herringbone tweed sport jacket

Name: No Brand herringbone tweed sport jacket
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Joseph Turner in Three Days of the Condor, 1975 — as worn by Robert Redford

Plate I — Three Days of the Condor, 1975BAMF Style · Image may be subject to copyright

The scene

At the beginning of Three Days of the Condor, Joseph Turner cuts through Manhattan traffic on his motorized bicycle during the opening credits, heading downtown before he reaches the Manhattan Literary Historical Society, the East 77th Street townhouse that fronts for his CIA research office. The sequence places him in a very specific New York of 1975: crowded streets, winter light, and a workday already in motion before the conspiracy has declared itself. This herringbone tweed sport jacket is part of that opening movement, worn beneath his outer layers as he rides in from the street and arrives at the office just before the film’s violence begins to gather around him.

The jacket gives Turner the look the film wants established before anything else happens: not a field operative, but an educated, bookish analyst whose authority comes from reading, pattern recognition, and routine. In these first minutes he is still moving through an ordinary morning, parking his bike, entering the Society, and settling into the bureaucracy of his cover job. The tweed, already associated with campus and professional dress, fixes him in that civilian-intellectual register before the plot turns him into a fugitive.

Sydney Pollack and costume designer Joseph G. Aulisi let the jacket register in glimpses rather than as a costume display. It emerges as Turner strips off the hat and scarf from the ride, and the broad herringbone reads on screen as a textured grey field against the office interior. In the opening stretch, the jacket is framed as lived-in working clothing, practical enough for a bicycle commute yet sharp enough to define Turner before a word of exposition is needed.

The object

This jacket was an anonymous commercial sport coat rather than a branded signature piece, selected for Three Days of the Condor by costume designer Joseph G. Aulisi, whose screen work also includes The Sting and The Way We Were. Publicly documented reporting and later costume analysis identify it as a jacket sourced from Barney’s men’s store on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, then altered for Robert Redford rather than built as a bespoke studio garment. That anonymous retail origin is central to why the piece matters: it is a ready-made American sports jacket elevated through proportion, tailoring, and screen use rather than through a label.

The cloth is a large-scale herringbone tweed in grey tones, reading on screen as black and light grey in alternating chevrons. Surviving costume analysis describes a single-breasted two-button front, broad notch lapels, a welt breast pocket, flapped hip pockets, a single vent, and a bright red Bemberg lining. Aulisi has been quoted describing additional alterations made after purchase, including suppressing the waist, extending the visual drama of the vent, and refining the jacket’s line for Redford’s frame.

In the film, the jacket is the version worn by Joseph Turner in the opening Manhattan commute and through the early office scenes before the attack that drives the plot. Its most identifiable screen characteristic is the unusually bold herringbone layout, which reads less like a standard country tweed than a graphic urban pattern under 1970s cinematography.

Because the original was a retail jacket from the mid-1970s and not a current catalogued product line, this exact item is no longer sold new in its original commercial form and survives, if at all, only as vintage or secondhand examples.

Provenance

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