Costume designer Kate Forbes and knitwear designer Ilana Blumberg have teamed up to produce a limited edition reproduction of Laslo Toth’s iconic garment.
When Adrien Brody took home the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 2025 Oscars ceremony for his role as Jewish-Hungarian architect László Tóth in The Brutalist, he thanked God, his children, his parents, his partner, as well as the creative team behind the film, including director Brady Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold.
What didn’t get a shoutout, however, was a particular item of knitwear that he wears in the second half of the film—grey-blue, with a high-collared neck and batwing arms—for many it was a standout moment in the film—leading to fashion pieces praising Tóth’s style and Reddit threads aiming to track down the garment.
“It suddenly had such an audience, and I really wanted to celebrate that,” says Kate Forbes, the costume designer on The Brutalist, who—with knitwear designer Ilana Blumberg—has now launched a limited edition collection of the jumpers.
Whilst it looks like it could be plucked from a Jonathan Anderson runway, Forbes—whose other TV and film credits include Master of None and Jonathan Glazer’s The Fall—first found the jumper at a costume house in Berlin called Theatre Kunst. “It just made my heart sing when I found it. And it just felt so right for the character.”
Forbes estimates that the sweater came from the early 1950s or 1960s—the latter part of the film, when Toth, having left his is working for an architecture practice in 1950s New York, living with his wife Erzebet (Felicity Jones), who is working as a magazine journalist. The next portion of the film flashes forward to the 1980 Venice Biennale, where Tóth’s contribution to architecture is being honoured. “You know, the guy’s a modernist, so it needed to feel fresh. The sweater has a beatnik quality to it. You know they definitely would have been part of that scene.”
Forbes teamed up with Blumberg to work on reproducing the jumper at scale. They were introduced by Ilana’s brother, Daniel Blumberg—the composer of The Brutalist. “I was really mulling it over and thinking, do I go to a brand, do I do a bigger collaboration with a company? Then I decided I would keep it small and independent, and retain that real craft and quality.”
You know, the guy’s a modernist, so it needed to feel fresh. The sweater has a beatnik quality to it. You know they definitely would have been part of that scene.”
The resulting garment—which is made of pure wool—has a quality that Tóth himself would likely approve of. The pair sourced yarn from Romania, where they also manufactured the sweaters. “A lot of the first samples we got were very limp—factories are under this pressure to use as little yarn as possible to make everything,” says Forbes, of creating the luxurious, sculptural shape. “We were like, let’s double the intensity of the yarn. I’m not doing a collaboration with Primark.”
Each of the resulting jumpers is numbered from 001 to 300 (the buyer can select their number). Forbes and Blumberg also expect their version to be worn by both men and women. “It’s definitely a unisex garment, I think it looks brilliant on both,” says Forbes, whilst admitting a certain weakness for Brody in the jumper. “But there’s something about men in knitwear. I just find it so sexy,” says Forbes. “It’s very delicious and sort of vulnerable.”
The grey batwing sweater isn’t the only garment in The Brutalist with reproduction potential—another quarter zip worn by Brody has had a fair amount of attention. “There’s definitely more sweaters in The Brutalist that I could do,” says Forbes. “But this is the one where, as soon as you mention it, people are like, oh I know the sweater. And it’s like, yeah, it is that sweater. It has its own iconography.”
To find out more visit: www.brutalistsweater.com
Continue Reading
