We Need to Talk About Tony Stark’s Boot-Cut Tracksuit in Avengers: Infinity War

The blockbuster movie has many things to recommend it. This outfit is not among them.
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Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark isn’t the only hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a well-articulated sense of personal style. Vision is into ascots, delightfully. King T’Challa has all manner of regal robes and Nehru jackets and dad sandals. And off-duty Captain America is never not dressing like off-duty Captain America. (Who in the known universe wears a blank baseball cap? More: Who thinks that counts as a disguise?)

Tony Stark, meanwhile, dresses like the billionaire playboy he is. Think loud suits, louder sunglasses, and the kind of facial hair that you can only sport if you’re so rich no one will ever tell you how it looks. Part of the joy of Stark’s looks comes from the overlap between the character’s style and the actor’s: Robert Downey Jr. has never met a pair of goofy shades he didn’t love. It’s fun to imagine Marvel’s zillion-dollar man showing up to a soundstage in Atlanta with a carbon-fiber suitcase full of the worst eyewear on the planet. But most of the fun comes from the costume designers’ elite vision of “Elon Musk, but with way too much improv training.” Tony isn’t supposed to look cool; he’s supposed to look like what he thinks of as cool—which, because he hasn’t been a normal guy in however many decades, is decidedly un-cool.

But shit really hits the fashion fan in the recently released Avengers: Infinity War. Because your boy Tony Stark (whose fictional net worth was pegged at $12.4 billion by Time in 2015) spends just about the entire movie in a dark camo gray-and-red boot-cut tracksuit. I’ll repeat that last bit: THE TRACKSUIT IS BOOT-CUT. People in my screening were dismayed when bad guy Thanos (who loves a nice vest) started destroying half the known universe, but I was not. If you came to Earth and were greeted by a goober in a boot-cut tracksuit, I bet you’d want to expunge life at a rapid clip, too.

Stark defenders will note that the getup houses Tony’s Iron Man suit—and, even more generously, that the film opens with Tony out for a jog in Central Park. So, really, he’s dressed properly for the occasion: You wouldn’t wear either of these two horrendous suits to exercise. You’d wear something a little more comfortable.

This doesn’t excuse the tracksuit. There is such a thing as good camouflage; there is such a thing as a good tracksuit. Tony’s getup is neither. Gray-on-black camo is best described as haute nu metal. The red piping makes the jacket look like something you’d buy on heavy discount at Dick’s Sporting Goods, probably from a line of off-brand CrossFit gear. And I have referred the boot-cut pants, even if they are cut wide to accommodate a certain actor’s chunky sneakers with height-adding lifts, directly to the prosecutorial team at the Hague.

It is no spoiler to say that Tony and his tracksuit make it through the heavy-casualty Infinity War—Downey Jr. is proudly billed in the cast of next year’s Untitled Avengers Movie. I really fucking hope he finds something else to wear.


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