Welcome to Style Detective, a series from T Magazine. Each month, we’ll investigate readers’ questions regarding the items and objects they can’t stop thinking about — and can’t track down. Subscribe here and click this link to submit your own questions.
“I’ve been thinking about Julie Delpy’s quilted cream jacket in ‘Before Sunset’ (2004) for over 20 years, and it remains tantalizingly out of reach, at least beyond my Reddit and Google image search capabilities.” — Deb, Brisbane, Australia “Before Sunset,” the second installment in Richard Linklater’s romantic “Before” trilogy, which he co-wrote with his stars, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke — as well as with Kim Krizan, who co-created the original story — unfolds over the course of a single afternoon in Paris. Delpy’s character, an environmental activist named Céline, spends much of the film in a quilted cream jacket, which she pairs with bluejeans and a black tank top. (It should be said that Céline has emerged as a bit of a style icon: We’ve received five separate submissions about the outfits she wears in this film alone.) My first thought was that the jacket might be vintage.
To find out, I wanted to speak with the movie’s costume designer, Thierry Delettre. Getting in touch with him turned out to be harder than I expected, but I eventually reached him through Antoine Ferron, a fellow costume designer and tailor who’d worked with Delettre on the 2024 French movie adaptation of “The Count of Monte Cristo” (not to be confused with the eight-part mini-series that aired on PBS’s “Masterpiece” earlier this year). After checking with Delettre, Ferron gave me his contact information. Over the phone, Delettre told me that he thought the jacket was from Isabel Marant. If he remembered correctly, it was produced in India, which made sense given the French designer’s longstanding relationships with artisans and manufacturers there. When I asked if the jacket was created for the film, he said there wasn’t much of a budget and that it had been borrowed from the brand. “Before Sunset” was shot in summer 2003, so I looked through Marant’s collections from that period and found a version of the jacket in her spring 2003 runway show. You’ll notice, though, that the runway version includes contrasting color panels along the seams and at the cuffs that don’t match the one in the film, which means that the jacket Delettre pulled was likely a slightly different iteration produced for retail.
Since the jacket hasn’t been for sale in decades, I asked Delettre where you might find something similar. He suggested having one made, something he’s done before. For “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan” (2023), some of his costumes came from antique quilted bedding (a material that looks quite similar to that of Céline’s jacket). The best place to find such fabric, he said, is Paris’s famed Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen. Before Delettre and I were put in touch, I’d also called Erin Beatty, the designer of the New York-based women’s wear and home décor brand Rentrayage, whose garments and linens are made entirely from vintage and dead-stock textiles. In her holiday 2026 collection, she has a khaki quilted jacket that looks similar to the one in “Before Sunset.” If you’re interested in her version, the collection will be available through her website in October. If you don’t feel like waiting, there are other contemporary alternatives. Sea New York offers a cream floral embroidered jacket with a vintage feel, and the Indian label Raw Mango makes an off-white silk jacket using centuries-old kantha quilting techniques from the Bengal region.
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