Train Dreams: Joel Edgerton’s Wabash Chore Coat as Robert Grainier
Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier in Train Dreams (2025)
Vitals
Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier, laconic logger
Pacific Northwest, Summer 1917 through 1920
Film: Train Dreams
Release Date: January 26, 2025
Director: Clint Bentley
Costume Designer: Malgosia Turzanska
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
Train Dreams debuted at Sundance one year ago today but gained wider attention after its official November 2025 release, driving a momentum that led to its four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay for director Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar’s treatment of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name, Best Original Song for Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner’s contribution, and Best Cinematography for Adolpho Veloso’s majestic photography.
“His name was Robert Grainier, and he lived more than 80 years in and around the town of Bonners Ferry, Idaho,” narrates Will Patton as we meet our taciturn protagonist, portrayed by Joel Edgerton. “In his time, he traveled west to within a few dozen miles of the Pacific—so he’d never seen the ocean itself—and as far east as the town of Libby, 40 miles inside Montana.”
Train Dreams is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the quiet meaning of ordinary lives, set during Grainier’s relatively insulated eighty-odd years of life as they unfold amid the forests and railways of the Pacific Northwest as industrialization and modernity shape the world around him.
Sensing its similar cinematic language with the likes of Days of Heaven (1978) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I enjoyed Train Dreams more than most films distributed by Netflix, though I wish it had received a wider theatrical release than the limited two-week pre-streaming window, as Veloso’s lush cinematography deserves the full cinematic experience.
What’d He Wear?
Grainier’s Wabash Chore Coat
Costume designer Malgosia Turzanska signals Robert Grainier’s past work on the railroad by dressing him for much of Train Dreams in a classic dot-striped indigo cloth Wabash chore coat, which he continues wearing even after the left shoulder is singed by embers while he runs into the wildfires that destroy his family’s acre in Idaho.
Grainier’s dark indigo-blue Wabash chore coat features the characteristic white dotted stripes, like a workwear translation of a tailored pinstripe suit. (He also has a vest and trousers from matching fabric, but he never wears them all at the same time!)
The hip-length jacket has four widely spaced brass tack buttons up the front, plus an extended throat-latch tab with two buttonholes extending from under the left side of the collar, connecting to a button rigged under the right side. Just below the second buttonhole is an angled buttonhole designed to string a pocket-watch chain. Grainier’s jacket has a symmetrical four-pocket layout, with two open-top patch pockets over the chest and two larger open-top patch pockets over the hips. The sleeves are finished with slanted seams setting apart the cuffs, which are fastened with two functioning brass tack buttons.
Familiar for its indigo ground and white dotted stripes, the hard-wearing Wabash fabric was developed during the 19th century in Wheeling, West Virginia by German immigrant Johann Ludwig Stifel, who pioneered its distinctive discharge-printing process that removed dye rather than adding it, embedding durable patterns deep into the tightly twill-woven cotton cloth. Lighter and more breathable than heavy denim yet remarkably tough, Wabash became a favorite of railroad crews and industrial workers, so closely associated with the Wabash Railroad that the name stuck, even as the fabric originally went by many terms—often marketed by Stifel just as “indigo cloth”.
Its use expanded across factories, railroads, and eventually the U.S. military during both world wars, earning Stifel & Sons national recognition before postwar economics, foreign competition, and synthetics led to the company’s closure and the fabric’s ostensible disappearance by the 1970s. Long absent from mass production, Wabash gained cult status among vintage collectors for its aging qualities and artisinal irregularities, commanding high prices before being painstakingly revived by Japanese heritage brands and later embraced by select American and global outfitters. You can learn much more about Wabash fabric and its application on work-wear like chore coats in u/garage_artist’s excellent post on the r/HeritageWear Reddit.
- Full Count 2051HW Wabash Chore Jacket HW (Brooklyn Clothing Co., $485)
- L.C. King Wabash Stripe Chore Coat (L.C. King, $300)
Grainier typically wears his Wabash chore coat over button-up or popover work-shirts, layered over an off-white cotton long-sleeved henley-style undershirt and finished with printed cotton neckerchiefs to catch his sweat after grueling days in the forest.
When Grainier debuts this jacket after returning home from his work on the Robinson Gorge Bridge for the Spokane International Railroad in the summer of 1917, he wears it over a slate-gray work-shirt, a red, navy, and light-blue printed neckerchief, and a high-fastening work vest cut from a slightly more vivid indigo Wabash cloth.
One of Grainier’s most regularly seen work shirts is made from a muted brick-red cotton flannel, piece-dyed and softened by frequent wear. The shirt has two large patch-style chest pockets and dark two-hole buttons up the front placket.
Grainier often wears popover shirts, a style of workwear popular through the early 20th century before shirts with full-length button-up plackets became standardized. These include a brown popover with a standard, henley-like front placket with tan four-hole buttons and another tan muslin long-sleeved pullover shirt with a much longer four-button placket, fused against a triangular self-bib.
Grainier wears the latter tan muslin shirt as an intermediate layer under his faded field-gray popover work-shirt when arriving back in Bonners Ferry on the day of the horrific wildfire. This long-sleeved popover shirt has four very large metal two-hole buttons on the front placket, which extends to mid-chest.
In costume for the scene where he awakes from a literal train dream into a fiery nightmare, Joel Edgerton takes direction from Clint Bentley on the set of Train Dreams. Photo credit: Daniel Schaefer/BBP Train Dreams, LLC.
Grainier never pairs the Wabash chore coat with its matching trousers, instead preferring to mate it with varying brown flat-front work trousers in hardy fabrics ranging from a tan canvas to a chocolate-colored corduroy. Regardless of the fabric, these trousers invariably have metal tack buttons arranged along the outside of the waistband for Grainier’s plain light-brown leather suspenders (braces), which have simple silver-toned adjusters slid up to the shoulders. The trouser styles range based on the cloth and color, but most have jeans-style curved front pockets, jetted back pockets, and plain-hemmed bottoms that he sometimes self-cuffs.
Logging in Caulk Boots
Train Dreams establishes the significance of a logger’s boots when fallen loggers have their footwear nailed to a tree for posterity, so “they won’t just pass out of this world without nothing to show they was here,” according to old-timer Arn Peeples (William H. Macy).
Grainier cycles through two primary sets of boots, custom-made for the production by White’s—an Idaho-based shoe company that indeed crafted boots for Pacific Northwest loggers through the early 20th century. At home, Grainier wears derby-laced boots with softer dark-brown napped leather uppers and hard leather soles, but his logging boots are distinguished by their calk-spiked soles, designed specifically to give loggers greater traction when working in the forest. This style is alternately called calk boots, caulk boots, cork boots, or simply “corks”.
Grainier’s caulk boots have smooth black leather plain-toe uppers that extend about 10 inches up to mid-calf. Dark rawhide laces are derby-laced through four sets of metal eyelets over the instep, then pulled up the shaft through seven sets of brass-finished speed hooks, with an additional single row of eyelets across the top.
More than a century after Grainier was depicted lacing up these work boots, White’s offers their Block Heel Logger and Spring Heel Logger boots in black roughout leather with calk-spiked soles, a modernized update of the cruder nails that would have been found on the soles of a 1920s logger’s boots.
Grainier’s Hats
Through the first act, Grainier wears a simple brown felt crusher hat—unlined and unstructured, its crown permanently misshapen from years of rain, sweat, and hard use in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The shape of its crown and brim lend some cosmetic similarities to the dressier fedora or trilby, but the functional similarities end there as crusher hats were designed to be practical, packable, and abuse-tolerant—hence the enduring “crusher” nickname that emerged for the headgear once politely marketed as “packable felt hats” and the like. Grainier’s hat is either missing its band or never had one to begin with, exposing the crude stitching where the crown has been fused over the brim.
When an aging Grainier returns to logging years after suffering a great personal loss, he now wears a different hat in an equally similar construction but crafted from a lighter tan felt and shaped with a wider brim. His light mushroom-brown work-shirt almost matches his hat, and it is styled in a more modern manner with its soft turndown collar, full-length button-up front placket, and two chest pockets with single-button flaps. He keeps it open at the neck to accommodate his olive-and-blue printed cotton kerchief.
A nice, if contextually tragic, bit of costume continuity maintains the burned left shoulder of Grainier’s Wabash chore coat, which we saw damaged by flying embers when he was caught up in the Idaho wildfire several years earlier.
More Wabash Work Clothes
Grainier typically wears his high-fastening Wabash work vest without the jacket. It echoes the jacket’s styling, with four brass tack buttons up the front—and indeed another slanted buttonhole for a watch-chain between the top two buttons. Made from a slightly richer indigo striped twill, Grainier’s Wabash vest has two open-top pockets over the hips and a cinch-back.
Grainier also wears his dot-striped indigo Wabash cloth work trousers orphaned from his jacket. Despite their denim-like cloth, these flat-front trousers have more in common with modern work pants than jeans. They have slanted side pockets, patch-style back pockets, an additional utility pocket positioned over the right thigh, a cinch-back, and—like all of his other trousers—sets of brass tack buttons around the waist to accommodate his suspenders.
In addition to their faithful update of Wabash chore coats, Non Stock Mfg. Co. also produces matching work vests and trousers in a 9-oz. cotton denim.
Though the Academy overlooked Malgosia Turzanska’s subtlely effective costume design for Train Dreams, she did receive a much-deserved nod this year for her work designing Hamnet (2025).
How to Get the Look
Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier in Train Dreams (2025)
Robert Grainier exemplifies hardy heritage American workwear worn with a purpose, from his distinctively dot-striped indigo Wabash chore coat to his spike-soled cork boots, flavored by a rotation of popover shirts, neckerchiefs, and brown work pants hoisted by suspenders.
- Indigo and white dot-striped Wabash chore coat with extended throat-latch, four brass tack front buttons with watch-chain buttonhole, four patch pockets, and 2-button cuffs
- Drab light-brown cotton long-sleeved popover work-shirts
- Off-white cotton long-sleeved henley undershirt
- Red, blue, and/or olive printed cotton neckerchiefs
- Brown flat-front work trousers with waistband suspender buttons, curved front pockets, jetted back pockets, and self-cuffed bottoms
- Light-brown leather suspenders with silver-toned adjusters
- Black smooth leather mid-calf plain-toe caulk boots with 4-eyelet/7-speed hook lacing system and calk-spiked soles
- Brown soft felt crusher hat
Do Yourself a Favor and…
Check out the movie, currently streaming on Netflix.
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