Without looking like you’re wearing a costume.
It works for the same reason the best celebrity style usually works.
It does not look styled.
Or rather, it does, obviously, this is a movie. But it looks like the sort of wardrobe that could have been assembled by a real person with particular tastes and a long habit of dressing himself a certain way. Which is why it feels believable in a way a lot of on-screen wardrobes do not.
And I suspect that is where some of the magic comes from, because the line between costume design and Gosling’s own taste feels blurred, to say the least. The fox cardigan, the joke science t-shirts, the mix of heritage knitwear, offbeat workwear basics, and very particular eyewear all feel at least adjacent to his instincts. Not entirely his, I am sure.
Ryland Grace does not dress like a generic scruffy genius, or a slick Hollywood version of an awkward academic. He dresses like someone who has landed on a few specific things he likes and kept wearing them. A man with an unusual cardigan he is oddly attached to (and is never acknowledged by others), a few t-shirts that amuse him, decent glasses, and useful outerwear.
The fox cardigan is the piece everyone has latched onto, and fairly enough. Mary Maxim, the largest Canadian mail-order knitting supply company still going since 1956, made this style of sweater famous. It draws on that old curling-sweater tradition: all outdoorsy nostalgia, sporting associations, and slightly eccentric animal motifs.
For the film, the costume department started with a Mary Maxim pattern, changed the original wolves to foxes (apparently at Gosling’s request), and knitted five sweaters for production. Which is about as far from an off-the-rack movie tie-in as you can get.
Mary Maxim product photos for their knitting patterns: Left, the original wolf pattern; right, the modified fox pattern for the film
That one detail tells you almost everything you need to know. The sweater is chunky, specific, a little dated, a little odd, and not flattering in any slick contemporary space-movie way. It looks like something a real person would love for reasons that are only partly rational.
But I think it is also worth saying that the fox sweater is probably this decade’s scorpion jacket from Drive. In the movie, it’s perfect. We all wanted it. But if you go out and buy the exact thing, everyone knows what you’ve done. It’s sooo specific, you are dressing as the character in the character’s costume.
Which, you do you, if what you want is the object itself. But if what you actually like is the feeling of the wardrobe, then chasing the exact fox sweater is probably the wrong lesson.
The better lesson is to find a real-world piece that gives you the same charge without tipping over into costume. And here the obvious answer is the classic Pendleton Westerly sweater.
It is not fox-covered, sadly and obviously. But effect-wise it gets surprisingly close to the same territory: heavy knit, heritage feel, bold retro patterning. It was worn by the Dude in The Big Lebowski, yes, but it existed before that film and after it as well.
If the fox cardigan had been sitting on Amazon for the last decade in the way the Pendleton has, then yes, people could probably wear it more loosely.
The Pendleton does not have that problem. Pair it with a chambray shirt and denim, or throw it over a faded band tee, and you are in the world of the film without looking as though you have dressed up as Ryland Grace.
Of course, if you look even remotely similar to this, probably safer to avoid this sweater.
And the useful part of the wardrobe is not really the foxes anyway. It is the mix.
Really, the overall aesthetic being presented here is not that mysterious. Like Gosling’s own style, it leans on two silos: roughly 70% premium Americana workwear and 30% premium indie obscurity.
The first bit is the foundation, denim, chambray, workwear-adjacent outerwear, sturdy sweaters, proper boots, ordinary useful things.
The second bit is where the character comes from, the odd graphic tee, the yellow layer, the retro wireframe glasses…the vintage sweater with two giant fox heads on it.
That is how men develop their personal style, by building on a base and letting a few specific preferences keep repeating.
The t-shirts make more sense in that light. The science tees were reportedly based on the joke science shirts the director’s son wears, which is much better than if wardrobe had simply gone out and bought whatever looked generically nerdy. And the band tees do the same sort of work. A graphic tee like that gives a wardrobe a bit of biography. When done well, it communicates personal taste, habit, and a person who has accumulated things over time rather than coordinated them all at once.
Grace wearing a Hermanos Gutiérrez band t-shirt, which I was excited by because it’s kind of a random pull and I love their dramatic, instrumental music
Then there are the glasses, which appear to be vintage Savile Row T48 Rimway frames, semi-rimmed, slightly sharp through the bridge, and are interesting without becoming gimmicky.
If you want a similar shape without going on a vintage hunt, the Shuron Ronwinne or Moscot Plotz are probably the nearest obvious alternatives.
A surprisingly detailed question and answer on his Converse in the movie and the scorpion Drive jacket:
It also helps that the film repeats pieces. Real wardrobes repeat themselves. Sometimes that means you end up with a sweater-as-jacket-hoodie-alternative layer that you throw on whenever you need something extra, even if it is a bit specific and has two giant foxes on it. That is what makes the wardrobe feel human.
And perhaps that is why it has landed with people. Not because it is aspirational in the usual James Bond-style movie sense, but because it makes the case that you can wear graphic tees, bright yellow, weird vintage sweaters with animal heads on them, and retro wireframe glasses, and still look modern, put together, and not like you are performing fashion.
None of that is fantasy. It is simply a very particular kind of normal.
Which is usually the more interesting thing anyway.
