Vol. 03 No. 04

In honor of the last night’s Academy Awards this week, I’m getting into movies. While looking at these films – specifically their costumes – as cultural products of their time, many of them are still referenced in certain men’s style circles today. These films, released between 1946 and 1982, have costumes that reflect the wear and popularity of military uniforms in American popular fashion. Simply put, this is the film syllabus for my research on military clothing in popular fashion. 

Many of these films are in a mode of post-war realism, with costumes designed to reflect a certain authenticity and closeness to the reality of clothing on the streets. Films also have an outsized influence on men’s style, with many of these films still relevant today. Stills from some of these films populate men’s style Instagram moodboards and prestige fashion publication websites alike. Men’s style, in particular, can get hung up on both the past and Hollywood. The styles of Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and Robert Redford are still seen as inspirations. There is a whole industry – all be it small – of coffee table books dedicated to this very premise. Joshua Rothman artfully picks at this backward-looking and costume-like nature of men’s fashion in his New Yorker piece “It’s Raining Menswear”: 

For many men, it was more appealing to dress like Steve McQueen than to dress like a frat guy. That wasn’t just because McQueen looked better. It was because the culture of the frat guy was so clearly the product of marketing; he was, ultimately, a creature of the mall…Walk into a menswear boutique and you’ll find yourself asking questions like: Do I prefer Cary Grant or Sean Connery? The First World War or Vietnam? The Army or the Navy? The woods or the West? One effect of menswear’s search for authenticity, in short, has been an outsize and somewhat embarrassing nostalgia…As a man who enjoys clothes, I often find the postmodern nature of menswear frustrating. I want to dress like myself, and not like James Bond, Steve McQueen, Sartre, or some action figure I owned when I was a kid. (Of course, dressing like “oneself” raises other problems of authenticity.)

This is just to say that while these films are all 40+ years old, many of them still have an outsized hold on men’s style today. 

Fred (Dana Andrews) in his A2 jacket and khaki shirt and trousers

The defining film of the immediate postwar period, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, won the best picture along with six other Oscars in 1947. The story follows three WWII veterans attempting to adjust to civilian life. The viewer meets the characters all in uniform and watches them convert to their civilian wardrobes. While there is no mention of the postwar clothing shortage, the characters maintain pieces of their uniforms in their civilian wardrobes. Homer (Harold Russell) wears his Navy chambray workshirt, and Fred (Dana Andrews) takes to wearing his leather A2 flight jacket. Al’s (Fredric March) clothes from before the war don’t fit and are shown as being out of style. Specifically, Fred’s A2 jacket marks him out as a veteran. Fred is the nominal main character of the film, struggling more than Al or Homer to adjust to civilian life, his marriage in disarray, his work meaningless, and suffering from PTSD. While Al and Homer had started dressing in suits and ties, Fred wears an outfit of khaki trousers, a similar workshirt, and his A2 jacket, reminiscent of his uniform.  

Only a few years later, in 1950, the comedy film The Admiral Was a Lady depicts the immediate postwar for four members of a US Army Air Force bomber. The comedy centers around the antics of the four former crewmen and their schemes to live high off the government’s veteran unemployment benefits of $20 a week for 52 weeks. In line for their weekly $20 check, they bump into an unemployed former WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). Always scheming ways to make a dime while not being lawfully employed, their costumes are a mix of civilian clothing and uniforms. Eddie (Johnny Sands) wears his A2 jacket and his web trouser belt, while Mike (Steve Brodie) styles his Ike jacket with a turtleneck and slacks. This movie is a wonderful slice of postwar pop culture. It is available in full on Youtube. 

Serpico (Al Pacino) wearing a US Navy “dixie cup,” Og-107 shirt, and likely Navy dungarees.

Fast-forwarding a few decades, the next movie on my syllabus is Serpico. Based on the true story of Frank Serpico (Al Pacino), an NYPD cop in the turbulent and crime-ridden 60s and 70s who takes on the NYPD’s rampant corruption. Serpico’s costumes are iconic in men’s style, constantly referenced and copied. Serpico’s outfits throughout the film are a heavy mix of surplus, from US Navy “dixie cup” hats, OG-107 fatigues, field jackets, and Navy dungarees. The depiction in the film is true to the style of the real Serpico, who was a bohemian West Village dwelling plainclothes cop. Anna Hill Johnstone created costumes that now feel so evocative of the time in the US and specifically New York City style. Johnstone supposedly raided the closets and attics of her friends in Brooklyn for the film.  

Serpico (Al Pacino) wearing an M-1965 field jacket

While not a favorite, it is hard not to mention Taxi Driver. De Niro’s Travis Bickle is the epitome of the outsider, loner, disturbed veteran (an oft-trotted out trope post-Vietnam), and his costumes reflect it, most notably the M-1965 Field Jacket and the WWII “tanker jacket.” All these years later, ad copy for Alpha Industries (a supplier of M-1965 field jackets and current brand) still references Taxi Driver and trades on the field jacket’s 60s and 70s tough outsider status. The costumes of Taxi Driver, more than Serpico or other films, have stuck in the brain of popular culture and fashion. In 2016, Vogue ran a web story, “What Fashion Owes Scorsese’s Taxi Driver:” 

On the runways, too, Scorsese’s masterwork—by this writer’s estimation, at least—has long resonated. Lee McQueen’s Fall 1993 collection, his first after graduating from Central Saint Martins, took the film’s title as its name, and paid homage to it in typically unflinching form, with prints of Bickle and blood-smeared models; McQueen’s own father was a taxi driver. (For more on the collection, which was never fully photographed, visit this excellent and encyclopedic Tumblr dedicated to the house.) For Junya Watanabe, who conjured up Bickle on his Fall 2006 menswear runway, De Niro’s character was emblematic of strength and single-minded motivation. “Men,” Watanabe mused backstage, “should take charge.” 

Taxi Driver has become the definitive 1970s film, a stand-in for the period itself. When one looks to reference the gritty, popular fashion of the era, one reaches for this film. It has become the avatar for the decade in style, and with that comes a healthy dose of military uniforms. 

Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) wearing an M-1965 field jacket and Gucci bit loafers.

The last two films to be referenced bring military styles fully into the mainstream. Annie Hall (1977) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) represent the full yuppie-fication of military surplus style. In Kramer vs. Kramer, Dustin Hoffman pairs his M-1965 Field Jacket with Gucci bit loafers, while Woody Allen (a noted surplus store style maven) wears his M-1951 field jacket in line to see The Sorrow and the Pity. This is a far cry from undercover narcotics cops or porn theaters in Times Square. Surplus military uniforms begin to represent past youth and self-conscious longing for outsider status. A generation that has become the establishment that once was looking to tear it all down. It has become a prop, a stand-in for taking a stand. Starting in the mid-80s, Banana Republic, which started out selling Army Surplus to white urban professionals in the post-hippie years, began making its own version of the M-1965 field jacket from more refined fabric and trimmings. With this, the field jacket made its final move outside of even affected utility and into a place in the fashion system.

Till next time, 

C.W.M.

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