“If you have this, anything is possible. It’s perfect,” says the French designer Nicolas Gabard, founder of tailoring brand Husbands Paris, of the grey tweed blazer worn by Robert Redford in the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor. No one, he adds, has ever been able to replicate it. “All menswear guys, at one point, have tried to copy this jacket. Even Ralph Lauren. And no one has succeeded.”
A slick, moody thriller directed by Sydney Pollack that typifies the era’s geopolitical paranoia, Three Days of the Condor, released exactly 50 years ago on 27 September 1975, was reviewed as “good-looking and entertaining”, but ultimately “no match for stories that have appeared in your local newspaper”. Redford, though, fresh from The Sting and The Great Gatsby, is in his boy-scout pomp. As Joe Turner, a low-level CIA operative with Labrador energy and perfectly bleached bangs, he is preternaturally stylish, scootering around New York in flared denim, a gold and grey wool tie, a ski beanie pulled boyishly low. And that jacket.
