Bullitt (1968)

From Lalo Schifrin’s jazz flute score to McQueen’s blue turtleneck, this movie isn’t just an artifact of the late 60s; it’s an anthem for them. It’s taut. It’s gritty. It has that grungy realism that would come to dominate American cinema in the upcoming 70s. Bullitt is far better than any movie that exists solely because Steve McQueen wanted to do a car chase has any right to be.

McQueen: Camel rain coat, navy suit, blue shirt and green tie. Robert Vaughn: Medium gray three-piece, white shirt and black tie.

Steve McQueen stars as San Francisco police detective Frank Bullitt—which is right up there with John Matrix and John Spartan on the list of awesomely unbelievable movie names. He’s cool. He’s a man of few words. He’s essentially Steve McQueen set against the backdrop of groovy San Francisco as society began to fall apart just a year after the Summer of Love.

The late 60s is commonly pointed to as the last good years for suits, but it’s also the period when even professional men started drifting away from them. Bullitt wears a suit and tie when he meets his girlfriend at a restaurant. Then he’s later wearing a cardigan, dress shirt and no tie when he’s watching a suspect overnight in the hospital. When he’s chasing down a murder in that iconic car chase, he’s wearing a turtleneck and sport coat.

McQueen: Red cardigan and check dress shirt.

Few looks are as specifically tied in with a time and place quite like the turtleneck/sport coat combo and the second half of the 1960s. You see it start to creep in on Mad Men. James Coburn rocked it in the James Bond spoofs In Like Flint and Our Man Flint. Hell, even Sterling Archer owns 10 black and slightly darker black turtlenecks in 60s-inspired cartoon Archer. But Bullitt might be the flick that turned it from something groovy twentysomethings wore into a look that even someone as sartorially out of touch as Don Draper would wear in 1968.

McQueen: Brown herringbone sport coat, and blue turtleneck

[Editor’s note: The writer, too, used to wear this combo, but he was never cool enough to pull it off. He has not attempted the look since a harrowing run-in with airport security in Amsterdam.]