Electronically published 12:36 AM, October 8, 2026
What a man wears on screen can tell us who he is before the story ever does. Menswear doesn’t always receive the same attention as womenswear, but take a closer look and you’ll see that it can unravel, exaggerate, disguise, seduce, or quietly reveal who a character is trying to become. From ancient armor and rock-star excess to dystopian workwear and deceptively ordinary basics, costume designers are giving men some of the most considered wardrobes on screen right now. Here are seven somewhat recent and upcoming films and shows making the case for a closer look.
#1 Sinners
Released April 18th, 2025
1930s tailoring, workwear, Southern style, and the way costume distinguishes characters who share the same face.
It’s crucial to start with the most notable film that has been released in the past decade– Sinners (2025). Ryan Coogler’s masterpiece of a movie transformed us all with its story, setting, set design, Ludwig Göransson’s scoring, the casting, the acting, and of course…the wardrobe. I’ll begin with a round-of-applause to the Academy Award-Winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who was responsible for Wakanda’s Afrofuturistic looks in Black Panther (2018). Her blindingly symbolic and historically accurate design for Sinners felt not only authentic to 1932 Mississippi, but established personality, class, migration, and masculinity. According to Variety, she and Coogler even pulled background pieces from Marvel’s stalled unfilmed Blade reboot from a 1920-1930s warehouse, using it for scenes like the crowded juke joint sequence. Marvel sold the wardrobe inventory to the Sinners production team at cost price so they could dress extras quickly. If we were to dive into Carter’s mind while in her development process, we would find that the tailoring tells us where the characters have been: Smoke and Stack return from Chicago dressed in wool suits that contrast with the cotton and denim worn by the Mississippi community. Carter intentionally wanted them to look like men who had “come from someplace else.” Their clothes visually communicate reverse migration before the story even explains it.
They also had the challenge of differentiating the twins and solved it with Stack’s clothing being aspirational and Smoke’s prioritizing function. Stack’s looks draw from Italian tailoring and Prohibition-era gangster style. His three-button 1920s-cut suit, burgundy shoes, red fedora, pocket square, watch chain and other accessories make dressing well part of his performance of confidence and status. Smoke’s suits are intentionally larger and boxier because he needs room to conceal guns and a knife. Even his blue denim flat cap connects him to American workwear. Carter described Smoke as an “everyman,” so his masculinity comes through practicality rather than decoration (Carter, TheSetSet). Color pallet-wise, red, white and blue runs through the entire costume structure; Ryan Coogler originally proposed red for Stack and blue for Smoke, but Carter decided to expand those colors throughout the community (Bianca Betancourt, Harper’s Bazaar). She drew inspiration from historical Southern photography and American imagery, making the palette part of the film’s larger argument that this is fundamentally an American story told through Black life and culture.
In Sinners, the clothes are never just there to look good. Carter lets the tailoring live, stressfully function, and eventually unravel with the story, proving that some of the most memorable menswear on screen is defined by how it’s worn—not just how it’s styled.
#2 Backrooms
Released May 29th, 2026
This fever dream of a film correlated outfits with mood, emotion, caricature, and saturated set design.
Much like his original Backrooms (2022), the creator, director, and writer Kane Parsons allows Backrooms (2026) to cater to fit, repetition, practicality, deterioration, color, and familiarity to communicate something about a character. Parsons’ psychological sci-fi horror film is set in 1990. It follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejofor), a struggling furniture-store owner who discovers a mysterious doorway in his basement leading to an endless, unsettling maze of seemingly ordinary rooms. As his fascination with the space grows, his therapist Mary becomes involved, turning the film into an exploration of memory, trauma, escapism, and the fear of familiar spaces becoming unfamiliar. In short, I would caution audiences in having extremely weird dreams after watching. The costuming in Backrooms strongly ties into the disruptive set design and –quite frankly– miserable personality of Clark. The bigger difference between styling and design in editorial or runway versus film is that half the time, it’s not exactly meant to be fashionable. It is meant to further the narrative and tropes of not only the project’s entirety, but the storyline of each character.
To the character styling that really took the cake: Bobby (Finn Bennet) is a young employee at Clark’s furniture, and his clothing immediately separates him from the older, more conventional Clark and had a wardrobe that communicated his personality without relying on traditional masculine tailoring. Compared to Clark’s broke businessman-like wardrobe (for lack of better phrase, but that’s what he is) Bobby’s crop tops, jewelry, loose silhouettes and bright accessories feel much more individualistic. His clothes suggest that he is comfortable experimenting; even the political slogan on his shirt gives him a little more identity. It comes to a point in the film where his clothing becomes a part of the horror, in piles of clothes within the backrooms, which was seemingly pulling something recognizable from Bobby’s own memories and reproducing it. His wardrobe starts to progress from simply telling us who Bobby is to becoming something the environment can use against him– bringing us back to how the design & styling team utilizes their surroundings and character profiles to mold material personas.
#3 The Odyssey
Released July 17, 2026
Ancient menswear reinterpreted for a contemporary blockbuster; draping, armor, utility, and masculinity without conventional suiting.
To say Ellen Mirojnick did her absolute part in costuming Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) would be understating it. Mirojnick and Nolan deliberately didn’t want the menswear to resemble the polished “sword-and-sandals” look audiences associate with Hollywood epics. Mirojnick said Nolan has an “aversion to movie clichés about antiquity,” so their goal was not to recreate one precise historical period, but to create something that felt ancient, believable, and timeless (Hannah Jackson, British Vogue).
Let’s begin with status: The male silhouette evidently changes according to power and circumstance. Mirojnick specifically researched “silhouette logic” and social hierarchy through dress. Odysseus (Matt Damon), Agamemnon, soldiers, sailors and Penelope’s (Anne Hathaway) suitors don’t simply wear interchangeable ancient-Greek costumes. Material, armor and decoration help establish where each man sits within the world. However, in Odysseus’s case, his wardrobe deteriorates with him; Mirojnick designed his wardrobe to erode, adapt and transform throughout his journey. She describes to Universal Pictures that as he is a survivor of a collapsed civilization, the clothing becomes increasingly weathered by salt, sun, dirt, battle and travel.
In terms of presentation, the 5,300 costumes needed to look lived-in, especially through IMAX format, while also surviving the actual physical filmmaking. The Troy sequences alone involved hundreds of performers, stunt teams, armor changes and multiple stages of blood, mud and battle damage. Costume teams continuously repaired, re-layered and reset clothing between takes. Yet a larger benefit in this confidence of detail is the actors’ performance. Himesh Patel said that putting on the armor immediately helped him understand the physicality of his character, especially alongside the sword-fighting preparation the actors underwent. The Odyssey pushes menswear back to its most elemental form, where texture, garment cuts, and wear speak louder than traditional styling. Mirojnick’s approach makes every layer feel earned, which allows the clothes to carry the weight of the journey right alongside the men wearing them.
#4 VisionQuest
Releases October 14th, 2026
Everyday menswear appropriate to the show’s theme, much like Wanda Vision, proves to us how seemingly simple costumes can establish character and environment.
For all the Marvel fans, mark your calendars for the premier date of October 14th, 2026 for VisionQuest. We can appreciate both Paul Bettany’s (Vision) role execution and Sarah Young’s costume design within the show. She uses Vision’s menswear choices as a performance of humanity. One of the most noticeable choices is Vision’s embrace of classic tailoring when appearing human; As of now, we’ve seen him in three-piece suits, waistcoats, ties, overcoats and hats. So at first glance, it’s conservative menswear—almost intentionally conventional, which is why the suits aren’t quite as human as they appear…Young hid easter eggs in the detailing of her styling. For instance, his gray pinstripe suit appears conventional from a distance, but the stripes are actually composed of computer code.
Young explained:
“You think it’s a pinstripe suit and then actually it isn’t.”
The costume department had code specifically written for the textile and developed a printing method that allowed it to fade in and out across the garment. Bettany even teased that viewers will be able to freeze-frame scenes and attempt to decipher it (Erik Amaya, Rotten Tomatoes). Even the wordage of the show title insinuates that Vision is on the search for his identity, which affects the color stories we will see within the show, as well as the authenticity of his wardrobe.
Ultimately, VisionQuest uses menswear almost like a second skin; Vision’s traditional suits allow him to blend into humanity, while hidden code, symbolic ties and unconventional construction remind us that he’s still learning what being human actually means.
#5 The Vampire Lestat
Released June 7th, 2026
This show probably had the most rich and decadent period menswear, rock-star energy, tailoring, jewelry, romanticism, and the relationship between masculinity and extravagance we have ever seen on television.
The Vampire Lestat (2026) creators treats Lestat’s (Sam Reid) wardrobe as a centuries-old dandy discovering modern rock-star fashion. Costume designer, Lex Wood, specifically wanted to “break [him] free of the suiting” of earlier seasons (in “Interview with the Vampire” [2022]) while retaining traces of his 18th-century identity. Her references for The Vampire Lestat undoubtedly range from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury to Jean Paul Gaultier and Dries Van Noten, according to her words in the LA Times. His version of dressing “normal” is hilarious and revealing; when Lestat wants to go unnoticed, he puts on a hoodie…but keeps the leather pants. In TV Guide, Wood specifically describes this as his attempt at looking like a “normal dude,” except “he’s still Lestat, and he’s still a peacock.” That’s a fantastic little menswear detail because even when he’s actively trying not to dress up, he can’t completely suppress his identity. Wood even incorporates a clever vampire-specific detail: because vampires retain the bodies they had when they were turned, Lestat can’t permanently pierce his ears. Instead, he re-pierces them in different places every day just to experiment with his rock-star image.
This being said, creators did not only transform the modern yet continuous persona of Lestat de Lioncourt, Louis de Pointe du Lac’s garments were show-stoppers as well. His wardrobe moves from being noticeably softer than Lestat’s -but still fresh, then he dresses depending on who he is dealing with, until Episode 6, where he begins to mirror Lestat’s openness; this is directly linked to how they open up emotionally as well. His “billionaire” wardrobe is intentionally understated, which makes the end goal seem be an expensive look, feel, and aura without obvious logos or stereotypical luxury. Instead, his wealth comes across through tailoring, fabric, fit and custom pieces. His trousers and cardigans, for example, were made or altered specifically for him. The color palette chosen for both Louis and Lestat flows as they navigate their traumas and identities, allowing it to display the strikingly opposite 21st century themes compared to previous seasons and signal a newfound freedom.
Lestat and Louis sit at opposite ends of the sartorial spectrum: one embraces unapologetic spectacle, while the other makes subtlety feel seductive. Yet neither is confined by conventional ideas of how men “should” dress. In a series built on immortality and reinvention, perhaps the most timeless thing about the characters and designer is their refusal to play it safe.
#6 Digger
Released October 2nd, 2026
This wildcard focuses on silhouette, character identity, and styling details rather than recognizable “fashion moments” in its upcoming release.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s newly released Digger (2026), starring Tom Cruise –in summary– is about an eccentric and immensely powerful billionaire who becomes convinced that he can save humanity from an impending catastrophe. Digger Rockwell, played by Cruise, turns his larger-than-life mission quickly into a dark satire of wealth, ego, power, and the dangerous belief that one man can—or should—have all the answers. His larger-than-life wardrobe helps construct that same ego and authority; costume designer Jacqueline West doesn’t dress Digger to make wealth look tasteful, she makes it impossible to ignore. Cowboy boots, imposing tailoring and an exaggerated silhouette build the image of a man performing his own version of power.
Paired with Cruise’s physical prosthetics transformation (big-up to the SFX artist team), the wardrobe turns traditional symbols of masculine success into part of the satire. Which in turn means the menswear isn’t necessarily asking us to admire Digger’s taste, it’s helping make him slightly ridiculous, but don’t worry; Iñárritu’s is going for that and proportion is doing a lot of the work. On top of the substantial facial prosthetics, the crew decide on a full on body transformation so West’s clothes have to work with an entirely different silhouette. The resulting suits and outerwear make Digger appear heavier, broader and more physically imposing than the Tom Cruise audiences recognize. I know I was completely unaware of his presence in this film until I looked at the key art credit block. Riz Ahmed (playing Ganesh) actually spoke to Rotten Tomatoes about this process from an actor’s perspective, saying that seeing yourself transformed through wigs, makeup and prosthetics changes the way you begin to move.
Iñárritu’s Digger turns the familiar uniform of male authoritativeness into something intentionally excessive. Every oversized proportion, polished detail, and Western reference adds another layer to the absurdity of the man underneath it all. It’s also a reminder of why menswear on screen deserves a closer look: even the most familiar pieces can become part of the punchline when styling and caricature collide.
#7 The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping
Releases November 20th, 2026
The Hunger Games franchise is practically known for using costume as world-building, particularly the contrast between Capitol excess, District clothing, class, spectacle, and the construction of male identity. We get a vibrant variety of that in this Nov 2026 film.
As a dystopian geek and THG franchise fan, I am excited to hear about Trish Summerville’s return to design The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping (2026), which will take place 24 years before Katniss Everdeen’s character (Jennifer Lawrence) was ever introduced. Director Francis Lawrence’s prequel shifts into Haymitch Abernathy’s story during the 50th Quarter Quell. Francis and Summerville take a strong mid-century/retro approach in their styling pulls that look like an earlier generation of Capitol fashion. We see wider collars, knitwear, patterned fabrics, structured tailoring and vintage-feeling proportions. That retro influence works particularly well because Panem has always existed somewhere outside our conventional timeline. It isn’t literally “the 1970s,” but borrowing recognizable fashion and adjusting color grading allows audiences to subconsciously understand.
Summerville beautifully executed the pre-traumatized version of Haymitch versus the lived-in version of him. Audiences already know Woody Harrelson’s older Haymitch by his disheveled hair, loose shirts, waistcoats, worn tailoring and clothing that often looks slightly slept-in. Young Haymitch (Joseph Zada) can’t simply look like a miniature adaptation, so instead, Zada’s utilitarian wardrobe gives us the visual starting point for the man he’ll eventually become. His clothes are a bit boyish but functional, and there are familiar textures, proportions and styling choices that subtly connect the two versions. This also immediately links the film to Katniss’s District 12 decades later– since fashion hasn’t radically progressed there because poverty doesn’t allow it to, their clothes are practical, repaired, reused and expected to last.
The Capitol clothing, of course, is freaking ridiculous. The excess of wealth and richness oozes out of Summerville’s design choices for these residents, but instead of simply putting these characters into the same style of clothing worn by characters like Effie and Caesar decades later, the designs feel like predecessors to those looks. Silhouettes and styling contain recognizable Capitol DNA without appearing quite as technologically polished or futuristic.
The director still gives us that particular class distinction between characters & world builds; and as usual, Summerville’s costume decisions have relied on the existing environments of either the arena, capitol, or districts. Sunrise on the Reaping proves that revisiting a familiar world doesn’t mean recycling its wardrobe. By dressing Panem’s past with its own visual history, Summerville makes the franchise feel lived-in across generations. For menswear especially, the appeal is in tracing what came before—seeing how workwear, tailoring, uniform, and spectacle quietly lay the groundwork for the Panem we already know.
Menswear may not always be the first thing we notice on screen, but maybe that’s exactly why it deserves a second glance. Across these films and shows, the details do the heavy lifting—from a perfectly cut suit to a worn layer, an unexpected silhouette, or a look that completely rejects the rules. The best men’s costuming isn’t always asking to be noticed; you just have to know where to look.
Which on-screen menswear moment made you look twice? Drop your pick in the comments.
Sources
Hounyoton, Bienvenu Hospice. “Vodoun: Historical and Socio-Anthropological Study of an Ancestral Heritage in Search of Affirmation.” International Journal of Innovation and Applied Studies, Innovative Space of Scientific Research (ISSR) Journals , Jan. 2024, ijias.issr-journals.org/. Vol. 41 No. 3, pp. 814-824. Accessed 7 Oct. 2026
Betancourt, Bianca. “Ruth E. Carter on the Costumes and Hidden Symbolism of ‘Sinners.’” Harper’s Bazaar, 24 Apr. 2024, http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/a64567733/sinners-ruth-e-carter-costumes-interview-2025/. Accessed 7 Oct. 2026
Jackson, Hannah. “‘The Odyssey’ Costumes Discard the Sword-and-Sandals Playbook.” British Vogue, British Vogue, 20 July 2026, http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/the-odyssey-costumes. Accessed 7 Oct. 2026.
IMDb: Ratings, Reviews, and Where to Watch the Best Movies & TV Shows, http://www.imdb.com/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.
Amaya, Erik. “Coded Easter Eggs and AI Personalities on the Set of Visionquest.” Rotten Tomatoes Coded Easter Eggs and AI Personalities on the Set of VisionQuest Comments, Rotten Tomatoes, 22 Sept. 2026, editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/visionquest-set-visit-paul-bettany-interviews/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.
Foundren, Precious. “The Hottest New Rock Star Is the Vampire Lestat – with Help from Bowie, Iggy and Freddie.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2026, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2026-06-20/vampire-lestat-rock-star-sam-reid?utm_source. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.
Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia. “The Vampire Lestat’s Costume Designer Explains the Show’s Brilliant and Symbolic Fashion Choices.” TV Guide, 10 Aug. 2026, http://www.tvguide.com/news/the-vampire-lestat-costume-designer/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.
Kwan, Maggie. “Tom Cruise Has ‘Never Seen’ a Character like Digger Rockwell.” Rotten Tomatoes Tom Cruise Has Never Seen A Character Like Digger Rockwell Comments, Rotten Tomatoes, 2 Oct. 2026, editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/tom-cruise-digger-big-ticket-interview/?. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.
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