In an early moment of the TV drama series The Bear, the perpetually stressed lead character, Carmy, is seen making a rushed deal in a parking lot. He is trying to swap vintage denim with someone who has a case of beef. Carmy needs the meat for his family’s barely surviving sandwich shop. It may not seem like a great offer but he pleads: “This is original Big E redline selvedge, all right? Nineteen fourty-four. You can get $1,250 for that on eBay tonight.” Throw in a “1955 blanket-lined Type 3” Levi’s denim jacket too – “pleated”? The deal goes down (it’s mirrored in a later episode when another character sells coke to keep the struggling restaurant afloat. Whatever works.)
Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen White, is a nationally recognised award-winning chef, who has returned home to run The Original Beef of Chicagoland after the death of his brother (played in flashback by Jon Bernthal), who had been in chaotic charge. The show is a hectic, closeup look at life in the kitchen. It encompasses grief and trauma, camaraderie and the dignity of work, the strains of gentrification and the fraying ties of family and friends, all at a relentless pace, with rat-a-tat wisecracking and a rage that is always at the point of boiling over. It has been the unexpected hit of US summer television – due on Disney+ in the UK this week – turning its star, complete with tattoos and great hair, into a gritty but damaged heartthrob and meme.
But the early mention of vintage denim points to another aspect that has gained wide attention: its style. “While The Bear appears to be a food show, it’s actually the next great menswear show,” declared Cam Wolf in GQ. Carmy is also briefly seen keeping his denim in the oven at his apartment – a nod, unwittingly or otherwise, to the storage methods of a TV fashion totem from a previous era: Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw. It is not clear whether he collects purely for the resale value or because he’s an out-an-out denim nerd, but his obsessional approach to food is matched by the show’s attention to a certain style.
And that style has been gaining a lot of traction. The show’s costume designers, Courtney Wheeler and Cristina Spiridakis, get almost as much coverage as the show’s main creative team, Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo. Fashion TikTok and subReddits chased down every detail of Carmy’s work wardrobe: his black trousers are Dickies 874 work pants, his footwear a Birkenstock Tokio sandal. The author Kayla Ancrum, New York Magazine and everyone else weighed in on how to get the signature white T-shirt, with emphasis on the specific weight of the material, loop of the collar and cut on the arms and body. Two brands were identified: Whitesville and Merz b. Schwanen.
“I have been surprised by the amount of attention around this style,” says Derek Guy, the menswear writer behind the site Die, Workwear! “The costume designers reportedly went to Self Edge [a small US chain of menswear shops] to buy some of the clothes. After this fact came out, apparently more than 1,000 people went to Self Edge and cleared out their stock of T-shirts from these two brands.”
Ultimately, though, the surge in interest for Carmy/Jeremy Allen White maybe isn’t all that hard to decipher. “Carmy is a very handsome guy and the show’s costume designers did a really good job of styling him,” says Guy. “He has a nice physique, a great hairstyle and cool-looking clothes. Oftentimes, when people talk about clothes in this way, they’re largely drawn by the other aspects of the person’s presentation. But that’s not to take anything away from the clothes or styling. It’s a whole package.”
Regardless, there has been much speculation about The Bear’s universe. “I haven’t been able to figure out if, like, he’s supposed to have shopped for those things,” says Pete Anderson, a menswear writer and contributor to the US style site Put This On. “Does Carmy know about Whitesville T-shirts? Or does the costume designer know that he would look really good in this T-shirt, but he’s supposed to be wearing just a T-shirt he bought.”
On the one hand, Carmy is running a restaurant on the brink of bankruptcy, so could he afford those clothes? On the other, he’s a high-end chef devoted to every aspect of that lifestyle, so of course he would. It is part of the push and pull of a character battling external and internal demons. The look is very alpha, with obvious nods to Marlon Brando and James Dean, and yet he is constantly undermined by the steaming masculinity of his “cousin” Richie (played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach), whom Carmy has usurped in taking over the restaurant. Richie’s look, meanwhile – Adidas tracksuit pants, high-top trainers, a Members Only pleather jacket – is more indebted to an Italo-sports casual style also in the midst of a resurgence and stretching on screen from The Sopranos with Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti, to Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, and even back to the vest and braces worn by James Caan’s Sonny in The Godfather.
Mad Men, starting with a bang in 2007, was perhaps the last TV show to have such a steady stream of attention for its menswear. Again it helped that in its lead, Jon Hamm, they had a handsome actor who could look decent in almost anything. Back in 2011, Banana Republic sold a capsule collection inspired by the series, maybe trying a little too hard. Naturally, much of the retrospective love was merely taking pleasure in its midcentury-modern aesthetic and crisp suiting, rather than something people were likely to emulate regularly.
“I think part of the buzz around The Bear stems from the fact that it doesn’t feel too self-consciously ‘styled’,” says Rob Nowill, content director at the e-commerce site Mr Porter. “The costume design occupies a quieter role than it did in, say, Mad Men or Narcos or The Sandman. And I think that’s the appeal: the way the characters dress feels unstudied, which is how we all want to look, really.”
Anderson agrees: most of prevailing pop culture is elevated reality, period pieces or drawn from comic-book style. “They’re a little harder to imitate, and we’re probably not going to dress like superheroes every day. So this being people in their 20s and 30s, doing a job, if they look good, I think it’s easier for people to say: ‘Oh, I could do that. I can wear that.’”
Another element that makes The Bear stand out is the relative scarcity of broad pop-culture breakout moments lately, be it via fashion, food or anything else. Because of how diffuse culture has become in the past decade, prestige TV shows, films and albums, regardless of their quality, can pass in a blink, barely registering a wider imprint on the world.
“It’s harder to pinpoint a single piece of culture it seems everyone wants to reflect,” says Anderson. “A movie like 2019’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood seemed primed for that sort of influence, and I did see guys looking for T-shirts and jackets in the style of that movie, but I think the bar is much higher these days for universal appeal.” In the film, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio sport the clothes of late-1960s/early-1970s Hollywood on the precipice of change – all denim and beige leather jackets and Hawaiian shirts – but a meme has perhaps lingered longer than its fashion. Granted, Hawaiian shirts are widespread at the moment, but fashion-watcher Jake Woolf suggests the influence goes back to another Tarantino creation: Tim Roth’s hapless thief in the era-defining Pulp Fiction from 1994.
Indeed, it can be hard to manufacture a fashion moment via TV or film. The short-lived HBO series How to Make It in America tried to go direct, chronicling two hipsters’ attempts to build a designer jeans brand among bohemians, scenesters and rich kids in downtown Manhattan. It was 2010’s comedy-drama version of the recent Dimes Square discourse you may have read about, but with boutique denim instead of dork fascism. Though not without some charm, the show was cancelled after a two-season, 16-episode run, and largely lost to time.
Granted, there have been some notable style moments on television in recent years that have organically created a stir. People were endlessly obsessed with the third season of Succession, and there was surprising interest in some of the sartorial choices of the 1% – especially the logo-free cashmere baseball cap worn by Kendall and Logan Roy, as well as the rich-guy gilet layering of Adrien Brody’s cameo character. In late 2020 there was a flurry of attention for the purple Pierpoint & Co branded hoodie worn by a character working for the investment bank at the dark heart of financial drama Industry – even the late great designer Virgil Abloh was hunting for it. And back in the Normal People-crazed early days of the pandemic, there was a brief frenzy for the chain and tight GAA shorts worn by Paul Mescal’s brooding Connell.
The shooting manner of The Bear seems to draw on the singular vision of the Safdie brothers’ recent, much-discussed films. It’s a stressful, relentlessly in-your-face aesthetic, almost a hysterical vérité. The excessive realism of the film-making is reflected in the clothing, too. Of course The Bear’s moment in vogue may not last long, but in Carmy’s kitchen casual it is capturing something immediately accessible and that has long been part of the culture.
“At the risk of sounding corny, I think he wears things that have been appealing for generations because they’re associated with a kind of rugged, working-class masculinity,” says Derek Guy. “Costume designers have relied on these styles for ever to signal a kind of gritty, working-class persona. It fits into a ‘moment’, although I don’t think that this moment ever really goes away. Workwear has been popular for ever. The constant in menswear is this desire always to look more relatable.”
The emphasis on certain sturdy, well-made basics with a touch of style has always been a draw. Think of how the late fashion photographer Bill Cunningham helped spur a wider interest in the classic French blue workman’s jacket, which would soon spread far beyond trades- and craftspeople.
Americana and workwear, meanwhile, remain ever present, “a consistent global design language” in menswear, says Nowill, something that is revived and reassembled continuously. It’s not surprising that such looks resonate and survive. “We can see that over the past year or so we’ve been coming out of the ‘hype’ era, as men have been moving towards a quieter, trend-agnostic approach to dressing,” Nowill says. “There’s a reason why that kind of look remains so popular: it suits almost everyone, and it doesn’t look dated after a few months. Selvedge is part of the same conversation: I think all of us are looking to buy clothes that will endure, that will look better as they age.”
