In On the Rocks , Bill Murray Is the Suit-Wearing King of New York

“Everyone in SoHo dresses like this now,” the joke goes. The phrase is usually tweeted alongside a photo of some long-forgotten cultural figure whose style seems to overlap almost perfectly with the prevailing advanced-fashion looks of the day. “To make the joke is to announce a deep exhaustion with much of menswear’s fixations, alongside a deep familiarity with them,” Max Lakin wrote for this website in January: a sense that, as hilariously as the young men outside Aimé Leon Dore or wherever might be dressing, someone else had worn their weird pants first.

I thought of the phrase while watching On the Rocks, Sofia Coppola’s mellow new Manhattanite caper. But not because anyone in the film was wearing Balenciaga or oversized Hawaiian shirts or all Raf Simons everything. Quite the opposite: This being a Sofia Coppola movie, everyone in it is almost distractingly tasteful. They’re in carefully aged vintage, and elegant gold jewelry, and soft-shouldered suits. This, of course, is what everyone is SoHo dresses like—or at least used to, when we still got dressed.

On the Rocks is ostensibly about Laura (Rashida Jones), a writer and mother frustrated to be doing a lot more of the latter than the former. She grows concerned that her husband, Dean, might be cheating on her and—perhaps against her better judgment—calls in her joyful philanderer of a father to crack the case.

If the film is strangely uninterested in Laura’s plight—her problems in love and work, it turns out, are mostly in her head—that’s because nearly all of its sympathy is reserved for her father, who is played by Bill Murray and who spends the movie’s 96 minutes giving a masterclass in charm. His Felix, a raconteur art dealer, is a little misogynistic, and a little more into sex-heavy evolutionary theory than you’d want your elderly father to be. But he’s also Bill Murray, at basically any moment seducing every character and the camera.

And here—because it’s set in a pre-pandemic New York, because he’s an art dealer, and because this is simply how it’s done in Manhattan—Felix does most of his seducing in a suit “We always wanted him to feel sophisticated and worldly, but also still have that softness and charm,” costume designer Stacey Battat tells me. Which meant suits: some from Brooks Brothers and some from Battistoni; a seersucker worn, winningly, with white bucks and a navy wool worn with a T-shirt.

He first appears through the window of his perfect-vintage chauffeured Mercedes, his head framed by an open-collar dress shirt (Felix is uptown, but not uptight) and polka-dot scarf. He moves through the world so easily—infuriatingly easily, to hear his daughter tell it—that it’s impossible to understand his suits as stodgy, or stiff, or formal. They are soft-shouldered armor, built to wear while roaring into the daily adventure that is his life in New York.

If you’ve spent more than a little time in New York, you know a version this guy: offensively charming, unimaginably wealthy, confident beyond belief. And in our extended period of Sweatpants Forever, it’s easy to forget that he was always wearing a suit. Hell, he’s probably wearing one now.

Murray’s character isn’t the only one who gets to have fun with his wardrobe. Laura rocks a killer white Paris Review T-shirt (custom-made, Battat explains; the original only came in black), while her husband cycles through his own rotation of suits. Dean runs some sort of startup, and so he buttons his shirts to the top and wears sneakers, and gets to have a nice little suit-off with Murray while wearing a khaki number.

But this is Bill Murray’s show, as you always knew it would be. Battat’s aim was to make the character feel worldly but relatable. The actor helped with that. “Bill brings a lot of the relatableness,” she says. “I can't take any credit for that. The charm of the character is not in the suits, though I like to pretend it is.” The charm, instead, is in what Murray does with them: he wears a belt with his suspenders, for example, much to the costume department’s chagrin. You can take New Yorkers out of their suits. But—as long as we’re still making movies starring people wearing real clothes—you can’t take the suits out of New York.

Originally Appeared on GQ