The Most Stylish Character of the Year: Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems

How the film's directors and costume designer came up with some of the slickest fits in recent memory.
adam sandler
The matching Ferragamo belt and loafers, says stylist Miyako Bellizzi, are a 47th Street fixture.Mordechai Rubinstein

In all of Josh and Benny Safdie’s films—pulse-pounding visits with complicated protagonists, like 2017’s blazing Good Time, starring Robert Pattinson—costume provides both style and backstory. But, Josh says, “in a film like Uncut Gems, which is all about showing your wealth and saying, ‘I belong,’ it becomes even more important.” And there is no character in the Safdie filmography with quite so personal a style as Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner, the diamond-dealing hero of their newest—a two-hour speedball featuring the brothers’ coolest costumes to date.

Ratner’s leather blazer, for instance, has a quasi-mystical power. “There’s a toughness to it that we thought was very important,” Benny says. Adds Josh: “It says business, it says grit, and it says chic. But it also says, ‘If you come near me, I will slap the shit out of you.’ ” The character’s getup emerged from research Josh had done in Manhattan’s 47th Street Diamond District, where costume designer Miyako Bellizzi and consultant Mordechai Rubinstein also scouted. “Forty-seventh Street’s stuck 20 years ago. They’re stuck in time,” Rubinstein says.

From the Rolex to the rings, Sandler wore nearly half a million dollars’ worth of jewelry.

Mordechai Rubinstein

The blazer’s unlikely inspiration: Josh Safdie saw a guy wearing one to lunch in Midtown—“probably with a divorce lawyer”—and loved the look.

Josh Safdie

And yet Sandler’s outfits—a welter of oversize slacks, garish polos, and gold jewelry—feel wholly out of time, crashing together early-aughts Cam’ron and contemporary Balenciaga, Midtown Jew and downtown scenester. Howard’s “style hasn't really changed in the last ten years,” Bellizzi says. “He's in his mid-40s or early 50s, but he is wearing the same clothes that he was wearing, like, in his 30s. So even though this movie takes place in 2012, his style probably hasn't changed since the early 2000s.” All of it’s just wrong enough to make it feel gloriously right and totally real—the believably twisted wardrobe of a small-time hustler trying desperately to be everything to everyone all at once. “You could see a young kid in their early 20s wearing that same exact outfit,” Bellizzi says, “and it being really cool.”

For the filmmakers, reality was paramount: “The Cartier glasses, that’s a jeweler staple,” Josh says. “That’s the same thing as a basketball player wearing Jordans.” Other pieces had stranger provenance. The hero blazer came from eBay, a pair of slacks from a never-picked-up made-to-measure order at Zegna. One double-breasted suit, Rubinstein says, was sourced “literally from, like, doublebreastedsuits.com. We went all over looking for the right one, but the right one was just online for $19.99, and it just worked.”

It helped that, in Sandler, the team found a willing partner—one who would show up to wardrobe blasting Too Short from a portable speaker, and who made the process a collaboration. “He's like a cozy boy,” Bellizzi says. “His personal style is amazing. He wears basketball shorts and Jordans every day, no matter the weather. If he's not comfortable, then he's not going to wear it. But that also worked well for his character, too, because we wanted everything to be slightly oversized anyway.” He was game, she says, for everything. Or at least almost everything: “The only thing that he would not try on were skinny jeans.”

And while the film has a December release, the Safdies learned by Halloween that Sandler’s look was resonating, as Howards began to appear by the dozen on social media. “That’s the barometer for a costume,” Josh says. “Can a teenager put it together at the thrift store? And I think they can with this one.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the December/January 2020 issue with the title "The Most Stylish Character Of The Year: Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems."


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