In ‘The Dog Stars,’ Jacob Elordi’s Carhartt Is More Than Just a Coveted Jacket

In “The Dog Stars,” the apocalypse hasn’t just wiped out most of humanity—it’s also brought an end to the idea of a new wardrobe. The film, adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel of the same name, depicts the varying degrees of isolation and paranoia of those left behind when the world ends. Ten years after a deadly virus breakout, Hig (Jacob Elordi) lives a mostly uneventful life in a dilapidated airport hangar in Erie, Colorado, with his beloved dog Jasper and a surly military veteran named Bangley (Josh Brolin). While Bangley—a former Doomsday prepper who has converted the hangar into something of a home—makes sure the grounds are secure, Hig is responsible for keeping their supplies topped up with regular recon missions to Denver. 

Early on, we see him set out in his banged-up Cessna to grab medical equipment, crates of Coke, and other non-perishables from the abandoned city, wearing a pair of oil- and mud-stained loose utility pants, a faded navy T-shirt layered over a once-white long-sleeved henley, and a moss green Carhartt jacket. “I always imagined that he would be a Carhartt boy,” costume designer Janty Yates says of the character. “So we got a load of Carhartt in.” Hig, we learn, worked as a mechanic in his past life, so dressing him in the brand, a favorite among hands-on labourers and blue-collar workers, felt like a natural fit, Yates says. His choice of clothing is less about fashion than practicality, and hinges on what he would have already had in his closet. 

However, the look was also partly dictated by Elordi’s own affinity for the brand. Not only has he been spotted wearing Carhartt to everything from premieres and parties to airport runs, but he arrived to an early meeting with director Ridley Scott wearing two distressed Carhartt pieces he sourced secondhand. “What Ridley told me was Jacob walked in, and he loved what he was wearing,” the British-born costume designer recalls. “He came in wearing a pair of paint-spattered trousers that were [originally] tan, but they had been so bleached with age that they were white, and a dirty old grey Carhartt jacket that he got on eBay.” Yates saw the vision, too—and set about recreating those pieces into the foundation of Hig’s distinctly worn-in look.

“We bought the fabric and we made six of everything,” Yates says, noting that unable to recreate two decades' worth of natural aging in the short pre-production window, she opted for white canvas pants rather than tan ones. Creating the duplicates for Higs to wear repeatedly throughout the film (he is, after all, working with a limited wardrobe), Yates and her team painstakingly matched the stains, rips and patina not only to each other, but to Elordi’s original pair that Scott loved so much.

Elordi's height also dictated the shape of his trousers; to mitigate the actor's towering stature, Yates took cues from his own preference for wider-leg pants. "He doesn't like to wear narrow trousers because it makes him look too tall," she says.

As for the jacket, which some may mistake for a rare vintage Carhartt J97 Detroit Jacket, the truth is that Carhartt worked with the production to create six new copies before passing them over to Yates to appropriately age them herself. “They initially said they hadn’t got the fabric, but they found some and made them and said, ‘You're going to have to distress them yourself,’” Yates recalls. “So we bashed the hell out of them, just like we bashed the hell out of everything he was wearing.

As with the pants and most of the rest of Elordi’s wardrobe in the film, working with real vintage, even multiple copies of the same vintage piece, just wasn’t an option. As Yates explains, unless you only need one copy for one singular scene, it’s not plausible on a production as action-heavy as “The Dog Stars” to work with the delicate, often mercurial nature of vintage. To make it work on camera, there needs to be consistency in shape, colors, and damage. “It’s why you have to have a breakdown department. You have to. You can't shoot a film without it, and there was a huge breakdown department on ‘Dog Stars.’”

Still, some online conversation has mistaken Hig's look for suspiciously fresh streetwear. Yates has a theory about that misreading. At six foot five inches, Elordi is, in her words, "a clothes horse" and wears clothes so well that people stopped registering the damage and just saw style.