Brad Pitt’s midlife crisis wardrobe
Baggy jeans, velvet jacket? What’s going on with the 61-year-old.
Be careful what you wish for. As a long-term advocate for men having more fun with what they wear I feel as if Brad Pitt’s appearance in a blue crushed velvet jacket at the weekend is at least partly on me. Because obviously the actor hangs on my every word - pretty much won’t leave me alone, in fact. Such a pain.
Rare is the 61-year-old male who could pull this one off. So rare, it transpires, that even Pitt didn’t quite manage it. It hurts me to say it but what is underlined by this latest manifestation of the actor’s hardcore embrace of Fun Fashion is that the male of the species can have too much of it. And I speak as a woman who has manoeuvred her other half into a pink chore jacket. (He loves it. Honestly.)
I see Pitt’s jacket and I think of the Bristol branch of Principles in 1989. That’s my trauma, not his. It is, after all, a long way from California to the shopping streets of Broadmead. But there has to be an American equivalent - a mall in his home town of Springfield, Missouri, perhaps - and he should have been similarly scarred by it.
My issue, to drill down into the detail, is not so much the velvet, nor even the colour, but the crushedness and the drapiness. It’s all a little bit too - if I am allowed to say this - girly, while also not being girly enough. If you want to bend the rules, then bend them. In for a penny, in for a backless top (Timothee Chalamet) or metallic harlequin jumpsuit (Harry Styles).
But it’s not only the jacket. It’s what he is wearing it with. As part of a suit I might almost (almost!) be OK with it. Add in a striped shirt, baggy jeans and middle-management footwear and what I am getting is female daytime television presenter crossed with estate agent crossed with raver. It’s Lorraine meets Stath Lets Flats meets Bez from the Happy Mondays.
This is confusing, to say the least. A less generous commentator might go so far as to label it egregious. Although it’s also entertaining, I suppose, especially when you see him cheek by jowl with his conventionally chic - and, Pitt being a film star, conventionally much younger - girlfriend, Ines de Ramon, 32. Clothes-wise, he is very much the Helena Bonham Carter in this relationship.
It’s three years now since Pitt embraced his inner ... his inner what, exactly? Exhibitionist is perhaps the best way to encapsulate a wardrobe approach that has included lemon yellow co-ords, peach tailoring, lilac silk shirting, a panoply of bucket hats and, most notably, a skirt suit. Cool or desperate? You decide.
One memorable response on social media to that skirt suit in 2022 was, and I quote, “Who on God’s Great Earth is Brad Pitt’s new stylist?” To which the answer seems to be George Cortina, whose other notable achievements include putting Paul Mescal in black leather shorts and tank top on the cover of GQ.
At least Pitt seems to have a sense of humour about his stylistic gear change. His recent appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon entailed him and Fallon playing Frisbee in the park together, like the 18-year-olds they are not, garbed in truly appalling tie-dye.
You will no doubt be unsurprised to hear by this point that Pitt has something to promote. It’s his new Formula 1 film, the imaginatively titled F1: The Movie, which is out on June 25. As Hollywood women have known and exploited since, well, the beginning of Hollywood, what you wear can earn you headlines, not to mention slightly pompous analyses in The Times - which can, in turn, get you audiences.
Men are now daring to adopt the same playbook - brave and usually extremely good-looking men who are, it’s worth noting, already in a position of power rather than attempting to shin their way up.
We have come to expect this stuff of a younger generation of superstar: Styles, Chalamet, ASAP Rocky, Lewis Hamilton et al. And it’s interesting to note how their outre-ness is spreading to others in their age group - the once strait-laced Eddie Redmayne, for one, who is now working with Styles’s longstanding stylist Harry Lambert.
Even among his own age cohort, Pitt is not alone in his Gen Z-esque peacockery. Daniel Craig (57), in parachute pants and yellow-tinted sunglasses, is giving him a run for his money. Colman Domingo (55), a more freshly minted star, looks to be drawing almost as much pleasure from getting dressed up as he is from his deservedly stratospheric cinematic trajectory - and highly enjoyable it is to witness too.
Winding up the age bracket further, Jeff Goldblum (72) has been pushing the envelope for decades, albeit by way of dandyish tailoring as opposed to the more slouchy skater-adjacent get-ups that have become Pitt’s default, and that are considerably more category-busting.
Because whatever you think of the results, bending the rules around age-appropriateness is, if you get it right, a way to come across as youthful. If you wear the kind of clothes that twentysomethings are more likely to choose than fiftysomethings, you confound the cliches about ageing.
Not that Pitt needs to do that. His preposterously well-maintained looks are already pulling that off for him. A body as buff as his, not to mention skin as buffed, can get you a very long way. Might there be a Wildean picture of Brad Pitt in an attic somewhere? And, if so, what is that Pitt wearing?
A non-Wildean warning for the real Pitt, however: there are always going to be tells as to your true age, as I was reminded at a Gucci show the other week. When a friend and I clocked a sartorially on-brand Goldblum rootling around in a small paper bag on the front row opposite us, we couldn’t initially discern what was in it. Eventually we worked it out. Fisherman’s Friends. How very - charmingly - septuagenarian of him. Stay clear of the Fisherman’s Friends, Brad.
The Times
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