You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake. Mass-produced furniture is... problematic. And you are never, ever, under any circumstances, permitted to talk about Fight Club.

The takeaways from Mr Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel and its 1999 film adaptation, directed by Mr David Fincher, are vivid and myriad. None, however, has had as much cultural impact as Mr Brad Pitt’s abs. “Brad Pitt ruined it for everyone,” Mr Charlie Hunnam once said about getting himself fighting fit for Pacific Rim. “After Fight Club, the expectation of what a dude is supposed to look like when he takes his shirt off is just so high.” Indeed, so sensational was the scene in which Mr Pitt’s Tyler Durden emerges as the king of an actual underground fight club that it for ever changed the fit goals for movie stars and we mere mortals, and has, until now, overshadowed Mr Michael Kaplan’s incredible costume design. But as we approach the film’s 20th anniversary, with conversations around the meanings and demonstrations of masculinity swirling again, we wonder if there isn’t something more that we might glean from this wonderful film, apart from some style tips.

Though style tips there are aplenty. In a lot of ways, Fight Club is a film about clothes, about the politics of clothes, about the lifestyle and values that an outfit signals. The rumpled, unremarkable, anonymous suit and tie that Mr Edward Norton’s unnamed narrator wears early on in the film, for example, represent his “single-serving” life, as he calls it, his cubicle life of conformity. A life from which Mr Pitt’s radical, primal id-man Tyler Durden – culminating in a full-length, faux-fur coat and shaved-head beastliness – represents a great escape. And that may be the film’s most incredible feat of prophecy – its anticipation of a post-nine-to-five man as a kind of athleisure entrepreneur bro.

In his track pants, tank tops, macro prints, fuzzy slippers and logomania, Tyler wouldn’t look a stitch out of place in the street-style blogrolls of today. The ironic prints Mr Kaplan made a series of visual jokes about call to mind the fashiony in-jokes of Vetements and its various imitators. Meanwhile, Versace, which released a collection that The New York Times dubbed its Fight Club collection shortly after the film was released, is going hard on the graphic, tabloid-style print T-shirts Tyler favours for its upcoming SS19 menswear collection. It’s also worth pointing out Tyler’s particular and prescient devotion to that hypebeasty staple, the Gucci loafer. Even his mash-up styling – pairing tear-away nylon trousers with a leather trench, say – seems to anticipate our DJ-style mixing and matching ethic.

“I think that in a strange way I was choosing clothing that I’d wished I was cool and cocky enough to pull off myself,” says Mr Kaplan, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated costume designers, who began his career creating the iconic wardrobes on the original Blade Runner and is now designing the costumes for the mainline Star Wars trilogy. “I had a good beat on the character and his specific outrageous way of dressing. I wanted all the pieces to look like they came from thrift shops – he had no money – and needed to be colourful to contrast with his alter ego’s boringly beige and grey attire.”

“Colourful” puts it mildly. Tyler’s outfit is the very opposite of a workaday uniform. It isn’t uniform at all. The items in his “wardrobe” are assembled casually, haphazardly. In every scene, he looks as though he has just picked up what was lying around: a battered blood-red leather jacket, bug-eyed, fluoro-lens sunglasses, track pants, military boots, wildly bold-print shirts. “There are some 1970s print shirts, which had strange, incongruous, ironic patterns that I was attracted to for Tyler’s character,” says Mr Kaplan. “I loved the irony of putting 1970s photo print shirts in front of the camera, and the pornographic photo print fabric that I used to make Tyler’s memorable tank top caused a stir with the studio’s censor.”

Even if the powers that be balked at some of the more radical looks, Mr Kaplan didn’t encounter much resistance at all to his grand designs. Quite the opposite, in fact. “Early on in the design process, I went to David [Fincher], who generally is not a fan of vibrant colour, to discuss Tyler’s look,” he says. “I feared he would nix my plan to adorn him like a peacock, in so much colour and outrageousness. Happily, he said, ‘You can’t go too far with this character.’ Although, on one occasion – I believe it was a tube top – I did.”

Tyler’s look was also ahead of the game, albeit accidentally, on fit or, rather, our modern sense of the word. His oh-so-1990s baggy pants look right-on today as we return to wider-legged trousers after the eek-trim 2000s. “The tracksuit pants were merely about their dated look, their colour and casual comfort,” says Mr Kaplan. “Tyler wears postal-worker trousers quite a bit, which I thought were cool and baggedly comfortable. In a morning-coffee scene, Tyler wears a chenille bathrobe with a teapot design, one of Pitt’s favourite items. I think you can catch a glimpse of his bunny-rabbit slippers as he climbs the stairs. Truthfully, I couldn’t believe no one was stopping me.”

It wasn’t all about simply throwing stuff on, though. Even though the clothes looked like they’d been snatched from the back rails of neglected charity shops, a lot of them were custom-made to look that way, in editions of three or more to survive the burn rate of the action being filmed. “Because there were so many fights resulting in blood and rips, multiples of the costumes were necessary,” says Mr Kaplan. “Tyler’s quintessential red leather jacket was designed and created from scratch to look like something out of a thrift shop. I chose the leather, decided on the colour (dried blood), had the leather dyed and made up about five jackets. Initially, they were too perfect until I sent them through our ‘distressing’ department. They made the leather look worn and cracked. I tore and tea-stained the lining. I took a hammer to it and broke some buttons, I even stapled on thrift-shop tags and ripped them off, adoring the tiny remnants of evidence.”

Those remnants, of lives lived, of the time in which the film was made, are apparent everywhere and rather interesting to look back on now. The dark, deserted Downtown Los Angeles of the film now seems a bit pastoral, an imagined dystopia from some other timeline. All the dilapidated, underpopulated parts of LA have now been filled in, densely so. And if the city is experiencing a sort of creative-industry boom, it’s hard not to view it a bit Tyler-ly. Sure, it’s great that we can wear sweats and work from home and get a great cappuccino anywhere in town, but hasn’t the rise of Uber and digital nomadism in LA just made the city into an al fresco WeWork, and the “creatives” who live there a free-range breed of the cubicle-farm workforce who preceded them? And, nowadays, when our insistent connectedness threatens to isolate us entirely, as men continue to seek out the corrupted sort of fulfilment to be found in radical fraternity, Fight Club’s warning bells once again begin to peal. In a recent article in The Guardian, Mr Palahniuk himself noted with some chagrin that the film had been taken up as a rallying cry by incels (men who identify as “involuntary celibates”). “It’s fascinating that the group that can’t get laid is now adopting the same language,” he said. “It shows how few options men have in terms of metaphors: a skimpy inventory of images.”

But at least we seem to have followed Tyler’s sensational sartorial example, even if it is just another unrealistic ideal to which Mr Pitt has asked us to aspire. “The key to all of this was Brad Pitt as a muse and the inspiration for Tyler,” says Mr Kaplan. “I can’t imagine any other actor at the time, or even now, being able to own the looks that I created and that we created together. He really was Tyler Durden.”

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