Midway through Top Gun: Maverick, in homage to the original Top Gun’s famous volleyball scene, Tom Cruise and his young acolytes frolic on the beach, playing a game of shirtless touch football. Cruise is just as bare-chested as the rest, clad only in blue jeans and his character’s distinctive, Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses. Glistening in golden hour sunlight, Cruise is resplendent.
The Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses Tom Cruise wears in Top Gun: Maverick were custom-made to suit the star’s face perfectly, a testament to the actor’s famed attention to detail.
“Tom is a stickler,” Marlene Stewart, Maverick’s costume designer, told The Daily Beast. “We had many, many fittings for the glasses. These are classic, Aviator Ray-Bans, and what I do and what costume designers do is you work with props, who is in charge of making the glasses. Altering them, customizing them. I’m in charge of the look, which includes the glasses, but I work in tandem with props, so that when we had a fitting with Tom, we knew of course that the Aviators were going to be on board. That was never a question.
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“It was really a matter of what size, and how customized was the color of the glass, and the shape. To talk about the scene on the beach, we had fittings with each character to see what’s gonna work for them, but we wanted to establish Tom’s first.”
The Aviators were established as iconic in the original Top Gun (1986). After the movie’s release, sales of Aviator sunglasses leapt by 40 percent; perhaps even more impressively, Aviators have continued to maintain double-digit growth in the following years. The film’s supporting cast members also each rock Ray-Bans that vary depending on the character, but each style works in harmony with the Aviators’ classic shape.
The sunglasses are just one sartorial echo of the original Top Gun. 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick finds Cruise reprising his now-classic 1980s role as Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell; the original’s narrative is more or less adhered to—a ragtag band of hotshot pilots must work together to execute an extremely dangerous mission, led by Cruise, who’s aged into the role of teacher. The costumes have only gotten more vigilantly precise.
Cruise, his love interest, played by Jennifer Connelly, and every one of his airborne naval comrades dip in and out of frame like models in a Ralph Lauren ad; Maverick high tails it astride a motorcycle, his jacket billowing in the wind, but only so much.
As for the supporting characters, one standout is Miles Teller as the hotheaded rookie “Rooster.” Teller huffs and puffs through the film rocking a petulant mustache and a pair of Ray-Ban RB3136 Caravan shades. Connelly, meanwhile sports the classic Aviators in a shade of golden brown.
The mercenary slickness of the film’s look and feel is no accident. Stewart has a long history in Hollywood; she’s got a particularly established track record when it comes to amplifying unique shades of cinematic masculinity.
One of her earliest collaborations was with Oliver Stone for the Jim Morrison biopic The Doors, and she went on to craft the terrifying T-1000’s look in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. (To my eye, there are more than a few similarities between Robert Patrick’s T-1000 and Cruise’s Maverick, even down to the two actors’ mesmerizing running styles.)
Maverick is also Stewart’s third collaboration with Tom Cruise. “Especially in Top Gun, [Cruise’s character] is very old school in a way, it’s like another period in time when people respected each other and yet they still had individuality and drive and ambition,” Stewart said.
“I had worked with Tony Scott; I did not do the first Top Gun, but I knew the people who worked on it,” Stewart said. “Back in those days, they used original pieces that were around, whether it be an original-issue flight suit or his jeans or his leather jacket.”
Cruise’s onscreen enthusiasm can border on hysterical, so it was essential that his performance in the original was helmed in by his character’s precise, utilitarian wardrobe. Mitchell appears onscreen looking every inch the US Naval Officer in his prime, clad in close-fitting flight suits, rugged bomber jackets, classic denim and, of course, instantly-iconic Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses.
For the new movie, to evoke these shades of nostalgia while ensuring that Cruise’s look was 100 percent contemporary, Stewart and her team went to extraordinary lengths to craft the perfect garments.
“We reproduced the original jacket to kind of change the shape of it, so it wasn’t really too much of that 1980s, oversized, shoulder pad look that was in the original,” Stewart said. “[Cruise’s] physical shape has changed a little bit and the times have changed a little bit. That was the biggest project on the movie. We had gathered almost 40 leather jackets from all over the world from vintage dealers that we Frankenstein-ed together. It had to have the original knit cut on the sleeves. It was maybe a five month process, the whole thing. We had to piece this whole thing together, it was like a Rubik’s Cube.”
While the other elements of Cruise’s wardrobe in the movie look perhaps more standardized and attainable, every single item was custom-made for the star from scratch, down to his white T-shirts and blue jeans, Stewart said. “I worked with a company called Vince that custom-made the jeans that had some stretch in them, that had a boot cut for his cowboy boots,” Stewart said. “We needed to have a higher rise in the back so that when he was riding the motorcycle they worked, and they made other jeans for the scene at the beach.”
“Top Gun was my much older brother’s favorite movie growing up, so it became my favorite movie,” Yang-Yi Goh, GQ’s Commerce Editor, said. “It’s so tight and compact, and every scene is so propulsive. When you’re a little kid, the action scenes and fighter jets are the coolest thing on earth, and it’s extremely quotable and quippy. And you have young Tom Cruise, the coolest person who ever existed, looking really cool. All these things left a deep imprint on my brain.”
Cruise’s Aviators in the Top Gun sequel function on a subconscious level: like the star wearing them, they’re a welcome reminder that despite the turmoil that currently defines American life, the classics are still firing on all cylinders. (Cruise has two indelible Ray-Ban moments. The first was Risky Business in 1983, when the actor cackled to high heaven wearing Wayfarers. Ray-Ban sold 200,000 pairs of the shades in 1982, and after the movie came out, Wayfarers sales jumped to 360,000.)
The fashions in the original Top Gun are “very classic and timeless on purpose,” Goh said. “When he’s not in a flight suit, Maverick basically just wears a tight white T-shirt and Levi’s, which is something you could have worn in 1955 or 2022 and looked perfectly normal and cool.”
“Out of all the actors that I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with many, Tom has given me 1,000 percent presence and time to do the job, and you see the results,” Stewart told The Daily Beast. “A lot of actors maybe are not so cognizant of spending that much time, but he is, and it’s really rare.”
