Juliet Polcsa Dressed the Most Accurate Italian-American Men on Television
Ask a man what Sopranos style means and he will tell you about the tracksuit.
He is thinking of one character, in his own kitchen, at four in the morning, eating gabagool out of the fridge. It is the most reproduced image in the show and the least representative. The tracksuit is what Tony wore when nobody was watching. It has been mistaken for the show's whole visual argument, mostly by people selling merchandise.
The person who built that argument was Juliet Polcsa, who dressed The Sopranos for eight years across all six seasons and was nominated for four Emmys doing it. She has given very few interviews. Ane Crabtree and Kim Marie Druce covered a couple of first-season episodes; everything else, the whole visual grammar of that world, came from Polcsa.
David Chase's instruction to her was blunt and it is the reason the show still holds up: no stereotypes. The men were to be true to life. That sounds like a small note. It is the entire difference between The Sopranos and every mob picture that came before it, and it is much harder to execute than a caricature, because a caricature only has to be recognizable and the truth has to be sourced.
So she sourced it. Rather than pull from costume houses, Polcsa bought where the actual men bought — the shirt shops and menswear stores of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Not vintage approximations of what those men wore. The same racks. That is a costume designer doing fieldwork, and it is why the clothes on that show read as lived-in rather than assembled.
The result is a wardrobe with a real internal logic. Tony's own clothes are deliberately unremarkable: short-sleeve button-downs, knit polos, Nat Nast bowling shirts, pleat-front trousers, a slim leather belt, leather loafers, gold. Polcsa has said she kept him restrained on purpose — that flash would have pulled the viewer out of believing him. He is supposed to be a man from a New Jersey suburb who happens to run something. She also noted, dryly, that his suits improved as the money did. That is the joke of the character in two words.
She was a serious operator about it, too. Gandolfini did not much like fittings and would often send his body double instead. For one scene she dressed him in a costume built entirely out of things she knew he hated — “I made that costume all the things Jim didn't like,” she said — to put him in the mood the scene needed. He thanked her afterward.
But the men who actually dress in that show are not Tony.
They are Johnny Sack, who is one of the best-dressed men in the history of American television and whose entire authority is communicated through a properly cut jacket before he opens his mouth. They are Silvio, whose look Steven Van Zandt argued should take after De Niro in Casino — old Vegas, precise, a man who understands that a room reads your lapel before it reads your face. These are the characters the show treats as competent. The tailoring tracks the competence. That is not an accident, and it took eight years of restraint to make it register.
The prequel extended the same discipline backward. For The Many Saints of Newark, Amy Westcott went to a New Jersey knitter to have the period knit shirts made properly rather than approximated, and dressed a generation of Newark men who took their cues from Dean Martin and the Rat Pack — sharkskin, a hard shoulder, a shirt that fit — and then kept dressing that way for decades after the rest of the country had moved on. That is the detail worth sitting with. The style was not fashionable. They held it anyway.
That is the part I recognize, and it is why this show matters to us and not just to the internet.
My grandfather Gaetano was from Newark. He was not any of these men. He worked with his hands his entire life at a place people drove out of their way to reach, and on a Saturday he put on a proper jacket. Not to be looked at. Because that was the standard he kept, and the standard did not adjust itself downward to match the occasion. There is a photograph of him with a drink in each hand and a cigar in his mouth, and he is the best-dressed man in the frame without any evident effort.
What Polcsa understood, and what the culture keeps missing when it reduces her eight years of work to a velour tracksuit, is that Italian-American dressing was never about display. It was about not letting the thing slip. You put the jacket on because you are going somewhere, and going somewhere is worth putting the jacket on for. The men who got that right on screen looked right because the men who got it right in Newark and Bensonhurst and on Mulberry Street looked right first.
That standard is mostly gone now, which is why we build suits the way we do — full canvas, cut by one master tailor on the Lower East Side, made to order for one man. Not as a costume. Nobody needs a Johnny Sack impression. But the jacket that holds a shoulder, that moves when you move, that still looks like something in twenty years — that is the object those men were actually buying, and it is the only thing on that show that was never a performance.
Gandolfini auctioned twenty-five of Tony's costumes for charity in 2008. They raised $187,750. People were not bidding on clothes. They were bidding on the last time somebody got this right on camera.