In search of Robert Redford’s most iconic jacket
© Alamy
The late actor’s blazer in 1975’s Three Days of the Condor is flawless. Fifty years later, it still encapsulates male elegance
“If you have this, anything is possible. It’s perfect,” says the French designer Nicolas Gabard, founder of tailoring brand Husbands Paris, of the grey tweed blazer worn by Robert Redford in the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor. No one, he adds, 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.
At first glance, it’s a straightforward piece of tailoring. Grey tweed, with a two-button closure, broad notch lapels and a scarlet lining. It’s the herringbone that sets it apart: it is massive, casting great chevrons across Redford’s torso.
“It’s a really wide herringbone,” agrees Will Adams, bespoke tailoring director at Dunhill, when I set out to discover its origins. “The only thing similar now is overcoating.” The fabric looks quite heavy too, he says. “The way the shoulder is falling and the rope on the sleeve head says to me that it’s fairly substantial. I’m not sure it is a true tweed, either,” he adds, suggesting that it might be from an American fabric mill. “I don’t think it’s bespoke: 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.
Robert Redford (left) with director Sydney Pollack on the set of
Three Days of the Condor, wearing the elusive blazer
© Shutterstock
Trawl the internet for clues, and you can see that various menswear-heads have managed to identify Turner’s boots (possibly a pair of Vasque Sundowner hikers), his watch (a Doxa SUB300T Sharkhunter on a leather “bund” strap) and his ring, Redford’s own (a gift from a Native American tribe in 1966, allegedly). But nothing on the jacket. Nor the shirt, tie or navy peacoat he commandeers later in the film.
"It ostensibly looks like a herringbone,
but it’s no normal herringbone"
- Joseph Aulisi, costume designer
on Three Days of the Condor
Few of the original Condor collaborators are still alive. But there is a man who would know where the jacket comes from: the film’s costume designer, Joseph Aulisi. He last worked on Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories in 2017. And he has no online persona. But after weeks of mewling missives, an email arrives out of the blue: “I’d be very happy to speak with you.”
Aulisi calls from his farm in upstate New York, where he has lived since retiring in 2020; he is, he chuckles, aged “somewhere between 40 and death”. He 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.”
The jacket suited Turner’s vibe. It was slick but low-key, and “you could put cheap things with it”, says Aulisi, such as those flared Levi’s jeans (Redford requested a “Hollywood hem”, says Aulisi, which involved cropping the 36in inseam and reattaching the original cuff); a chambray Western shirt and 2in “garrison” belt from an Army & Navy surplus store; and a navy crewneck knit. Redford often wore a tie under a sweater, says Aulisi, “but I never liked the way a tie always bulged under the neck”, so he had the collar removed, making the neckhole wider, “which made the tie more of a feature, without looking out of place”. Turner’s satchel was an old fishing bag, Aulisi’s own: “Redford said he had to have it.”
Aulisi wishes he could say he designed the jacket himself. The fabric was “magical,” he says, but it was too boxy, so he had a tailor nip in the waist, add the swelled-edge stitching, and exaggerate the vent to give it more movement. And the brand? “I have no idea who the maker was,” he apologises, before politely reminding me that this was 50 years ago.
Though the details are lost, similar iterations exist: Drake’s (£895), Edward Sexton (£1,450), Polo Ralph Lauren (£1,195) and Gabard’s Husbands Paris (£1,326) all offer their own versions. “It’s so versatile,” says Gabard of a grey herringbone jacket. “You can wear it in so many ways.” And you don’t need Turner’s fringe or jawline to pull it off, either. “He’s not a dandy,” points out Gabard. “He’s just a normal guy.”
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
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