Site icon BAMF Style

Mean Streets: De Niro’s Plaid Jacket and Dobbs Hat as Johnny Boy

Nick (luckystrike721)
Advertisements

Robert De Niro in Mean Streets (1973)

Vitals

Robert De Niro as Johnny Boy Civello, irresponsible mob associate

New York, Fall 1972

Film: Mean Streets
Release Date: October 14, 1973
Director: Martin Scorsese
Wardrobe Credit: Norman Salling

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

“You’ve blogged about this movie, right?” my wife asked me during her first-ever viewing of Mean Streets this weekend. When I responded that of course I have, she nodded and pointed to Robert De Niro swinging a broken pool cue in a bar full of angry mooks, adding “I can tell. This outfit is very you.” And that’s when I realized I needed to quickly rectify my BAMF Style blind spot that had so far overlooked Robert De Niro’s style as the reckless Johnny Boy in director Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough feature.

Heeding his pal John Cassavetes’ advice to make something more personal than his last film (Boxcar Bertha), Scorsese crafted Mean Streets as his own spin on I Vitelloni (1953), drawing on experiences and characters he knew growing up in New York’s Little Italy. He shot the film over 27 days in spring 1973, including seven days on location in New York City—often without permits.

Harvey Keitel led the billing as mob associate Charlie Cappa, whose internal conflict swirls around intense Catholic guilt, his ambitions within his uncle’s organized crime family, and his self-imposed responsibility for the self-destructive Johnny Boy—whose brash attitude doesn’t endear him to the mob loan sharks who are chasing him over his increasing debts to them.

Even when he’s not directly involved in the action, Johnny Boy often escalates problems. When Charlie brings him along to collect a simple payment for the luckless Jimmy (Lenny Scaletta), Johnny Boy can’t help but to needle the corpulent pool hall operator Joey (George Memmoli) to the point where Joey not only refuses to pay, he calls Jimmy a mook (“a mook, what’s a mook?”) and ultimately punches poor Jimmy, launching a messy brawl scored by The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman”.

What’d He Wear?

Like all the worst guys you know who started unironically wearing fedoras (or trilbies that they called fedoras) during the late 2000s hipster era, Johnny Boy is obsessed with his new chapeau, explaining to Joey that it’s a $25 Dobbs hat. Johnny Boy isn’t exactly the kind of guy I’d trust on his word alone, but there’s no reason not to believe that his new dark-brown felt trilby with its matching grosgrain band was indeed made by Dobbs, the respected New York City milliner in operation since 1908.

Johnny wears his trilby with the self-edged brim turned up, at least until he loses it during the scuffle and later bemoans to Charlie after his loss that “I’m sick about my hat.”

Through this sequence, Johnny wears a sharp brown windowpane sports coat in an ochre-forward palette that screams early ’70s fashion, despite some details more reflective of the prior decade’s trim tailoring. The warm tobacco-brown wool fabric may be a finely brushed pure wool or a wool-silk blend, given the soft sheen and visible nap. The large-scaled golden triple-windowpane overcheck consists of pronounced horizontal lines perpendicular to more muted vertical lines.

The notch lapels taper high above the single-button stance, which had re-emerged in the 1960s as a trendy alternative to more conventional two- and three-button jackets. A narrow welted breast pocket is supplemented with straight flapped hip pockets, and the sides are split with long double vents. The shoulders are padded out to a straight and wide silhouette, which Johnny Boy probably liked to give him a more imposing presence when trying to talk loan sharks out of breaking his legs. The sleeves are finished with a single button on each uniquely mitred-corner cuff.

Johnny’s mustard-yellow knit shirt neatly calls out the golden check of his sport jacket. The shirt is cut like a leisure-forward alternative to sporty polo or tennis shirts, with a pullover design and button-up placket that extends down to mid-chest. He always wears the four-button placket fully buttoned to the neck, emphasizing the length of its point collar that sits at the intersection of trendy ’70s excess and the iconic spearpoint collars favored by Scorsese’s screen gangsters.

Though we never see him without his jacket, we can be almost positive that the shirt has short sleeves given that Robert De Niro’s wrists and forearms are always bare when stretched out under the jacket’s sleeves.

Johnny smartly contrasts the busy sport jacket with lighter neutral trousers, specifically tan twill flat-front slacks that slightly flare below the knees to the plain-hemmed bottoms. The beltless waistband has a squared, single-button extended tab over the front, and the “frogmouth”-style front pockets are typical of 1970s trouser design. These are the same trousers he would wear with a brown leather car coat and half-zip shirt during the finale.

BOB

Brown leather footwear is the best choice for this outfit, and it’s refreshing to see that one of Johnny Boy’s few good choices in Mean Streets is following this direction. Worn with plain black cotton lisle socks, his derby shoes have dark-brown leather uppers with a reddish-to-burgundy cast—even in the harsher florescent light of Joey’s pool hall rather than the default red tones in Tony’s bar.

For late nights and early mornings in transitional season New York City, Johnny layers with a camel double-breasted topcoat cut to just above his knees—a style often marketed to commuters as a “walker coat”. With a sheen suggesting real camelhair or an elegant wool like cashmere, Johnny’s coat has peak lapels rolling to a high-fastening 6×3-button arrangement of dark-brown leather buttons in two parallel columns of three buttons each. Like the sport jacket beneath it, this coat has a welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, and single-button cuffs.

At the end of a day that extended far too deeply into the next morning, Charlie and Johnny both strip down to their underwear to catch a few winks. Both men wear white ribbed cotton sleeveless undershirts: a style formally known as “A-shirts” (for “athletic shirts”), though they also have the more derogatory moniker as “wife-beaters”.

Johnny’s boxer shorts are printed with an alternating, large-scale, foulard-like pattern of blue medallions against the white ground. They’re the same boxers—or, I should hope, merely identical to the boxers—that he previously wore for his introductory scene in Tony’s bar, when he entered pantless with his suit jacket, tie, and that $25 Dobbs hat. “Are those the shorts with the hearts on ’em?” Tony had joked when he saw them. (For the sake of this blog’s compulsive dedication to precision, I should clarify that no, this pattern does not appear to be hearts.)

The Godfather told us to keep our friends close and our enemies closer, but then Mean Streets offered this more curious arrangement for frenemies.

How to Get the Look

Robert De Niro in Mean Streets (1973)

Say what you will about Johnny Boy, he can coordinate the hell out of an outfit—as long as he’s wearing pants. During the pool hall sequence that led to an improvised trash can fight later that night, Johnny anchors his neutral tones to shades of brown from his checked sport jacket and mustard polo to a camel double-breasted coat and a beloved brown hat that’s lost in battle.

Assuming Johnny Boy survived that ending, he could at least retrieve his screen-worn hat from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which maintains a comprehensive collection of Robert De Niro’s costumes and personal effects, including the famous hat from Mean Streets that appears on its main search page.

Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

The Quote

A mook? What’s a mook?

Exit mobile version