Robert Redford Had Great Jeans

The late Robert Redford began acting in the 1960s. Back then, the archetype of the leading man was brooding, suited, and, like the scotch he sipped, a little too neat. Sean Connery’s James Bond was a man of mystery who’d emerge from an underwater mission in a spotless tuxedo and a perfectly in-place side part, embodied this perfectly. Redford, with his sun-kissed everything and Southern California swagger, offered something a little more vernacular. And his career followed that path.

Redford’s oeuvre, which includes beloved classics like Barefoot in the Park and The Way We Were, solidified his status as an actor’s actor, with many contemporary A-listers today doing their best to channel his inimitable cool. (As my dad used to say in an effort to get me to watch old films, “If it weren’t for Robert Redford, there’d be no Brad Pitt.”) Though there are many things one can attribute to Redford’s men-want-to-be-him, women-want-to-date-him magnetism, one thing in particular stands out style-wise: his incredible denim.

Finding the right jean cut can be a lifelong pursuit, but Redford figured out his preferred silhouette rather early. By the time he starred in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, Redford had settled on a thigh-squeezing, bulge-forward bootcut. And he wore the hell out of them for the rest of his career.

The bootcut and Redford became so synonymous that his flared Levi’s frequently made their way into his costuming, which was intentional on his end. Some might say Redford played a heavy hand in evolving the bootcut beyond its cowboy origins (though he did, of course, play several cowboys), but he rocked those louche baby blues as an Olympic skier (Downhill Racer, 1969), a Depression-era grifter (The Sting, 1973), and a Pulitzer-winning journalist (All the President’s Men, 1976).

When he played CIA analyst Joe Turner in the 1975 spy thriller Three Days of the Condor, Turner almost exclusively donned light-wash bootcut jeans, tailored with a Hollywood hem at Redford’s request to give them a more distressed look. (Per the Financial Times, this involved “cropping the 36in inseam and reattaching the original cuff.”) The result was effortlessly smart-casual, though, admittedly, not all that credible. I mean, how many CIA agents do you know with a propensity towards cheeky pants?

Onscreen and offscreen, he often punctuated these tight little things with a playful newsboy cap, weathered leather boots, or aviator sunglasses. But if you ask me, no accessory could top his pose of choice: a rakish popped hip in a devastating, denim-clad contrapposto.