I
n cases of exceptionalism in film fashion, few are so prominent as Steve McQueen’s outfit in The Great Escape. His character, Captain Virgil Hilts, the Cooler King, spends much of the movie in khaki chinos and a blue sweatshirt, while all around him fellow prisoners are in much more formal military uniforms. He also has a baseball glove and ball to bounce against walls. Why did the Germans allow this PoW to wear this chic gear? Could it be because the King of Cool had to look the part even in a period wartime drama?
Now, while it is perfectly reasonable that a captured United States Army Air Force pilot might wear this sort of gear, the details tell a different story. Those chinos are more slim than they would have been in the 1940s, and McQueen’s A-2 brown leather jacket just looks like too good a fit. Plus his short-sleeved sweatshirt is so perfectly campus track-and-field that when paired with his ever-present baseball and glove we are looking at something much more 1960s Sunday-in-the-park US than behind-barbed-wire Second World War Germany.
Steve McQueen playing Captain Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape
SUNSET BOULEVARD/GETTY IMAGES
