Daniel Craig’s Vintage-Style Safari Suit in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

In his first film since leaving the role of James Bond, Daniel Craig returns to the part of Detective Benoit Blanc in the 2022 film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Jenny Eagan designed Daniel Craig’s creative and flamboyant but historically inspired costumes, which are beautifully presented throughout the film by director Rian Johnson. The detail put into the costume is not lost on screen.

In the first Knives Out film he dresses appropriately for an old-fashioned American detective in a tweed hopsack suit and soft-collared shirts. He’s established as someone who has a very traditional sense of style and probably shops at local menswear shops or from small bespoke clothiers where nothing has changed since long before he was born. He looks like he’s come straight out of the 1930s. Giselle Gauthier previously wrote about Craig’s style in his first turn as Benoit Blanc in Knives Out for The Kavalier.

In Glass Onion, his sense of style is equally old-fashioned but is much flashier. In Knives Out he dresses like a typical American did from the 1930s through the 1950s. His outfits show a respect for tradition but in a conservative way. For Glass Onion his style has considerably more flair. Maybe because he’s travelling abroad he feels he can have more fun with his clothes. He now dresses more like a Golden-Age Hollywood star than simply an old-fashioned detective. Blanc consistently aims to dress in a way that was proper for an older generation, even going so far as to wear a shirt and tie with his bathrobe on his 770 Park Avenue penthouse terrace.

@whatsdanielwearing on Instagram has identified some of the pieces from Glass Onion.

Blanc wears two suits for his weekend away in Greece, plus a two-piece swim suit and a Cary Grant-inspired striped sweater. The centrepiece of his wardrobe is a beige linen safari-style suit, made of a heavy plain-weave linen that rumples more than it wrinkles. The suit looks like it could be straight out of the 1920s or 1930s, but the superb bespoke fit prevents it from looking like an outdated piece of costume.

The suit jacket takes style inspiration from the safari jacket, most notably in its four-pocket front. Each pocket is a rounded patch pocket with an inverted box pleat and a curved button-down flap. The pockets contribute to the suit’s casual and sporty look.

The buttoning style of the jacket also comes from the safari jacket. It has five buttons down the front, evenly spaced from the top of the lapel to the top of the lower pockets at the hip. The gorge is too high for the top button to be able to fasten, but it updates the silhouette of the jacket to the 21st century. Craig fastens only the fourth or third and fourth buttons on the jacket.

The back of the jacket is also safari-inspired. There’s an inverted box pleat down the whole back, held in place at the waist by a half-belt sewn across the back. There is no vent at the back, only the inverted box pleat. The quarters of the jacket are curved and cutaway, removing the jacket from the safari jacket tradition.

The jacket has a very close fit, but it is not too tight. The shoulders are soft and very narrow, but the sleeves have enough fullness to drape neatly over Craig’s arms. The cuffs are detailed with three buttons.

The suit trousers look slightly more modern than the jacket. The jacket’s narrow shoulder and lean cut gives it a 1920s look while the trousers look more like they’re from the 1940s. The front of the trousers has a kissing pleat—an inverted box pleat—on each side, cleverly mirroring the pleats seen on the jacket pockets and at the back of the jacket. The pleats are similar to double reverse pleats but the secondary pleats are folded inwards instead of outwards to meet up with the main pleat. The end result looks a little sloppy, especially in linen that doesn’t stay crisp, but it’s all for the sake of a flashier style that also reflects the style of the jacket’s many pleats. The legs are wide with a plain hem.

The trousers are constructed without a separate waistband in a Hollywood-top style, a fashion from the 1940s. The legs of the trousers continue to the top of the trousers, and the material is folded inside and sewn in place to give the top the rigidity of a waistband. The trousers close with a hidden hook and eye, but because there is no separate waistband there is no extension.

The trousers also have quarter-top slanted side pockets, two rear double-jetted pockets without buttons and slide-buckle side adjusters.

His shirt is light blue with a subtle woven polka dot pattern in a lighter shade of blue. The shirt ismade by Anto, a bespoke shirtmaker in Beverly Hills, CA that has made shirts for countless film and television productions as well as for many celebrities in their personal lives. Anto also made Benoit Blanc’s matching swim shirt and shorts for the pool scene.

The shirt has a point collar worn open, two-button cocktail cuffs, a French front and side pleats behind the shoulders. The fit of the shirt is close to the body without being overly tight. The cocktail cuffs are similar in shape to Roger Moore’s cocktail cuffs from Frank Foster in The Man with the Golden Gun and Moonraker. Craig sometimes fastens both cuff buttons and the gauntlet button, sometimes he only fastens the button at the end of the cuff, and sometimes he only leaves the gauntlet button open. The inconsistency of how he buttons his cuffs fits a character who wears his clothes with a bit of nonchalence and probably fiddles with his buttons.

The shirt’s buttons match the colours of the shirt, contributing to a more casual look. Cocktail cuffs, being mainly popular in the 1960s, are slightly out of the place with the early 20th century look of the rest of the outfit, but they show a strong element of personal style as well as a continued influence of James Bond’s style on Daniel Craig.

Blanc maintains the same colour scheme of this suit, shirt and neckerchief from the one he wears earlier in the film simply by flipping the colours of the shirts and neckerchiefs. He pairs a patterned pink neckerchief with the light blue shirt. His dotted light blue shirt recalls the light blue neckerchief he wears earlier with a pattern of white dots in varying sizes.

Like as James Bond, Daniel Craig still wears an Omega Seamaster as Benoit Blanc. His watch is a Seamaster 1948 Co‑Axial Master Chronometer Small Seconds on a brown leather strap, and its vintage look beautifully completes the rest of his vintage-looking outfit.

His shoes are two-tone spectator apron-toe penny loafers in mid-brown with a cream vamp, which have an old-fashioned look that follows the traditional styling of the rest of the outfit. With these shoes he wears burnt orange ribbed socks, which coordinate with the brown in the shoes.

The outfit overall takes considerable inspiration from historical looks from the first half of the 20th century, but it also shares similarities with Roger Moore’s style. A safari suit with a cocktail cuff shirt is exactly how Roger Moore liked to dress in the 1970s. The historical details included in this outfit along with its flamboyance recall how Roger Moore dressed as Lord Brett Sinclair in The Persuaders!. While The Persuaders! was not likely a direct source of inspiration for Glass Onion, both Benoit Blanc and Brett Sinclair dress with similar inspirations from the past.