The Great Gatsby (1974) · Suits on Screen

The Great Gatsby: how a pink suit won an Oscar

Updated September 2026 · Sam’s Menswear editorial team

A pale pink linen suit jacket on a wooden hanger in a sunlit dressing room, with a tumble of pastel striped, lilac, apricot and sky blue shirts spilling from a stack on the table below — A pale pink jacket and a pile of shirts. The novel's most famous wardrobe scene, told in cloth.

Jay Gatsby is a man who invented himself and then bought the clothes to prove it. F. Scott Fitzgerald dressed him in a pink suit in the novel, and when Robert Redford played him in 1974, the film took the idea and made it the most talked-about wardrobe of the year.

The clothes

The costumes were designed by Theoni V. Aldredge, who won the Academy Award for costume design for the film, with the menswear made by Ralph Lauren. Aldredge’s own account was that she designed the costumes and Lauren carried them out to her specification.

The pink suit: pale, soft and summery, worn with the ease of a man who has never been told what not to wear.
The white suits: the other half of the Gatsby look, equally pale and equally deliberate.
The shirts: in the novel Gatsby throws his shirts across the table for Daisy, one colour after another, and the film keeps the scene.

The look was a phenomenon: the film made the cover of Time, and Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan quickly sold a line adapted from it.

Why it works

Pale is a statement of leisure. A pink or white suit cannot be worn to work, cannot be worn in the rain and cannot hide a stain. Wearing one says you have none of those worries. That is exactly what Gatsby wanted to say.

It suits the season. Pale colours reflect heat and look right in bright daylight, on a lawn, by water. On a July afternoon a white or pale suit looks cooler than anything dark ever will.

Everything around it stays calm. The suit is the whole statement. Shirts and ties in the same pale family keep it from tipping into fancy dress.

Wearing a pale suit today

Daylight and summer only. A garden wedding in July, a summer party, a race day. Not a January evening.
Start with ivory or stone before pink. They carry the same idea with less risk, and they go with more.
Choose the cloth for the heat. Linen or a light, open wool; see the patio suit for why the weave matters.
Keep the accessories quiet. Brown suede shoes, a pale shirt, a tie or none. Let the suit do the talking.

Suit colours that photograph well covers how pale suits read in wedding photographs, which is where most of them end up.

Getting it made

The Drawing Board has no pink cloth yet, but ivory linen gives you the white Gatsby suit: draw it. Sam makes summer suits at the Vaughan studio in three to four weeks, so for a July garden wedding, start in May. If pink is the plan, bring the idea to the first appointment and look at the cloth in daylight before deciding.

Where the details come from: BAMF Style and FashionBeans.