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About three-quarters of the way through The Brutalist, Brady Corbett’s Oscar-winning epic about the life of a Hungarian Jewish architect named László Tóth, there’s a scene that has transfixed a certain sector of menswear enthusiasts ever since the film hit theaters last December. In the clip, it’s the late 1950s, and Tóth—who by then is living in New York City and spending time in its downtown beatnik scene—is having dinner with his family at their apartment. Seated at the table, he is wearing a concrete-gray sweater with a sculptural neckline, Issey Miyake-esque ribbing, and soft, sloping shoulders. The role earned Brody an Oscar, but the sweater earned him the adoration of style-obsessed aficionados across the world wide web. “There’s a sweater in The Brutalist that’s the best single item of clothing I’ve seen in months. Maybe years,” New York Times fashion reporter Jacob Gallagher wrote on X in January. Elsewhere on the internet, Redditors tried to crowdsource an ID on the knitwear, which has now inadvertently quickly found its way in the canon of iconic movie sweaters among The Dude’s cardigan in The Big Lebowski, little Danny’s Apollo 11 sweater from The Shining, and Harry’s chunky knitwear in When Harry Met Sally. Earlier this year, I spoke to The Brutalist’s costume designer, Kate Forbes, about the sweater—which, like Tóth’s many other beautiful wardrobe pieces in the film, was vintage and sourced from Theaterkunst, a costume house in Berlin. She mentioned that she’d seen the fervor about the sweater online, and that she “really would love to do something” about making a contemporary version that fans could purchase. Now, Forbes’s vision is reality. As of today, her carefully recreated version of “The Brutalist sweater” is available for pre-sale, with a limited run of just 300 pieces. The sweaters are crafted from new wool and are priced at £450 (roughly $592). “There was such a sort of outpouring over that sweater [online] that it felt like so many people wanted it,” Forbes told me by phone this week. “I was really touched by that, because it’s just a one-off sweater found in a costume house. It has one tiny label in it, which is just a size label, and there’s no other clue as to where it comes from. I just really wanted to bring it back from obscurity.” With the blessing of Theaterkunst, Corbett, and producer Andrew Morrison, Forbes connected with the London-based knitwear designer Ilana Blumberg—who is the sister of Daniel Blumberg, the Oscar-winning composer of The Brutalist’s score—about recreating the vintage garment. The next task was to have a sample made, which proved to be more challenging than Forbes had anticipated. “This is a really old sweater—surely technology has just advanced so much that anything is possible these days,” she said. They tried and failed with three different manufacturers before landing on a company in Romania, which finally sent over their dream sample a month ago. “In this world of mass production, I wanted to keep it quite niche,” Forbes said of the sweater’s small run. “I wanted to retain how special it is. It’s not going to be unique anymore, but it is still going to have a rarefied quality.” The duo needed to produce as many as they did, however, because they “didn’t want to make it so expensive that only very few people could actually afford to have it.” They opted to offer preorders “so there’ll be no wastage,” which was important to Forbes and Blumberg. The duo wanted to do right by the garment, which wound up requiring a careful, analog approach that, in some ways, paralleled The Brutalist’s seven-year-long journey to the silver screen. Forbes wanted to maintain “the integrity of that original piece and the same integrity that I’ve always felt [in] the film and the script.” When Forbes and I spoke earlier this year, she shared that Brody himself had taken a particular liking to the sweater during his fittings for the film: “I remember him photographing it incessantly,” she said then. I asked this week if she planned on sending one of the reproduced sweaters to the best actor winner (who, back in June, wore an A24-made László Tóth T-shirt while on vacation in Sardinia). “I mean, I probably should,” she said, laughing. “I don’t think it would be quite the sweater that it is now without Adrien having worn it, because it did look amazing on him.” The Brutalist sweater is now available for presale on brutalistsweater.com. On November 15, Forbes and Blumberg are hosting a launch party at Twos Project Space in London, where visitors can try various sizes before preordering.
