When Al Pacino's Coats Were Longer Than A Scorsese Runtime
Style Archive: a series in which we celebrate the stars of the past that made menswear what it is today. This week: The Irishman's Al Pacino, at length.
Robert De Niro never really dressed for the party scene. Joe Pesci found his 1920s mob wardrobe in 2019. But unlike his The Irishman co-stars, Al Pacino has always had fun with the stuff on his back. He just preferred to take the long way round.
The really long way round, actually. Throughout the Nineties, the Oscar-winner opted for coats that were longer than a gangster epic (yes, even Sergio Leone's almost-four-hour-long Once Upon A Time In America). And not just overcoat long. We mean properly long: ankle-length long. Al Pacino went to lengths many menswear designers wouldn't dare.
What's more, these weren't your classic overcoats. Yes, there was one solid chocolate brown number at a 1991 memorial for Broadway bigwig Joseph Papp. And a similar option, in black this time, which popped up in 1994 at LAX. But Pacino also had an unexpected, frankly risky love for leather. This wasn't the wardrobe of a New Jersey kingpin. This was the outerwear of a Chicago detective who'd discovered a glitch in The Matrix. Pacino was all too happy to stick to a strong course of the red pills.
Not content with going oversized on overcoats, Pacino applied the more-is-more thinking to his suits, too. See the peak-lapelled, ankle-brushing blazer he wore to 1999's premiere of The Insider. It sounds insane, but on Pacino, it looks insanely good. That's because the now-79-year-old picked a signature and stuck to it. Long coats were his thing and he had the confidence to pull them off.
Still, it's a style move that goes against conventional thinking (and proves that, like the mafia, Pacino and his oversized coats thinks the rules are for mooks). Standing at a comparatively slight 5ft 7in, Pacino's style doctrine should be to elongate the frame with something that finishes mid-thigh. Around the knee at most. The one thing he should – technically – never wear is a coat that almost drags on the floor. And yet, for all the shaking down of the rulebook for its protection money, Pacino's only guilty of one thing: absolutely killing it.
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