‘The Instigators’ Costumes Pay Tribute to Boston and ‘The Town’

“The Instigators” is many things. Doug Liman’s movie starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck is a buddy comedy, a heist caper, and a thriller — but it is also a stealth menswear stunner.

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That might not be entirely surprising, given the internet uproar when the trailer revealed Jack Harlow’s vintage Red Sox jacket. That was thanks to costume designer Charlese Antoinette’s eye for vintage shopping (both in person and online); the rest of the workwear that fills the Apple TV+ movie was a little harder.

“I couldn’t do a lot of thrifting with those guys for the outfits they end up wearing once the whole heist began,” Antoinette told IndieWire about locking Affleck and Damon’s crooks into one look. “That stuff was new, and we had to age it down and make it look beat up and old. That’s also why I like thrifting, because it gives me inspiration for the aging.”

So how does one make not just a new pair of jeans look older, but five pairs of the same jeans look like five different but related stages of distress? Dryers and rocks.

“Wet [the jeans] and put them in a dryer with a sand block. I’ve done that. Sometimes tumbling them with actual rocks in a bag,” Antoinette said. “That also helps. But it’s not as fast as you ever want. You always need more time with aging. A lot of our aging came down to the wire; we had an ager on for a couple of weeks, we had that much stuff, and she was great, but you always need more time.”

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Antoinette described the non-stop pace of the film’s plot as similar to that of the production itself, which included working with Harlow to introduce little nods to Ben Affleck’s 2010 movie “The Town” in his track jackets.

“The tracksuits were from Sergio Tacchini, who is still in business,” Antoinette said. “I have a great relationship with them. And then we worked with New Balance, which is Boston-based, but [Harlow is] also a brand ambassador for them and has collaborations with them. So we were able to get some New Balance on him, which is pretty cool because there’s some full-body shots, so it just feels, to me, really cool and authentic and Boston.”

As for Harlow’s trailer fits ending up all over e-commerce sites, Antoinette was shocked and delighted. “I was like, ‘Oh, it’s not a costume movie. It’s not a period piece. It’s not super fashion-forward. It’s like workwear and pretty chill.’ But then people were bootlegging his outfits. I went online, and I’m like, why are they selling me this jacket on these random sites? Honestly, when my designs on films get bootlegged, I actually get really excited because if the general public thinks it’s good enough to bootleg, that means it’s good.”

Even the janitorial jumpsuits that Damon, Affleck, and Harlow’s characters don for the heist are elevated in Antoinette’s hands. “One jumpsuit we built custom because [Liman] wanted it to have a little bit of reflective quality to it,” she said. “He had this vision of it having a little bit of sheen. They were printed, built, painted. Basically, there’s a standard conductor stripe that we over-dyed blue because I wanted him to have a textured stripe. And the duct tape on the back was a last-minute addition during the camera test. The director was like, ‘Put this on it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah!’ So it has these splashes of inspiration.”