“Everyone in Soho dresses like this now,” the joke goes. The phrase is usually tweeted alongside a photo of some long-forgotten cultural figure whose style seems to overlap almost perfectly with
the prevailing advanced-fashion looks of the day. “To make the joke is to announce a deep exhaustion with much of menswear’s fixations, alongside a deep familiarity with them,” Max Lakin wrote for this website in January: a sense that, as hilariously as the young men outside Aimé Leon Dore or wherever might be dressing, someone else had worn their weird pants first.
I thought of the phrase while watching On the Rocks, Sofia Coppola’s mellow new Manhattanite caper. But not because anyone in the film was wearing Balenciaga or oversized Hawaiian shirts or all Raf Simons everything. Quite the opposite: this being a Sofia Coppola movie, everyone in it is almost distractingly tasteful. They’re in carefully aged vintage, and elegant gold jewelry, and soft-shouldered suits. This, of course, is what everyone is Soho dresses like—or at least used to, when we still got dressed.
Who needs a dress shirt?
Courtesy of JoJo Whilden for A24 / Apple TV+On the Rocks is ostensibly about Laura (Rashida Jones), a writer and mother frustrated to be doing a lot more of the latter than the former. She grows concerned that her husband Dean might be cheating on her, and—perhaps against her better judgment—calls in her joyful philanderer of a father to crack the case.
If the film is strangely uninterested in Laura’s plight—her problems in love and work, it turns out, are mostly in her head—that’s because nearly all of its sympathy is reserved for her father, who is played by Bill Murray and who spends the movie’s 96 minutes giving a masterclass in charm. His Felix, a raconteur art dealer, is a little misogynistic, and a little more into sex-heavy evolutionary theory than you’d want your elderly father to be. But he’s also Bill Murray, at basically any moment seducing every character and the camera.
And here—because it’s set in a pre-pandemic New York, because he’s an art dealer, and because this is simply how it’s done in Manhattan—Felix does most of his seducing in a suit “We always wanted him to feel sophisticated and worldly, but also still have that softness and charm,” costume designer Stacey Battat tells me. Which meant suits: some from Brooks Brothers and some from Battistoni; a seersucker worn, winningly, with white bucks and a navy wool worn with a T-shirt.