On Friday, I ducked out of the office early to see “The Odyssey.” I loved it. An all-too-jacked Matt Damon, a wonderfully sniveling Robert Pattinson, a boat ride into hell, Charlize Theron looking as if she stumbled out of a fragrance ad, a fleet of silvery soldiers at Victor Wembanyama-scale? This is why we go to the movies!
But I’m not going to sit here and lie to you that “The Odyssey” is a fashion movie. It’s the standard swords-and-sandals fare we’ve seen before: a lot of coarse tunics and drapey robes.
Still, “The Odyssey” has one singular incredible garment: the jacket trimmed in cheetah fur worn by Pattinson’s Antinous.
The feline fluff curling around Antinous’s neck betrays his cunning. Pattinson, speaking with GQ before the movie came out, described his character as “like a little sleazy.” A speckle of spots wasn’t enough for the actor; he wanted Antinous to wear leopard underwear, which would have rendered this Grecian suitor as a Tom Ford runway model. Probably for the best that it didn’t come to pass.
My eye kept drifting back to that cheetah fringe. It felt so contemporary. In men’s wear we have these agreed-upon areas in an outfit where we say, “OK, here, right here, you’re allowed to add something feminine or something a bit twisted.” It’s the dash that does a lot.
The collar is one of those spots. “The Odyssey” seemed to be saying that that logic goes way back to the Bronze Age. Antinous’s jacket made me think of Helmut Lang’s parkas and bombers from the late 1990s, with collars trimmed in fur that was arctic fox white.
Yet that isn’t quite the right comparison. White fur is too tame. To get closer to what Antinous was wearing, we’d have to go back to Hedi Slimane’s tenure at Saint Laurent in the mid-2010s. Now there was a designer who knew how to use some cheetah. It appeared on sweaters and across jacket lapels. A denim jacket from Saint Laurent’s 2016 collection with a spotted leopard collar in Pepto neon is what Antinous would have worn had Christopher Nolan unwisely decided to reboot “The Odyssey” in the middle of a Guns & Roses tour. Slimane’s feline flourishes were indebted to grunge. They were, to use Pattinson’s word, sleazy.
I bring all of this up because the fur collar seems to be re-entering our field of view. Just before I entered the theater, I saw an Instagram post from the London designer Jake Burt, whom I profiled last year. It showed a new jacket that he was selling. It had — bingo! — a fuzzy, cow-printed collar. Antonius, I imagine, would have been a Jake’s shopper.
Other things worth knowing about:
A couple readers wrote to ask me about the white socks that Harry Styles was wearing with black loafers, as seen in last Friday’s newsletter. Yes, that is still a thing. You can probably thank Alessandro Michele for it. The white sock-black shoe was a foundation of Michele’s granny-meets-geek sensibility when he was at Gucci. To me, the look is trite, too knowingly dorky. I prefer gray socks with black shoes. Not a heather gray — that’s still too athletic — but darker gray. I wear these from Uniqlo. They’re lighter, still neutral, but not as glaring as white.
The indelible fit of the day
I have to say, I wasn’t familiar with Jason Bard Yarmosky, but from the full single-pleat trousers to the very Cary Grant “To Catch a Thief” bandanna (ascot? neckerchief?), this is a very good outfit.
