Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey Have Never Dressed More Like Themselves in “Brothers”

In Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson’s pseudo-autobiographical television series, “Brothers,” the Texas-born actors play comically heightened versions of themselves—and the duo could not be dressed more differently. From a costume perspective, occupying the “metaverse,” as costume designer Colin Wilkes put it, allowed for “a little bit more room for play.”  True to their public personas, Harrelson sports loose, embroidered tunics and marijuana-printed long johns while McConaughey wears tailored button-down shirts and philanthropic graphic tees. Wilkes viewed the assignment as one of costuming opposites. “Honing in on their differences helped me develop them individually,” Wilkes says. “The kind of odd coupleness they actually have with the brotherly love is so visually juxtaposed.”

The duality of the brothers' style can be boiled down to their respective choice of jewelry: McConaughey wears a gold chain while Harrelson opts for an arrowhead talisman that Wilkes envisioned as a callback to his eco-estate in Maui, Hawai’i. “I wanted to focus on the central parts of what makes them them,” Wilkes says. For McConaughey, that meant underscoring the actor’s Texas roots by leaning on heritage brands and iconic Americana silhouettes. By contrast, Harrelson’s costumes reflected the actor’s environmental activism and countercultural ethos. “I leaned into the fact that [Harrelson] is very conscious of the Earth. He's very intentional about the clothes he wears and where they come from, so we focused on a lot of circular fashion brands that are smaller labels,” Wilkes says. One such brand was Indian fashion designer Kartik Kumra’s boutique fashion label, Kartik Research, which provided Harrelson’s orange shirt for a school dance. 

Whereas Harrelson’s closet gives the impression of a varied assortment of pieces collected on his travels, McConaughey sports a very contained wardrobe of Texas heritage pieces, including a custom embossed belt. “There is a swagger to wearing a pair of pants with a cowboy boot… the amount of stack that you have hits in a different way than other parts of the US,” Wilkes says. She drew on local brands like Aspen Hatters and Texas Hatters to make custom cowboy hats in “a very distinct Matthew shape.” On the band of the hat, items from McConaughey’s ranch are embedded into the design for a personal touch.

In episode four, “The Band,” Harrelson and McConaughey go undercover as a music duo in hilariously ostentatious costumes. “I was like, ‘guys let's figure out how far on the scale we want to go, and they were always like, let's push it,’” Wilkes recalls. For Matthew, “pushing it” meant a bald cap and full leather look inspired by the heavy metal band Judas Priest and designed by leather expert Tod Waters. Harrelson took a more peace and love route, drawing inspiration from Texas musician Stevie Ray Vaughan. Wilkes intended for the costumes to make “absolutely no sense” beside each other to produce a visually jarring effect. “It is just about the two of them and how their costumes are playing off one another, and it's almost as if one can't exist without the other,” she says. The rocker costumes heighten the existing costume juxtaposition between the leading men.

Outside of the Judas Priest get-up, McConaughey serves as a role model—fashion, and otherwise—for his broader family. “Everyone in his family really loves and adores Matthew, and I wanted them to all have a little bit of Matthew in their clothing,” Wilkes says. McConaughey’s littlest on-screen son, River (Noah Carganilla), is perhaps the biggest offender of this phenomenon, always wearing a matching Just Keep Living Foundation bracelet and chain and paying subtle homages to iconic costumes in his dad’s acting career. “With River, there's a little bit of a cosplay of a character that Matthew has been and once in his career in everything he wears,” Wilkes says, citing a flame shirt and fanny pack as a reference to “Beach Bum.”

The Harrelsons also influence each other’s style, albeit in the opposite direction. “I wanted it to feel like the ladies were the visual scaffolding of the guys,” Wilkes says. “You could see with the colors, the textures, and the shapes, that they were cut from the same cloth.” Harrelson’s Gen-Z and millennial daughters give the impression of exclusively shopping second-hand, in part because Wilkes sourced the majority of their pieces from massive Depop hauls. The whole family shares an affinity for looser, bohemian silhouettes that appear to be one-of-one. “I wanted it to feel like there is a visually distinctive language to the way he dresses, which is very much him. It's a slipper; it's a loose, carefree, beautifully handmade piece that has a lot of story.”