By all accounts, Project Hail Mary — the highly anticipated adaptation of The Martian author Andy Weir’s space epic, spearheaded by 21 Jump Street directing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — is already a success.
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Minus the rock-star shades…and the rock-star PradaCritics have embraced Amazon MGM’s sci-fi film as both the second coming of E.T. and an insightful inspection of male loneliness, simultaneously praising leading man Ryan Gosling’s prowess as one of the strongest dramedy actors of his generation. (More cynically, his even rarer ability to open a movie: the flick’s opening weekend raked in an impressive $141M at the box office.)
Online buzz has been similarly positive, with a particular interest developing in the wardrobe of Dr. Ryland Grace, the well-meaning high-school teacher turned astronaut protagonist that the ever-gregarious Gosling affably portrays.
For a popcorn flick about saving the universe with a rock buddy, Grace wears a shocking amount of down-to-earth menswear, ranging from a host of tongue-in-cheek graphic t-shirts to ’70s-esque rainbow-striped polos to an off-season, faux-leather, mustard yellow Maison Margiela trench coat. He’s even seen sporting the latest TAG Heuer smartwatch.
It’s one piece in particular, however — a creamy-colored, fox-embroidered zip cardigan Gosling wears throughout much of the film — that provides enough reason to cast contrivances about how his character can afford all of this stuff on a teacher’s salary aside.
If the vulpes embroidery looks familiar, you’re probably correct; there’s actually a strong chance that you’ve seen some variation of the sweater before. Its origins are fairly unique: rather than a single mass-produced knit from some now-defunct brand, the sweater is actually the result of a knitting pattern — specifically, from Mary Maxim, the legendary mail-order supply company founded in Manitoba in the late ‘30s.
The original curling sweater design, patented in 1959, prominently features the iconic and oft-cribbed pair of laughing wolves on the front, with a paw-print trim, two more full-sized wolves spanning the back and a classic Cowichan-style zipper and collar. (True Cowichan knits are made on Vancouver Island.) In the decades since, plenty of the resulting hand-knit sweaters have popped up from small-batch labels and on secondhand markets; often altered or customized, the style has become something of a collector’s item for serious knitwear enthusiasts and one-on-one fanatics.
This included Project Hail Mary costume designer Glyn Dillon, who revealed that the costuming was a direct result of scooping up a wolf-embroidered knit at a London-based vintage fair for his own personal wear. In a recent post on Instagram, Dillon suggested that, after a topsy-turvy approval and camera test process with the original wolf design, Gosling himself convinced the costuming team to alter the design into a (friendlier-looking) fox at the last minute after being purportedly inspired by sighting experiences of London’s oversized urban fox population. (Gosling, for his part, told Mashable it was a “little Easter egg for my kids.”)
Given the bespoke nature of the piece, a pre-constructed version isn’t currently available, but to their credit, Mary Maxim actually did release a “Knit Kit” for Gosling’s sweater (priced at a modest $80) in collaboration with the movie’s launch. The bad news? Crocheting skills aren’t included. Prepare to lock in for some serious YouTube tutorials…or just be ready drop $900 on eBay.
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