather sport jacket he had with him in D.C., eventually updating his wardrobe for Magic City’s tropical climate that remains unseasonably warm in winter.

It’s difficult to imagine dressing for a modern American football game like Kabakov does, swathed in a distinctive collarless jacket made of brown dupioni silk, evident by the irregular slubs and the way the material shines under the sun.

Kabakov’s collarless jacket defies any simple classification, to the extent of my sartorial knowledge, though the cut recalls “loafer jackets” or “Hollywood jackets” that were the 1940s precursor to ’70s leisure jackets. The jacket has a two-button front, similar to a traditional sport jacket. A vertical pleat strip runs down each side of the front, from the shoulder seam to behind the semi-bellowed hip pocket, and the ventless back is semi-belted across the waist. The wide shoulders have significant padding, though loose through the sleeves down to the gathered cuffs with their large, shirt-style single-button closure.

Kabakov wears a cream-colored long-sleeved camp shirt, styled with a breast pocket, button cuffs, and a plain front (also known as a French placket.)

Kabakov navigates the crowd of Steelers fans bedecked in black and gold and hoisting cans of Iron City.

Kabakov’s trousers are dark-gray gabardine flat front slacks with side pockets, jetted back pockets (with a button through the back left), and plain-hemmed bottoms. He holds them up with a hefty brown leather belt that closes through a brass-finished single-prong buckle.

You’ll thank yourself for keeping your pants up with a sturdy belt while you’re clambering over the side of an explosives-laden Goodyear blimp.

Chukka boots had emerged as casual footwear through the mid-20th century, named for the seven-minute periods of play in polo, where the ankle-high derby-laced boot style is said to have been popularized. Kabakov wears dark brown leather plain-toe chukka boots with two-eyelet lacing and black outsoles. Especially around the toes, the leather boot uppers show plenty of wear. His socks are plain black.

You’ll also thank yourself for keeping your shoes firmly laced!

The day before, Kabakov had led interviews of the blimp team, including the intended pilot Farley (Tom McFadden), while wearing the same outfit though with a gold polyester shirt typical of the disco era with its long-pointed collar and white pearl-esque plastic buttons up the front placket and through the breast pocket yoke.

The Watch

Throughout Black Sunday, Kabakov clearly wears a Rolex GMT Master ref. 1675 that, according to IMDB, was director John Frankenheimer’s own “prized Rolex”. This GMT Master features the distinctive combination of brown and gold that resulted in nicknames like “Root Beer” Rolex and “Eye of the Tiger”, evolving into updated models like the ref. 1675/3 and ref. 16753 that would be famously worn by Clint Eastwood.

Worn on a dark brown leather strap, Kabakov’s Rolex has a stainless steel 40mm case and lugs, contrasted by the 18-karat yellow gold bezel with its duo-toned finish. This rotating 24-hour scale bezel has the even-numbered hour indices printed from 2 to 22, with the top half of the 24-hour bezel is brown with gold-printed indices while the “daylight” bottom half presents the inverse of brown-printed indices against a gold background. The brown “nipple dial” is known as such for the slightly protruding round hour indices on the dial itself, lume-filled for additional visibility like the baton indices at 6 and 9 o’clock and the triangular index at 12 o’clock. A gold date window is positioned at 3 o’clock.

Take good care of that Rolex, Major Kabakov!

1970s Rolex GMT Masters on eBay

The Guns

Kabakov carries a snub-nosed Colt Lawman MK III as his service sidearm. The Lawman was introduced in 1969 as the “service grade” variant of the Colt Trooper—itself described by IMFDB as the “Poor Man’s Python”—though the MK III lineup was considered a major improvement for Colt revolvers, which had not undergone a significant design refresh since the early 20th century.

As its name implied, the Lawman was intended primarily for use among law enforcement, able to fire .357 Magnum and .38 Special ammunition as was the contemporary standard for service revolvers. The Lawman was configured with either a full four-inch barrel or the shorter two-inch barrel, as carried by Kabakov, while finishes ranged from the basic “Colt Royal Blue” to two nickel finishes.

The shroud-less ejector rod and distinctive front sight shape help identify Kabakov’s revolver as the Colt Lawman MK III rather than the more frequently seen—and slightly smaller—Colt Detective Special.

After Kabakov realizes that he’s likely outgunned by the terrorists taking off in the Goodyear blimp, FBI Agent Corley offers that he’s “got a high-powered rifle and a submachine gun in the trunk” of his sedan. Kabakov takes the former, a sporterized Springfield M1903 bolt-action rifle, as he and Corley commandeer a Goodyear helicopter to chase the rogue blimp.

Corley’s trunk rifle that’s wielded by Kabakov illustrates one of the many examples of the early 20th century M1903 Springfield military rifles that were later converted to hunting purposes by shortening the fore-end and affixing a long-range telescopic scope.

Kabakov and Corley prepare to battle the Goodyear blimp.

After Corley gets wounded, he takes the agent’s blowback-operated Smith & Wesson M76 submachine gun, ultimately using this to bring the day’s events to their explosive conclusion.

The M76’s interesting history began in the mid-1960s, when the U.S. Navy contacted Smith & Wesson about contracting them for a 9x19mm Parabellum submachine gun to effectively replace the Carl Gustaf m/45 currently in service among Navy SEALs. The Navy had no issue with the reliable m/45, but it was instead the manufacturing company based in neutral Sweden who objected to its weapon being used in war.

Despite some cosmetic and operational similarities to the m/45, Smith & Wesson designed the M76 from scratch, rushing it into production just nine months later at the start of 1967 without the usual finishing touches to make their firearms attractive and marketable. Thus, the resulting M76 was an efficient brute that represented pure function over form, firing 9mm ammunition at a rate of 720 rounds per minute from box magazines with capacities up to 36 rounds.

Although the M76 development had once been considered a top priority for the Navy, it eventually saw only limited combat use in Vietnam before production ended in 1974. (“M76” denotes “Model 76”, but this doesn’t represent the year of production as Smith & Wesson had ceased to manufacture the weapon two years before 1976. Instead, it’s merely a continuation of their standard numbering system as found on Smith & Wesson revolvers like the Model 10, 15, 19, 29, and 36, or their semi-automatic handguns like the Model 39 and 59.)

How to Get the Look

Robert Shaw in Black Sunday (1977)

David Kabakov dresses for his mission at the Super Bowl in a casual outfit that recalls the elegance of 1940s leisure-wear, which may be contextually unexpected for a football game—even one as high-profile as the Super Bowl—though this is consistent with his relative unfamiliarity with the sport and its reverence in American tradition.

• Brown dupioni silk 2-button collarless loafer jacket with front pleat strips, semi-bellowed hip pockets, 1-button shirt-style cuffs, and semi-belted ventless back
• Cream long-sleeved camp shirt with breast pocket, plain front, and button cuffs
• Dark-gray gabardine flat-front slacks with belt loops, side pockets, jetted back pockets, and plain-hemmed bottoms
• Brown leather belt with brass single-prong buckle
• Dark brown leather plain-toe 2-eyelet chukka boots
• Black cotton lisle socks
• Rolex GMT Master ref. 1675 “Root Beer” automatic watch with stainless steel 40mm case, 18-karat yellow gold bezel (with brown-and-gold duotone fill), brown “nipple dial” with 3 o’clock date window, and dark brown leather strap

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The post Black Sunday: Robert Shaw in Brown Silk at the Super Bowl appeared first on BAMF Style.

Ethan Hawke as Jesse in Before Sunrise (1995)

Vitals

Ethan Hawke as Jesse Wallace, itinerant American

Vienna, June 16-17, 1994

Film: Before Sunrise
Release Date: January 27, 1995
Director: Richard Linklater
Costume Designer: Florentina Welley

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Happy Valentine’s Day! While I’ve occasionally used this holiday to feature style from movies depicting gangland violence (think Jimmy Hoffa’s February 14th birthday or the 1967 movie The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre about the real-life 1929 event), this marks my first Valentine’s Day as a married man, so I’m feeling romantic and thus wanted to write about one of my favorite romance-themed movies: Before Sunrise.

For his fourth feature film, director Richard Linklater took inspiration from his chance meeting with a woman in a Philadelphia toy shop that led to the two walking through the city and conversing well into the night. Linklater collaborated with Kim Krizan on a screenplay that would focus heavily on dialogue between a man and a woman who had just met, with their conversations realistically balanced between casual and deep as they get to know each other… and learn more about themselves in the process.

We begin on the train from Budapest, where a German couple’s increased bickering compels French student Céline (Julie Delpy) to change seats, fortuitously finding space near the young American tourist Jesse (Ethan Hawke), who was engrossed in his book until he spots his lovely new traveling companion. Jesse debates sparking a conversation until the arguing couple passes them and he finds his opening, asking—half out of curiosity, half to break the ice—”do you have any idea what they were arguing about?” She doesn’t, but she keeps their conversation going with a light but intriguing comment about how couples pretend not to hear each other as they age.

Their connection made, Jesse and Céline continue their first of many conversations, which threatens to be interrupted when the train stops at Vienna, where Jesse is scheduled to depart while Céline will continue riding to Paris. He impulsively asks her to join him:

All I know is, I have to catch an Austrian Airlines flight tomorrow morning at 9:30, and I don’t really have enough money for a hotel, so I was just gonna walk around, and it would be a lot more fun if you came with me. And if I turn out to be some kind of psycho, you know, you just get on the next train… think of it like this, jump ahead 10-20 years, okay? And you’re married, only your marriage doesn’t have that same energy that it used to have, you know? You start to blame your husband. You start to think about all those guys you met in your life and what might have happened if you picked up with one of them, right? Well, I’m one of those guys! That’s me! You know? So think of this as time travel, from then to now.

Ethan Hawke later explained to The Guardian that Jesse’s argument was developed during a “controlled improv” with Julie Delpy, who said Céline would only be impressed enough to get off the train by someone who demonstrated that he was funny and smart. “We finally came up with this idea that I was a time traveler,” Hawke said. “She was like, ‘Okay, that I would get off the train for.'”

Jesse and Céline make the most of their limited time and budget in Vienna, skipping the soon-to-be-closed museums and experimental plays about talking cows in favor of record stores, amusement parks, and graveyards, all the while discussing mortality and music, literature, love, and life.

What’d He Wear?

Before Sunrise is only the second of two total credits for costume designer Florentina Welley, who effectively dressed our two leads to reflect the fashions of the mid-’90s, as you’d expect of two attractive twentysomethings, while still incorporating a timeless quality—after all, what young man doesn’t own a simple gray T-shirt, pair of jeans, and cool leather jacket?

Jesse and Céline during the titular sunrise.

While on the train, Jesse cozily settles into a corner with his book while wearing a burgundy wool turtleneck. The ribbed roll-neck contrasts against the more smoothly knit body, which shows signs of being comfortably broken in with its pilled wool and tears along the shoulder seams.

Jesse the time traveler makes his case for Céline to join him in Vienna.

After Jesse and Céline disembark in Vienna, Jesse presumably stashes the sweater in the train station locker with their bags, opting to roam the city in his T-shirt and leather jacket, occasionally removing the latter to keep cool in what IMDB reports was “one of the hottest summers in Austria” up to that point in time, with temperatures steadily near 90°F during the day.

Made from a soft, broken-in black leather, Jesse’s hip-length jacket appears to have once had a four-button front, with the lowest button totally gone and the second remaining brown woven leather button hanging by a thread. The ventless jacket has horizontal yokes across the chest and back, with a vertical seam extending down from the front yokes to the waist hem. The flapped side pockets slant gently toward the back. The cuffs are left plain, but the remnants of thread on each suggest that a single button once adorned each one.

Céline and Jesse field an offer to spend part of their low-budget evening in Vienna watching a bovine play.

Jesse’s base layer is a heathered gray cotton short-sleeved T-shirt, which he seems to alternate between wearing correctly and wearing inside-out, as evident by when the seams are exposed over the shoulders. Under the T-shirt’s standard crew-neck, Jesse wears a simple black leather-corded necklace.

Note the exposed seams on Jesse’s T-shirt shoulders and around the crew-neck, indicating that he was likely wearing his shirt inside-out.

A few hours later, Jesse appears to be wearing the shirt correctly.

Blue jeans are firmly rooted in American fashion, so it’s reasonable to see Jesse—the young American of meager means—wearing the same trusty Levi’s as he probably wears at home. Made from a light-blue washed denim, Jesse’s jeans have a roomy fit, classic five-pocket configuration and a button-fly that suggests the classic Levi’s 501® Original Fit. He wears them with a brown leather belt that closes through a squared silver-toned single-prong buckle.

Arriving and departing.

Before Sunrise focuses on the power of conversing, so it’s significant to see our male protagonist strolling through the streets of Vienna in a pair of Converse sneakers, specifically the iconic high-top Chuck Taylor All Star model.

With the involvement of professional basketball star Charles Taylor, who had joined the company as a salesman and provided feedback about improving flexibility and ankle support, the Massachusetts-based Converse Rubber Shoe Company introduced its new basketball shoes in the early 1920s, capitalizing on the Taylor association with his signature on the ankle patch by way of endorsement. More than a century later, the shoe has maintained the same overall design with its contrast-stitched canvas “high-top” uppers and white rubber outsoles and toe cap. The shoes have eight sets of nickel-finished eyelets for the flat woven cotton laces, with the eyelets matching the two ventilation grommets on the inner side of each shoe.

Jesse’s Chucks follow the classic black-and-white colorway, with black cotton canvas uppers detailed with white contrast stitching that matches the laces and the rubber outsoles and toe cap, though the round white ankle patches echo the shoes’ red, white, and blue all-American origins with “CONVERSE” and “ALL STAR” in red text flanking a large blue five-pointed star that bisects Chuck Taylor’s blue-printed signature.

All Stars under the stars.

Shop the shoes:

Converse Chuck Taylor All Star

Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars have been iconic American basketball shoes for more than 100 years, available from a range of outfitters today:

• Amazon
• Converse
• DSW
• Nordstrom
• Saks Fifth Avenue

Availability current as of Feb. 13, 2023.

The long break of Jesse’s full-fitting jeans and the high tops of his sneakers cover his socks, though viewers hoping for more knowledge of his undergarments can catch a glimpse of his red tartan plaid boxer shorts as he and Céline move through the train on their way to the dining car.

What to Imbibe

“You think Old Milwaukee’s expensive here?” Jesse jokes with Céline after she offers to buy him a beer in the club. Based on the red-printed yellow labels on their green-bottled beers, they appear to be drinking Ottakringer, an Austrian beer established in Vienna in 1837.

Beer-fueled pinball.

After determining “no delusions, no projections, let’s just make tonight great,” the duo ducks into a local bar where Jesse talks an amiable bar owner into selling them a bottle of red wine—on credit—while Céline purloins a pair of used wine glasses from an unbussed table. We get a glimpse of the label, but I’m not well-versed enough in wines to determine any more detail than that!

Jesse finagles a bottle of wine from a sympathetic bar owner.

How to Get the Look

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise (1995)

Jesse tours Europe in a conspicuously American casual style, comprised of staples like a plain gray T-shirt, blue Levi’s, and black Converse sneakers and anchored by his well-traveled black leather jacket.

• Black leather hip-length jacket with four-button front, horizontal chest and back yokes, slanted flapped hip pockets, ventless back, and plain cuffs
• Burgundy turtleneck
• Gray heathered cotton crew-neck short-sleeve T-shirt
• Light blue denim Levi’s 501 Original Fit button-fly jeans
• Brown leather belt with squared silver-toned single-prong buckle
• Black-and-white Converse Chuck Taylor All Star high-top basketball sneakers with black cotton canvas uppers, white laces, and white rubber outsoles and toe caps

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie, the first installment in what would become the excellent “Before” Trilogy.

Footnote

Before Sunrise evidently pulled some inspiration from James Joyce as well, following the example established in Ulysses of being set entirely in one city on June 16th, the same day that Joyce and his future wife Nora Barnacle met and is now celebrated by Joyce’s fans as “Bloomsday”.

The Quote

I always think if I could just accept the fact that my life is supposed to be difficult… then I might not get so pissed off about it, and I’d just be glad when something nice happens.

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