Hellmann’s pulled out all the stops for its Super Bowl ad this year. Not only did the mayonnaise brand recreate the iconic Katz’s Deli scene from When Harry Met Sally with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, but they actually paid attention to the details! She’s eating turkey, he’s got pastrami. They’re sitting at the same table. The famous “I’ll have what she’s having” line is uttered by Sydney Sweeney (cross-generational appeal!). Crystal is even “wearing his classic cable knit fisherman’s sweater” — that’s according to the press release, and seemingly every news outlet that wrote about the spot parroted that statement.
There’s just one problem: Crystal’s sweater in When Harry Met Sally has become the stuff of legend — but the version he’s wearing in this ad? It just shows how far sweaters have fallen. Even a $10 million Super Bowl ad can’t find a good one.
To be fair, it’s not clear what brand made Crystal’s sweater in the movie. Despite it being extolled everywhere from GQ to TikTok, we still don’t know the exact provenance, and Crystal himself recently said he thinks he lost the garment, possibly having donated it to the UCLA theater department. But there are specific qualities that make it timeless: the slightly oversized fit that’s cozy without being sloppy, the sumptuous construction that makes you want to reach through the screen and caress it, the substantial mock neck and cable knitting that looks handmade, all topped with a satisfying cream color that pairs perfectly with blue jeans.
Meanwhile, the sweater Crystal wears in the Hellmann’s ad is too tight, too thin, too bright. As a colleague of mine suggested, is the sweater color supposed to match the mayo? (We couldn’t ID the specific sweater at the time of publication, but we’re working on it.) The knitting patterns are so small and uniform it’s almost certain this was spit out by a machine, whereas the original had the delightfully irregular look of a handcrafted garment.
This year’s crop of Super Bowl ads, according to The Hollywood Reporter, cost anywhere from $10 to $20 million in total. (When Harry Met Sally reportedly cost $16 million to make in 1989, which equates to about $41 million in 2025 when accounting for inflation.) With that sort of budget for a 30-second advertisement, why couldn’t Hellmann’s find a reasonable cable-knit lookalike, especially when including that sweater is a deliberate change from the original scene?
Actually, that question was covered in a story about this same exact sweater in The Atlantic in 2023. After Ben Schwartz’s sweater was roasted on Twitter when he tried to copy Crystal’s look from the film, journalist Amanda Mull dug into the predicament and found a few factors contributing to our great knitwear collapse, including “changes to trade regulation, the declining in garment-industry wages and working conditions, [and] the rise of synthetic textiles.” The overarching theme is cheap abundance. Brands want people to buy more stuff, people want cheaper clothing that’s less of a hassle to maintain (they can put it in the washer and dryer vs. hand-washing and/or line drying), and bingo: we’ve got lots of thin, cheap, machine-made synthetic sweaters — none worthy of Harry Burns.
Hellmann’s isn’t really at fault here, nor is VML, the creative agency behind the ad. Even Billy Crystal couldn’t find a sufficiently chunky sweater when he recreated the look for his 75th birthday. No one can find a mass-produced sweater to rival this sartorial icon because modern versions just don’t exist. Sure, you could potentially find a small brand that specializes in wool cable-knit or Aran sweaters that make something similar, but I’m not going to recommend one that I haven’t actually tried on myself.
There’s really only one way to find something as satisfyingly snug as Crystal’s ‘80s knitwear: comb through vintage stores and resale sites that actually sell knitwear made in the ‘80s.
More Like This
This article was featured in the InsideHook newsletter. Sign up now.
