Oomph for Robert Redford’s Jacket
- Polka
- Sep 16
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 19
The actor’s blazer in 1975’s Three Days of the Condor is flawless. Fifty years later, it’s still a rare bird.
If you have this grey tweed blazer worn by Robert Redford in the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor, anything is possible. It’s perfect. No one, has ever been able to replicate it. All menswear guys, at one point, have tried to copy this jacket. Even Ralph Lauren. And no one has succeeded.
A slick, moody thriller directed by Sydney Pollack that typifies the era’s geopolitical paranoia, Three Days of the Condor, released exactly 50 years ago on 27 September 1975, was reviewed as “good-looking and entertaining”, but ultimately “no match for stories that have appeared in your local newspaper”. Redford, though, fresh from The Sting and The Great Gatsby, is in his boy-scout pomp. As Joe Turner, a low-level CIA operative with Labrador energy and perfectly bleached bangs, he is preternaturally stylish, scootering around New York in flared denim, a gold and grey wool tie, a ski beanie pulled boyishly low. And that jacket.
It’s a really wide herringbone. The only thing similar now is over-coating. The fabric looks quite heavy too. The way the shoulder is falling and the rope on the sleeve head, it’s fairly substantial. The edge stitching [on the lapel and pockets — known as a swelled edge] is done by machine. And a bespoke tailor in 1975 would definitely have done it by hand. The cuff buttons look to be fused and inoperative, another sign of inexpensive work.
Film’s costume designer, Joseph Aulisi, remembers that the plan for Turner’s wardrobe was clear. Turner, a bookishly charismatic jock, has a personal style that is not dissimilar from Redford’s, so the plan was for the former’s wardrobe to simply mirror the latter’s even if Turner’s low-paying job wouldn’t allow for expensive clothing.
“We still wanted to have a sleekness,” says Aulisi. “When I found the jacket [at Barney’s men’s store on Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue] I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It ostensibly looks like a herringbone, but it’s no normal herringbone. It has a wide band, and the threads change — at some points it almost looks like a maze, or a labyrinth.”
Comments