The Brutalist’s László Tóth Is an Unsung Menswear Icon

This interview contains mild spoilers for The Brutalist.

The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s sweeping drama about a Hungarian Jewish architect’s emigration to America after surviving the Holocaust, is a top contender at this weekend’s upcoming Academy Awards. Its three-and-a-half-hour runtime overfloweth with big-picture ideas about the human condition in the post-war 20th century: the gnawing slope of assimilation; the predatory dynamic between patrons and artists. But in spite of its thematic gravity, while watching the film, my menswear-writer brain couldn’t help but fixate on the wardrobe of László Tóth, the protagonist played by Adrien Brody.

In every scene, Brody’s character is wearing something that looks exactly like what stylish guys want to wear now: A zippered canvas jacket and low-slung work trousers that may as well have been plucked from Daniel Day-Lewis’s closet. A pointy-collared dress shirt like the ones my GQ colleagues have been obsessing over. A gray ribbed pullover so sculptural, you’d swear it was Issey Miyake (which, as it turns out, it wasn’t—nearly all of the film’s costumes are vintage from the mid-20th century). Look carefully and you’ll notice that even his chic quarter-zip knits are of such interesting and bizarre construction, they’ll make you resent that quarter-zips ever devolved to such a corporate-logo-embroidered low as to become synonymous with frat boys and finance bros.

In other words: Respectfully, László Tóth had that shit on.

But then again, The Brutalist is a movie about beauty and dignity—or, more specifically, the pursuit of beauty and dignity in the wake of unspeakable anguish. Tóth’s wardrobe reflects this pursuit. His clothes are as elegant and unfussy as his concrete structures.

As it turns out, I was not alone in thinking this. Just as some moviegoers may marvel at Tóth’s hand-welded furniture or poetically stark interiors, others remark on his beguiling personal style. Reddit users posted blurry photos they’d snapped mid-movie in the theater in hopes of crowdsourcing an ID on his knitwear. A popular menswear TikToker recreated an outfit worn by László’s friend Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé) by sourcing a pair of 1940s-era coveralls. The writer David Hering tweeted, “The Brutalist should win Best Costume Oscar purely based on the number of times I thought ‘Man, I need that outfit.’” (Woefully, The Brutalist did not receive an Oscar nomination for its costume design.)

Even Adrien Brody himself has gotten wind of the talk about his character’s surprising drip. “No, it’s so funny. They also spoke a lot about my attire in Succession. It became such a theme,” he recently told GQ.

During Brody’s fittings with costume designer Kate Forbes, the pair discussed how László’s idiosyncratic wardrobe would “make him stand alone, to not quite conform to the norms, but to exude a formality of the era,” the actor said. “We intentionally never had László in a tie, for instance, but made sure that I was buttoned up all the time.” His wardrobe puts him in sharp contrast with Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), the oligarchic patriarch of a WASPy Pennsylvanian family whose proclivity for unsettling printed ties is a mere drop in the bucket of their perversion.

In turn, László Tóth—a fictional Bauhaus-trained architect making his way in America—has emerged from this year’s slate of Oscar-nominated films as a somewhat unlikely menswear icon, whose cinematic wardrobe has incited a sartorial fervor to rival that of Cate Blanchett’s brooding titular protagonist in the 2022 film Tár.

(Indeed, the fictional László Tóth and Lydia Tár have other commonalities, too. They both share an affinity for punishing artforms. They both spell their names with acute accents. They both cause moviegoers to uncannily believe that they are real-life historical figures, which they are not.)

The film’s costume designer Kate Forbes gave GQ an inside scoop on Tóth’s beautiful and brutal wardrobe, how Brody’s “amazingly angular physique” made him the perfect model for knitwear, and how you may just be able to get your hands on that Pleats Please-esque sweater someday.

Kate Forbes: My process and my approach to the whole movie was in part dictated, obviously, by the script and by the periods that it was traversing and how enormous that was compared to the budget that we had, which was quite limiting. Basically everything in the movie, bar a couple of shirts that we had to make for Adrien, it's all rental. Everything is original pieces from that time. We used, in the end, seven costume houses to amass all of the costumes, so it was quite a tall order. It was really just building up wardrobes at each of those costume houses and then bringing it all to Hungary, where we were shooting.

With László, with that character especially, he covers the greatest amount of time, so there needed to be something very consistent there, but also something that really set him apart. I think when I first spoke to [Adrien] Brody about the script and the characters, it was really important that we found something other with László and Erzsébet and Zsófia, that they always sort of stood apart from the American characters that they were encountering on this new journey…especially the Van Burens. It was very prescribed [in] that period that they would be in tailoring and in suits.

The first fitting with Adrien, I said, “I think we should never have László in a suit. I think he always should kind of stand apart, and that's maybe a really strong way to do it, that he's not kind of kowtowing to that fashion, that he is a really individual person with his own stylistic sense and just to really have an otherness, but also a very individual kind of appearance for him.” So we never used a suit until right at the very, very end, in 1980. And also we only, I think twice, used a tie, again, right at the end, and for the one scene where he's in the drafting office [at his corporate job in Manhattan], where he's kind of in a slightly more bureaucratic environment. Adrien really, I think he was really surprised, because he was really anticipating just seeing a sea of suits, but he got it, and he was like, “Yeah, I think it's great. It does need to be something other and something different.”

It was really then just finding those amazing trousers, a lot of knits, shirts, great overcoats, and building it with those elements, but also remaining very true to 1947 when he first arrives, and then 1950, ’53, ’56, ’58, ’60. The silhouette does kind of change in accordance with the fashion of that time.

Exactly.

One of the really key things when you're doing a period film, as a designer, you have to do so much research. You have to really immerse yourself, whether it's through films, through picture libraries, magazines, all of the material you can find from that time, documentaries, to really understand the language of the clothing that was around. And once you have that in your brain, your subconscious almost, then you can look at clothes and you can sort of look at clothes through the eyes of whichever character it is you are pulling for. You're basically, I suppose, shopping in László's shoes, like, “Oh yeah, I would like this sweater.”

There were a few of those quarter-zips that we used in the mid-’50s, because it felt like these would be almost much more mass-produced than a lot of stuff had been before. And being a modernist, I think he would be very drawn to that. There's something modest and readily available and really modern about this new kind of mass-produced fashion. Also, when we get to New York especially, the idea that there is this big, thriving beatnik scene happening at that time as well, and he would be adjacent to that. He would be maybe at a speakeasy, or [the beatniks] would be his people much more so than the Van Burens. He can be in a very bureaucratic environment, but he still retains that kind of spirit of independence and difference.

The decision to take away the ties on László was also just really thinking about architecture and modernism and how, if you think about it in architectural terms, all of that adornment is suddenly stripped away. It's brutal, it's bare, it's without any excesses. So taking away the tie also felt like a reflection of that ethos in design, that there isn't room for this sort of frivolity, why it's not necessary, why is the tie necessary, like why is cornicing on a building? I really wanted to have the wardrobe somehow reflect that sense of modernity, and also with the palette that we used on him, which is really—I mean, we have some navies—but it's predominantly gray, black, and white. It's very monochromatic. There's moments where there's a little bit of color and pattern, but it's fairly minimal.

The knits begin actually when we first see him in the film, where he gets off the boat. I really wanted to use a knit there because he has such an amazingly angular physique, Adrien Brody, and I really wanted to bring that to the fore. And if you put a jacket tailoring on that, you kind of lose that. There's always something, for me, it's a little bit more vulnerable with knitwear, because you do see the physicality more clearly, and I felt it was really important there. We found this amazing cardigan with the checked front [from] a costume house in Berlin. It was just such a beautiful piece, but literally the arms from the cuff to the armpit were just darned. It had been repaired within an inch of its life. There was so little of the original sleeves left on that cardigan.

And usually, you find a piece like that and it's like, “Oh, there's no way of using it. It's such a shame, but it's been destroyed.” But in that instance, it was like, “No, we can completely use this. He's lived through a war, everything would be destroyed.”

The gray sweater was [also] from Berlin, from Theaterkunst. An original piece from the time, in immaculate condition, which was incredible. It's really sculptural, it's got a softness, but the shape of it is, I've never seen a knit like it before—old, vintage, or new. We tried it on Adrien and he loved it. I remember him photographing it incessantly. He was just like, “It's incredible.” And then when we had the scene in the New York apartment, it just felt so right for that sort of time and the modernity of the life that they're living in New York, mid-’50s, beatniks, that sort of whole subculture going on around them. And there's his niece saying, “We're going to move to Israel.” And it's like, “Oh, but we are here in this amazing, modern place. Really?” It lends itself really beautifully to that scene, because it does feel incredibly modern.

I've had so many emails inquiring about that sweater in particular, and everybody just assumes it was off the peg, a new piece. It's difficult for people to understand, no, no, this is genuinely from that time. I'm really hoping to do something with that sweater, to reissue it somehow.

Yeah. We had great fun—both with Adrien and with the actor who plays Gordon [Isaach de Bankolé] on the construction sites—just finding really beautiful pieces that already had real age to them. So a lot of them were actually earlier, sort of ’40s era, which is probably what they would've been wearing because it wouldn't be brand new, it would be hand-me-downs. Again, it was just really lovely to find original pieces that had a beautiful age to them, and to have a place that they just fit so organically, really.

There's a bit of a story behind that rubber coat. It was a Theaterkunst piece, and there were actually quite a few of them, and again I just loved the modernity of it and how utilitarian it is. It's practical. All the other guys in that scene at the building site, they’ve all got umbrellas because they’ve got their felt hats and gabardine overcoats and these things they can’t get wet. So they’re highly impractical, in a way, certainly in the rain. And just to have him there, no hat, in this rubber kind of mac, just dressed super practically—again, it just felt really true to who he is as a designer.

So we found several [coats] in this costume house, and I remember there was one that I was like, Oh, this is beautiful. It's really a beautiful piece of design. We took that one and we fitted it, and Adrien loved it and we had this great moment for it.

And then we got closer to shooting that scene, and suddenly there was a stunt double [involved], because it was originally scripted that he was going to get pushed to the ground. I was like, Oh God, we’ve only got one [coat]. But I remembered that there were multiples of a slightly different design back in that costume house. So I called them up and they sent over a matching pair of a slightly different design, and we ended up using that.

I remember Adrien was a bit like, “This isn't the same one.” I explained to him, “No, but we've got a stunt double, so I need to have the repeat, otherwise we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot.” And he said, “Okay, I understand.” So he wore this slightly less-good one, and then we never used the stunt. But that happens. At least he does wear a rubber mac, and it's still a great rubber mac, and it's still from the right period.

Exactly—it was even better. There was another mac that we used on Erzsébet towards the end. She wears it in the last scenes at the Van Buren mansion. It was a very late ’50s, with a really modern cut, and it was reversible— it’s got buttons both ways and there's a lighter side and a darker side. And we always used the darker side, but I really loved that she wore it kind of open. We discussed it a lot with Felicity [Jones], that she'd wear it open at the collar, so you could see that there are these buttons inside that tell you it's reversible, because it just felt modern and practical. It felt like everything I think a sort of modernist person—someone that had been trained at the Bauhaus—would be really akin to and would choose.

Yeah, exactly. “I like this! It makes so much sense. I've got two coats in one.” I suppose the thriftiness of it, as well, is something that really drew me to some pieces.

I mean, to be honest, I think everything made the final cut. It’s a long movie.

I don't think we lost anything—nothing that I can really think of now. I mean, my favorite has to be between the gray sweater and that rubber mac. It really fills me up when I see that scene with all the bureaucrats and those brown gabardines all around and then just this black, very dramatic and modern mac.. It's like this guy is in the future somehow. He's not living in the past. There's almost these two time periods colliding there—which I suppose [reflects the clash of] all of the architecture that everybody was used to and this great modernist vision. For me, the costumes in that moment really visually describe that.

Well, maybe we can find a way.

It's extraordinary. Because of what’s been spoken about online, I’ve had them pull all the sweaters just to see what we can do, because I really would love to do something. I don’t know what it is yet, but these pieces—especially that gray sweater—deserve a new lease on life. Other people deserve to have one. So, yeah, watch this space.

This interview has been edited and condensed.