At last, the menswear locomotive that is the Bullet Train press tour has reached Los Angeles.
After high-kicking their way through Europe, the movie’s motley cast—Brad Pitt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, and Joey King among them—have reconvened stateside. For the film’s LA premiere, the gang added a few more co-stars, including Bad Bunny and Logan Lerman, to their passenger log. And maybe it’s because the movie literally takes place on Japan’s state-of-the-art high-speed rail system, but there has been a kinetic energy to the red-carpet showing for David Leitch’s newest action flick. Pitt and Henry, in particular, have been sporting some of the sauciest menswear we’ve seen in a while.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, and Brad Pitt attend the Bullet Train red carpet on July 19, 2022 in Berlin.Sebastian Reuter/Getty Images
Pitt, as we have discussed, has really been on one during the promo circuit. His idiosyncratic linen garments, which he co-designed with private-label designer Haans Nicholas Mott, seem to have granted Pitt a mystifying, and sometimes flippant, sense of physical and spiritual mobility on the red carpet. Standing still and smiling, as per usual event protocol, has been replaced by strange feats of jumping and general peacocking. This behavioral shift is, in a way, the pulse of Mott’s design practice as he described it to GQ via email, positing that “the wearer must do real independent work to understand how they want to be in the world, i cannot do this work for them.”
(As for the design process itself, Mott found harmony working alongside Pitt: “there is an accord between mr pitt’s vision of our shared space and my freedom to navigate within it. his sense of color / fit / texture / pattern is utterly nuanced and genuinely special,” he wrote.)
For Pitt, maybe it’s the clothes, or maybe it’s his new lease on life. Last night in Los Angeles, when Variety asked the actor why he wore a skirt to the Berlin premiere, he offered a wasp sting of an answer: “I don’t know! We’re all going to die, so let’s mess it up.”
That being said, while we await the movie’s arrival in theaters on Thursday, August 4—and while the United States awaits a truly radical municipal high-speed rail system of its own—these high-speed outfits still provide some jolt. Here are some highlights: