Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers (2023)
Vitals
Paul Giamatti as Paul Hunham, cantankerous boarding school professor
Massachusetts, Winter 1970/1971
Film: The Holdovers
Release Date: October 27, 2023
Director: Alexander Payne
Costume Designer: Wendy Chuck
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
One of my favorite new releases in 2023 is The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s comedy-drama centered around the skeleton staff chaperoning a group of boarding school students who aren’t going home for the holidays.
Set through the 1970 winter break, The Holdovers centers around the cranky classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), an odorous, lazy-eyed loner whose few friends among the Barton Academy staff include cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and administrator Lydia Crane (Carrie Preston). After four of the five students are given the opportunity to leave Barton days before Christmas, Paul and the remaining student—the bright but troubled Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa)—transform their mutual dislike into a surprising bond.
As many are returning to work and school this week after the holidays, let’s take a deeper look at Paul’s classic Ivy fashions that he wears to bookend the Barton Academy holiday break.
What’d He Wear?
Despite his grumpy attitude, Paul Hunham takes pride in being a professor and dresses exactly as you’d expect of a long-time instructor at a New England prep school. “While I didn’t want to go completely into that stereotypical look, how could I not a little? Besides, the yearbooks demonstrated that was exactly the right look for the period,” costume designer Wendy Chuck explained to Focus Features of the professorial corduroy suits, knitwear, and bow ties that she chose for Paul.
On the two days where we see Paul teaching—the last day before the holiday break (December 17, 1970) and the first day back to class in January 1971—he wears the same wheat-colored corduroy suit and green sweater vest.
The sweater vest provides textural harmony in addition to another vertical layer to help elongate and flatter Paul’s frame.
Chuck’s team worked to make this two-piece suit look considerably lived-in, appropriate for a regularly worn part of Paul’s wardrobe. The medium-waled corduroy cotton sacrifices some of the neater structure of a thinner-waled corduroy for something that would wear comfortably soft while still affording its wearer an air of professorial authority.
The single-breasted jacket has lapels of a narrower width that suggests an early ’60s provenance, as Paul is arguably the type to not care about updating his wardrobe. These lapels roll over the top of three flat black buttons on the front of the jacket, creating a classic 3/2-roll configuration that Ivy outfitters like Brooks Brothers and J. Press had been popularized in the United States since the early 20th century. The jacket is lined in a burgundy-and-green-on-beige tattersall check.
The jacket is characterized by sporty details like patch pockets, a half-belted back, and elbow patches. All three patch pockets have rounded bottom corners, though the breast pocket is left open while the two larger hip pockets are covered with rectangular flaps. The back is half-belted with double side vents (as opposed to the conventional back with a single vent on the brown corduroy three-piece suit he would wear to Miss Crane’s Christmas Eve party.) The dark brown suede elbow patches are a particularly professorial detail, originally designed for outdoorsmen’s sport jackets to reinforce the elbows from regular wear.
Often worn orphaned with other shirts and sweaters over the course of The Holdovers, Paul’s flat-front suit trousers have belt loops, side pockets, jetted back pockets (with a button through the back-right pocket), and plain-hemmed bottoms.
Paul holds them up with a dark-brown leather belt, which coordinates to the uppers of his dark-brown leather apron-toe derby shoes. Rather than traditional dress shoes, these everyman work shoes are built more for function than for form, designed to withstand years of everyday wear, including in the harsh New England winters.
For an additional layer of warmth during this snowy season in Massachusetts, Paul wears an olive-colored V-neck sweater vest made from a thin, soft wool like merino.
Summoned by a scuffle, Paul pulls back his shirt sleeves to time how long it will take for one of the holdovers to tell him who instigated a fight with Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa).
The oxford cotton button-down (OCBD) shirt emerged as an Ivy style staple shortly after Brooks Brothers president John E. Brooks brought the button-down “Polo collar” to the U.S. after observing English polo players fastening their collars down during play. Paul wears almost exclusively button-down collars, saving his dressiest white OCBD shirts for work. These softly worn-in shirts have front plackets and barrel cuffs that close through one of two buttons, adjustable suit how snugly Paul wants them to fit around each wrist.
When we meet Paul on the last day of Barton’s 1970 term, he wears a burgundy silk bow tie with a foulard horizontal-elongated diamond print alternating between beige-bordered, black-filled diamonds and larger all-beige gradient diamonds.
When classes resume in early January 1971, Paul wears exactly what he had been wearing on the last day of classes several weeks earlier, but he swapped out his neckwear for another dark-red printed silk bow tie, this time with a series of gold-trimmed medallion circles against a maroon ground.
“For Paul, there were two things that were important to get right—his hat and his jacket,” costume designer Wendy Chuck shared with Focus Features. Indeed, his checked tweed trilby and duffel coat coordinate with the rest of his costume. The short-brimmed tweed trilby is patterned in a gun club check, consisting of a rust-and-black houndstooth check against a beige ground.
Characterized by their integrated hoods and a loop-and-toggle front closure that could be easily operated by gloved hands, duffel coats were named for the coarse and heavy woolen cloth that originated in the Belgian town of Duffel during the 15th century. Though they may have emerged from earlier Polish military outerwear, the duffel coat was popularized by British outfitter John Partridge’s design during the 1850s. The Brits adopted the coat for its own military service, most widely in the Royal Navy though it adopted its “Monty coat” moniker for its association with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery of the British Army.
Like many other military fashions, the duffle coat was widely adopted by civilians after the war thanks to firms like Gloverall, and it was firmly established as a campus staple in northern colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. As Paul was a lifelong Barton man, he likely picked up his duffel coat sometime between his tenure as a student and his early years as a faculty member.
Paul trudges through the snow in his tweed trilby and duffel coat for a meeting with the school headmaster.
Paul’s dark-gray melton wool duffel coat follows the traditional design, with its integrated black-lined hood and four black leather toggle-fastened loops up the front. The thigh-length coat also has a shoulder and back yoke, set-in sleeves with plain cuffs, flapped patch-style hip pockets, and single vent.
Paul confers with Mary at the end of a stressful first day with his holdovers.
Paul regularly wears a yellow-gold wristwatch with a round black dial, secured to his left wrist on a black leather strap. He also frequently pulls on a pair of tortoise square-framed reading glasses, with the right arm scotch-taped at the temple—an inelegant repair that adds to his rumpled appearance.
What to Imbibe
Paul Hunham’s preferred spirit is Jim Beam bourbon whiskey, enjoyed straight or in his coffee.
Having been known as “Old Tub” for decades, this Kentucky bourbon was rebranded “Jim Beam” in 1943 in tribute to then-president James Beauregard Beam, great-great grandson of German immigrant Johannes “Jacob” Beam, who had started the operation in the late 18th century. As of 2020, Jim Beam’s standard 80-proof “White Label” variety was deemed the world’s most popular bourbon in Brad Japhe’s reporting for Forbes, citing the IWSR Drinks Market Analysis.
In the 1970s, Jim Beam was heavily advertised as a bourbon that could bridge the “Generation Gap”, featuring John Huston and Dennis Hopper, Bette Davis and Robert Wagner, and Orson Welles and his daughter Rebecca in various ads that depicted older and younger generations (respectively) enjoying it, simultaneously declaring that its popular formula had remained generally unchanged since 1795—an appropriate spirit for a tradition-minded instructor like Paul.
Paul gets interrupted while on a Jim Beam-fueled evisceration of his students’ exams.
Though he may be finicky, Paul isn’t choosy about his liquors and eagerly asks Mary for a nip of her Canadian Club after spotting a bottle of this venerated Canadian whiskey at her workstation.
“You know this is a necessity?” Mary asks Paul before pouring him a mug of Canadian Club.
When called to meet with headmaster Hardy Woodrip (Andrew Garmin) at the start of the winter break, Paul spies a bottle of the exclusive Rémy Martin Louis XIII cognac on his desk, which Dr. Woodrip explains as “a Christmas gift from the board of trustees.”
Paul-Emile Rémy Martin introduced this expression in 1874, the 150th anniversary of Rémy Martin’s operations, when he began selling a blend of his best 100% Grande Champagne cognacs. This blend of up to 1,200 different eaux-de-vie—aged for up to 100 yeass— is exclusively sourced from the Grande Champagne region of France, contributing to its rich and complex flavor profile. The cognac is presented in a distinctive and handcrafted crystal decanter, which Paul-Emile Rémy Martin replicated from a metal flask that had been recovered from the 1859 Battle of Jarnac.
How to Get the Look
Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers (2023)
Paul Hunham dresses to suit the image of the beleaguered New England professor, rotating through a well-worn closet of Ivy staples like his broken-in light brown corduroy suit, sweater vest, OCBD shirt, bow ties, and hardy leather derbies, layering against the cold in his checked tweed trilby and duffel coat.
- Wheat-colored corduroy cotton two-piece suit:
- Single-breasted 3/2-roll jacket with notch lapels, patch breast pocket, flapped patch hip pockets, 4-button cuffs, and half-belted back with double side vents
- Flat-front trousers with belt loops, side pockets, jetted back pockets (with button-through right pocket), and plain-hemmed bottoms
- White oxford cotton shirt with button-down collar, front placket, and button cuffs
- Dark-red printed bow tie
- Olive-green merino wool V-neck sweater vest
- Dark-brown leather belt
- Dark-brown leather apron-toe derby shoes
- Beige gun club check tweed trilby
- Dark-gray melton wool duffel coat with integrated hood, four black leather loop-and-toggles, flapped patch hip pockets, and single vent
- Tortoise square-framed reading glasses
- Yellow-gold wristwatch with round black dial and black leather strap
Do Yourself a Favor and…
Check out the movie, currently streaming on Peacock.
The Quote
Hardy, I have known you since you were a boy, so I think I have the requisite experience and insight to aver that you are and always have been penis cancer in human form.
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