How The Irishman ’s Costume Designers Created the Year’s Most Tender Pajama Moment

“One of the first things Martin actually said to us was that this isn’t Goodfellas. It’s not Casino,” said Sandy Powell, who, along with Christopher Powell, designed the costumes for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. “These aren’t the same kind of guys. These are much more subtle looking.

“So on the one hand, you think, ‘Oh, I want to do really wild and interesting gangsters.’ On the other hand, it’s more of a challenge, and it was really interesting [to interpret] the subtleties and the differences.”

Perhaps the scene where costume underscores those differences most is the one that finds Jimmy Hoffa, played by Al Pacino, and Frank Sheeran, played by Robert DeNiro, discussing Hoffa’s idea for Sheeran to run for president of a Pennsylvania union. They conduct the entire conversation while wearing complementary sets of blue pajamas. One is a despotic labor union leader who turns the Teamsters pension fund into a mafia money pot, and the other a mafia-adjacent hitman with grandiose Zelig tendencies, but there they are, in an unremarkable hotel in a midsize American city wearing cornflower blue and plaid jammies, respectively, discussing a little light corruption the way midcentury married couples shared intimacies before retiring to their separate twin beds.

“Obviously the scene was scripted [that the characters be] in pajamas, which was always quite hilarious,” Powell said. “Then it was just a question of trying on different pajamas on each of them until they found something they were comfortable in and looked right.”

With vintage pajamas, Powell said, “There’s always going to be something not quite right, or that doesn’t fit right. We had to make sure they looked good, but not silly.” So they ended up making the pajamas, which are simple in style—“traditional,” as Powell said—following the script to the letter: “long sleeve, long pant pajamas.”

“Of course people still wear pajamas,” Peterson said, “but for men to put on, you know, a matching set of pajamas—it’s unusual to see now.”

Powell has worked with Scorsese on nearly all of his films since 2002’s Gangs of New York, with Peterson working as an assistant costume designer on recent productions, including The Wolf of Wall Street. They were given a huge cache of information, including photographs and film footage, by Scorsese’s longtime researcher Marianne Bower, about the characters, whom they were tasked with dressing across five decades.

Below, Powell and Peterson break down other major looks from the film.

The Spearpoint Collar

As we’ve previously observed, the spearpoint collar has been a longtime Pesci signature, particularly in Scorsese films like Goodfellas and Mean Streets. “It’s a memory from Marty’s youth growing up in New York,” Peterson said. “Simply, it’s a collar that has traveled across many of Marty’s films, and every time that it appears, the designer has handled it slightly different.”

It’s become bigger and sharper in Scorsese’s films, Powell noted, with the apex being the fang-like collars of Goodfellas. For this film, Scorsese told the designers he wanted something more subtle. “These guys did not want to be noticed, particularly,” she said. “They are more under the radar.”

“So we really pulled back on that collar,” Peterson added. “We tried to hone much more closely to that classic spearpoint collar.”

Skinny Razor’s Ties

Skinny Razor—Bobby Cannavale’s swaggering butcher-turned-murderous gastronome Felix DiTullio—had perhaps the most flamboyant style of the male gangsters, particularly when it came to his wildly printed ties. Powell said they found the ties “everywhere,” but that “actually a couple of them belonged to Martin Scorsese himself.”

Peterson recalled DeNiro sharing a story about how he and Scorsese would shop in Los Angeles together during the ’70s for vintage clothing. He kept several of the ties as a kind of archive, and sent them to Peterson and Powell. “They had to go on somebody,” Powell said, “and we decided to use them on Bobby Cannavale.”

The Ban-Lon Knits

Camp shirts and knit shirts are staples in the few casual outfits in which Sheeran, Hoffa, and Frank Bufalino (Joe Pesci) appear, such as a creamy Ban-Lon short-sleeved knit that Bufalino wears during the road trip that threads the film’s narrative together. The designers had the knits manufactured, since the synthetic fabric doesn’t age particularly well. They gave the task to Maria Ficalora, who teaches knitting at the Parsons School of Fashion, and has knitted costumes for film, television, and the stage, including making sweaters for Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street. “She’s very, very good and very meticulous about getting the period right,” Powell said.

Tony Pro’s Non-Suit

Another scene in which the costumes steer the mood is the moment when union man-slash-mobster Tony Pro arrives 15 minutes late for a meeting with the notoriously punctual Hoffa—and has the pluck to wear short-shorts and a chest-baring mustard-and-brown clownfish-print camp shirt instead of a suit, which Hoffa takes as a sign of disrespect. Since the egregiously casual look was in the script, it was “a question of getting a hundred different pairs of shorts, and a hundred different short-sleeved tops, and trying on every combination until we hit the right one,” Powell said.

Peterson added, “Stephen Graham, who plays Tony Pro, is completely fearless. He will put on anything.”

“He knew the minute he had the right shorts,” Powell said.

The Howard Johnson Tableau

In one foreboding scene during Bufalino and Sheeran’s wedding-bound road trip, Bufalino and Sheeran sit by on the patio of a Howard Johnson’s hotel as their wives dip their feet in the pool. Their wives’ maddening, Pucci-inspired printed swimwear and the men’s camp shirts create a strange and malaised harmony with the dull tones of the hotel chain’s signature colors. When Powell and Peterson saw photographs of the location, it hadn’t yet been restored for filming, so they didn’t realize how well it would work until they got on set. “Really, it was all about the women’s swimwear,” Powell said. “We hunted and found original swimsuits in good enough condition for them both to wear.”

“The choices that we made for the road trip, especially on the women, grew out of this mad fitting that we had with both of them,” Peterson added. “And the pattern is a throughline there with the women. Anytime we could get one of these men out of a suit, we did that. Usually it was the weather in Miami, the weather on the road trip—it was all summer. So, we tried to lighten up the color palette where we could.”

Bufalino’s Glasses

Throughout the film, Bufalino slips on a huge pair of black glasses that are neither too retro nor too conservative—a kind of a statement for the all-seeing mob boss. “I can’t tell you how many messages I have on Instagram,” Powell said, from people asking, “‘What was the make of Joe Pesci’s glasses?’”

In fact, “That was a collaboration with the props department—” Peterson began.

“—and Joe Pesci,” Powell finished. “Actors are always very, very interested in choosing the glasses. “It’s usually the thing they have the most opinions about, I have to say.”

Hoffa’s Red Hat

Hoffa lacked the natty fetishes of the mobsters with which he conspired, but, Peterson says, “he would just dress quite smartly. He actually looked good in the suits, but there weren’t the same kind of style notes with Hoffa as there were with, say, Russell or Skinny Razor, or any of the other gangsters. He was a much more practical guy.”

An exception is the red hat he wears with a black leather jacket with a shearling collar. “It’s very strange, isn’t it?” Powell said. The red hat appeared in film footage the designers saw of Hoffa, and it “seems really out of place with everything else that he wears, but that was it: we have the footage of it, [and] Martin really wanted us to recreate that.”

Originally Appeared on GQ