The pantheon of men’s style icons is surprisingly compact. There are scores of uniquely handsome and stylish actors, pop stars, sportsmen – but when it comes to their decades-long influence and a sense of permanence unaffected by trends in fashion, three square-jawed American boys next door stand out: Paul Newman, Steve McQueen – and Robert Redford, who died yesterday at 89.
Redford’s death is, obviously, a loss to cinema. In the latter half of the 20th century, few actors so roundly embodied the soul of American film-making, or perhaps even the US itself. During a decade-long, career-defining run of hit movies, Redford established the archetype of the modern leading man. He was impossibly handsome and warmly charismatic, of course, but also scrappy, soulful, athletic, bookishly intelligent and politically aware. A matinee idol who could fix your car while reciting Walt Whitman.
But his influence spread beyond Hollywood. For the menswear fraternity, especially those remaining few tasked with publishing men’s style magazines, Redford’s death is especially poignant. He was a paragon of masculine cool and a sartorial chameleon, able to take any aesthetic trope – the cowboy, the drifter, the clean-cut executive, the coastal intellectual – and make it shine with easy authenticity.
Redford played with style, able to flit between macho tradition and 70s femininity, and always with innate sex appeal
Redford’s breakout role came in 1969 as the Sundance Kid, opposite Newman’s Butch Cassidy, in a film that remodelled the cowboy for 1960s pop culture. The pair were smart, irreverent and sensitive, dressed as much for Greenwich village as the OK Corral.
In the same year, Redford popped up in the Swiss Alps as part of a fictitious Olympic ski team in Downhill Racer, swapping jumbo corduroy prairie-wear for a clean shave and one of the many singular garments that would gradually serve as tent poles for his sartorial lore. There are whole webpages dedicated to the shearling coat Redford wears in the movie, which is just a nice shearling coat. But on him it was somehow more. In case you want to buy your own, sleuths have deduced that the coat had western pointed yokes, set-in sleeves with plain cuffs and pile-lined curved welts. But actually, it’s the garment’s blue-eyed contents that gives it such appeal.
