Early last year, Brad Pitt strolled onto the paddock of the Hungarian Grand Prix looking every bit the off-duty actor. In his tinted sunglasses, faded sweatshirt, and well-worn designer sneakers—to say nothing of the leather duffle bag slung casually over one arm—it was a little hard to separate Pitt, the Hollywood icon, from Pitt, the casual F1 fan.
It was, however, a lot easier to identify the exact Sunspel sweatshirt he wearing, which we did almost immediately. But it took us a few months to realize that Pitt wasn’t just attending the race for the thrill of it—the actor was, well, acting. F1, Pitt’s most recent box-office blockbuster, was filmed at real races alongside real drivers on real grids. (We might have guessed as much if we zoomed in on his pass, which depicts him as Sonny Hayes, the veteran driver brought in to revitalize the floundering APXGP team.) And Sunspel’s sweatshirt, it turns out, was always going to make a big cameo.
The piece was “a real obvious choice,” says F1 costume designer Julian Day. Sunspel’s sweatshirts are classic, he tells GQ—“they’re so easy to wear and so easy to look at.” And, Day, emphasizes, “Brad’s very particular about what he wears.” According to Day, the costumes for the movie worked less like a strict roster of ‘looks,’ and more like an actual wardrobe, largely dictated by Pitt himself.
“We actually set up shop in three suites in a hotel,” he says. “We set it all up [on rails], and [Pitt] brought stuff as well, and we had hundreds of pairs of shoes and sunglasses, and we chose all our favorites, photographed them, and then had them on his wardrobe truck. He’d come in and sort of use it as if it was his wardrobe, and say, ‘Oh, I really like that. Let’s wear that today,’ or ‘The scene is this, let’s do that.’”
The images of him wearing the sweatshirt at the Grand Prix were how David Telfer, Sunspel’s design director, found out he was wearing it, too. “We had provided a few pieces for the film, but you can never be certain how or if they’ll be used,” Telfer tells us. “We first discovered our sweatshirt had made it in when we saw behind-the-scenes images of him wearing it.”
Funnily enough, the sweatshirt itself was introduced to Sunspel’s core collection over 15 years ago by another recurring character in the GQ universe: Jonathan Anderson, the Irish designer who cut his teeth at Sunspel long before he was ensconced in the airy Dior ateliers. According to Telfer, the sweatshirt has been continuously refined since, and “embodies our approach to craftsmanship and design: comfortable, understated, and timeless.” For Day, the fact that they felt “soft and worn” was a plus, too—they had to look like Pitt’s character owned them for years, dutifully wearing them in over time.
To celebrate the movie’s success, Sunspel is doing us all a solid and releasing a limited-run of each color Pitt wears in the movie—a fetching shade of thyme green and a very summery pale pink—both of which are selling faster than a professional pit stop. But if you miss out on ‘em, don’t, uh, sweat it: Brad Pitt’s go-to off-duty layer is available in 20+ other colors, too.
This story originally appeared on British GQ.
