Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Dressed Trailer | Clothes on Film

Looking so sexily brilliant that the finished film can be nothing but a huge disappointment (kidding), this first teaser trailer for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ticks all the right seventies period costume boxes.

UPDATE (4TH AUG): And now we have a full trailer…

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Set in what looks to be around the mid-late decade, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (directed by Tomas Alfredson) is a feature update of John le Carré’s novel about a ‘mole hunt’ within Mi6. Having already been filmed as a really quite creepy TV series in 1979 starring Alec Guinness as spy master George Smiley, this version, with Gary Oldman in the Smiley role, has a lot to live up to. On the basis of this thrilling one minute eighteen seconds glimpse, all signs point toward ‘ridiculously promising’.

It is all there: Harringtons, 70’s penchant for loud check jackets as acceptable day wear (think Roger Moore in The Man With the Golden Gun), along with a 3 piece suit revival for authority figures; very 1930s-esque, thick herringbone, worsted with significant chalkstripe, also wide lapels on heavy overcoats and slip-ons, some raglan, some based on Royal Navy reefers, all in the brownest, smudgiest colours imaginable. There are hardly any female costumes on display; this is presented as a man’s world. Yet do stay alert for a flash of pencil skirt and print shirt with bow neckline. This ensemble may even enjoy a fashion resurgence if Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy brings box office in addition to expected critical acclaim.

Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr on set in a Harrington jacket, as created by Baracuta in the late 1930s.

Costume designer is Jacqueline Durran. Perhaps best known for Atonement (2007), in particular that emerald green silk gown worn by Keira Knightley, outwardly Durran has kept this period away from farce, which the seventies can so easily drift into, by a retaining a sense of the real world. This is actually how civil servants dressed, or those saving the world from Russian sleeper agents anyway.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy and Mark Strong is released on 16th September in the UK and 18th November in the U.S.