Vitals

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist and “father of the atomic bomb”

Washington, D.C., Spring 1954

Film: Oppenheimer
Release Date: July 21, 2023
Director: Christopher Nolan
Costume Designer: Ellen Mirojnick

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Among its seven Oscar wins including Best Picture (as seen by Al Pacino’s eyes), last year’s blockbuster Oppenheimer received the Academy Award for Best Actor for Cillian Murphy’s spectacular performance as the eponymous J. Robert Oppenheimer, born 120 years ago today on April 22, 1904.

The latter portions of Oppenheimer‘s chronography are set across his security clearance hearings throughout the spring 1954. Between April 12th and May 6th, the United States Atomic Energy Commission investigated 24 allegations questioning Oppie’s allegiance, loyalty, and Communist affiliations, as well as his opposition to the hydrogen bomb despite his influential development in nuclear weaponry that resulted in his nickname as the “father of the atomic bomb.”

The hearing was in no small part the result of Oppenheimer’s humiliation of committee chairman Lewis Strauss—portrayed to Oscar-winning excellence by Robert Downey Jr.—who opted to remain in the shadows while hard-driving prosecutor Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) mercilessly questions Oppenheimer’s colleagues, friends, and enemies across the scientific community, including his fiery wife Kitty (Emily Blunt).

Given Strauss’ petty motives for instigating the inquiries and Robb’s decidedly unfair treatment of the Oppenhomies, the hearings remained controversial for decades, with the AEC’s decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance posthumously nullified by U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in December 2022.

Director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan chose the hearings to frame his retelling of Oppenheimer’s life, by having Oppie explain at the outset to his questioners that “the so-called interrogatory information in your indictment of me cannot be fairly understood except in the context of my life and my work.”

What’d He Wear?

J. Robert Oppenheimer enjoyed a lifelong familiarity with fine clothing, as his father Julius was a textile importer described by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in American Prometheus as “one of the most knowledgeable fabrics men in New York.”

Oppenheimer‘s Oscar-nominated costume designer Ellen Mirojnick explained to me that his “costumes were informed by historical research and then adapted for the film.” She elaborated in an interview with Yusra Siddiqui for Who What Wear that “We chose only to wear blue shirts and tones of blue and gray in the suiting in urban environments. When he gets to New Mexico, he wears two entirely different colors with more of a work fabric and whipcord suiting that is very sympathetic to the land.”

A decade after wearing his distinctive khaki-hued “working suits” in the desert sands at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer returns to the conservative sobriety of dark blues and grays as he navigates these bureaucratic spaces where the scientific and political communities intersect. By this time in the mid-20th century, the real Oppenheimer “often wore expensive English wool suits hand-tailored for him at Langrock’s, the local tailor for Princeton’s upper crust.”

Given the urban environment of these D.C. hearings through the spring of 1954, Oppenheimer consistently wears a staid charcoal-blue semi-solid woolen flannel three-piece suit that recalls a very similar suit he had worn through many 1940s-set scenes, though this ’50s-set suit features a three-button jacket which notch lapels ending higher on the chest than those on the two-button jacket paired with his ’40s-set suit.

Oppie occasionally wore that earlier three-piece suit sans waistcoat, but—in keeping with the decorum expected of a man of his notoriety, position, and advancing age (he turned 50 during the hearings), as well as the formal context of a government investigation—he always wears this suit with its matching vest.

We also see a shift in the tailoring style from the wide shoulders and heavy drape of the ’40s, updated here for the ’50s with less drape and a more structured silhouette, shaped by front darts. The single-breasted jacket’s straight shoulders are slightly padded, with roped sleeveheads and four-button cuffs. As mentioned above, the notch lapels taper to mid-chest, allowing for a full three-button front rather than the two-button closure of his 1940s suits. The ventless jacket also has a welted breast pocket and straight jetted hip pockets; consistent with 1950s fashions, these pockets lack the flaps that adorned the two-button jacket of the otherwise similar suit he wore during the prior decade.

The suit’s matching single-breasted waistcoat (vest) has a six-button front, and Oppenheimer correctly wears the lowest button—positioned at the crest of the notched bottom—undone. Unlike the four-pocket waistcoat of his ’40s suit, this waistcoat features only two welted pockets—one on each side—and the back is finished in the same silvery light-blue satin that lines the inside of his suit jacket.

The trousers also follow the predominant cut of the era, with a long rise that neatly conceals the waistband under the waistcoat and double forward-facing pleats that harmonize with the flattering proportions of the top half of the suit, which Ms. Mirjonick described for Who What Wear as “full but not excessive to the point of clownish.” Likely also held up with suspenders (braces) that connect to buttons along the inside of the waistband, these trousers also have gently slanted side pockets and the usual turn-ups (cuffs) on the bottoms that were typical of the era.

Oppenheimer cycles through different sets of footwear that befit each relative era and situation, though all have one thing in common: black leather uppers. Rather than the dusty chukka boots he wore at Los Alamos, Oppie typically dresses his feet for government meetings in well-shined black leather cap-toe boots, oxford-laced up to mid-calf.

Oppenheimer continues his tradition of wearing exclusively blue shirts and solid-colored ties, as directed by Ellen Mirojnick, who explained to Jazz Tangcay for Variety that she utilized four different shades of blue to reflect the mood of the scene. Through Oppie’s harsh questioning by the AEC, his cotton shirts are a pale shade of ice-blue; this proximity to white makes it the most formal and the least colorful, implying that the minutiae of their scrutiny has drained him of his energy and passion.

The shirt design remains the same across the multiple decades of his professional career depicted in Oppenheimer, featuring a plain button-up front, double (French) cuffs often fastened with gold links, and a semi-spread collar that better balances Murphy’s angular face than a sharper point collar.

The extensiveness of the hearings allow for Oppie to rotate through many of his solid-colored ties, specifically in burgundy, brown, forest-green, sage-green, dark-navy, and cornflower-blue.

Oppenheimer’s distinctive silhouette was arguably defined by his wide-brimmed hat, which the real-life Oppie adopted after seeing the similarly statured Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld wearing one in the late 1930s. To emphasize this, Christopher Nolan gave costume designer Ellen Mirojnick the direction that no one was to wear hats on screen aside from Oppenheimer, with exceptions made for military personnel and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), whose airborne hat is prominently featured in a key scene.

Mirojnick’s team undertook a global search for the ideal hat that led them to the California-based Baron Hats, who crafted two hats for Oppenheimer that the costume designer described on The Art of Costume podcast as “a hybrid of a porkpie with an extended brim.” Oppie’s hat for these more urban-set sequences was made from an undyed taupe-brown South American felt and detailed with a tonally coordinated brown grosgrain band that differentiates it from the leather-banded hat he wears at Los Alamos.

Continuing a collaboration with director Christopher Nolan that began with Tenet, Hamilton provided a number of period-accurate vintage watches (from when the now-Swiss company was still producing watches in Lancaster, Pennsylvania) for the cast of Oppenheimer to wear, including three for Oppie himself: a gold Cushion B from the 1930s, a stainless World War II-era Lexington field watch, and a gold 1940s Endicott on a tan leather band.

By the time of these scenes set through the early 1950s, Murphy’s Oppenheimer dresses his wrist with the latter, a stylish Hamilton Endicott strapped to a tan edge-stitched leather bracelet. Hamilton introduced the manual-winding 17-jewel Endicott in 1938 and would produce it for ten years. The model featured in Oppenheimer follows a configuration common to the watch’s second generation, with a 29mm-wide case filled in 10-karat yellow-gold. The beige dial boasts triangular hour markers around the outer ring, each correlated to an 18-karat gold numeric hour indices except for the 6 o’clock position, which features a second-counting silver sub-register.

Even as the hearings explicitly explore his extramarital romance with Communist activist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), Oppenheimer continues wearing his plain gold wedding band on his left ring finger.

What to Imbibe

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin write in American Promethesus that Oppenheimer “would subject his guests to his potent martini, shaken with elaborate ceremony and poured into chilled glasses. Sometimes he dipped the rims of the martini glasses in lime juice and honey,” a gesture suggested during a scene set in his kitchen, though other sequences depict Oppie having to make due with standard martinis mixed by others and garnished with the usual olive.

As also detailed in my earlier post, Oppie’s martini habit remains so integrated with his legacy that even the official Los Alamos gift shop sells a stainless steel shaker and martini glass—$25 each—that are both etched with a recipe for “The Oppenheimer Martini”:

• 4 ounces good gin
• A smidge of dry vermouth
• A lime juice and honey syrup
• Stir liquids with ice until chilled, then strain into chilled martini glass with honey-lime juice applied to rim.

How to Get the Look

When not in his sand-toned working suits at Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer wears the requisite dark blue and gray tailoring of the era, intentionally adapted to his distinctive silhouette as anchored under the wide brim of his signature porkpie-style hat.

• Charcoal-blue semi-solid woolen flannel three-piece suit:
  • Single-breasted 3-button jacket with notch lapels, welted breast pocket, straight jetted hip pockets, 4-button cuffs, and ventless back
  • Single-breasted 6-button waistcoat with two lower welted pockets
  • Double forward-pleated long-rise trousers with slanted side pockets and turn-ups/cuffs
• Pale ice-blue cotton shirt with semi-spread collar, plain front, and double/French cuffs
  • Gold cuff links
• Cornflower-blue tie
• Black leather cap-toe oxford-laced mid-calf boots
• Taupe-brown felt elongated porkpie-style hat with brown grosgrain band
• Gold wedding ring
• Hamilton Endicott wristwatch with 10-karat gold-filled 28mm-wide case with round beige dial (with 18-karat gold numeric hour indices and silver 6:00 sub-register) on tan edge-stitched leather strap

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Sources:

In addition to my personal correspondence with Ellen Mirojnick, these below articles provided a wealth of valuable information about Oppenheimer’s on-screen style:

• The Art of Costume — “A Fusion of Style and Substance: An Exclusive Conversation with ‘Oppenheimer’ Costume Designer Ellen Mirojnick” by Spencer Williams
• Backstage — “How ‘Oppenheimer’ Costume Designer Ellen Mirojnick Found the Perfect Hat” by Emma Fraser
• GQ UK — “Oppenheimer‘s suits make it the biggest menswear movie in ages” by Zak Maoui
• Hodinkee — “Cillian Murphy Wears Three Vintage Hamiltons As J. Robert Oppenheimer In Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer'” by Danny Milton
• A Little Bit of Rest — “The Menswear of Barbenheimer” by Ethan M. Wong
• Variety — “How the ‘Oppenheimer’ Costume Designer Searched the Globe for Cillian Murphy’s Hat” by Jazz Tangcay
• Vox — “Oppenheimer is the surprise fashion movie of the summer” by Esther Zuckerman
• Who What Wear — “Oppenheimer Has Gone Viral, But Its Effect on Menswear Is Underrated” by Yusra Siddiqui

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.