Last year, windbreakers worn by Timothee Chalamet’s character in the film Marty Supreme sold out at pop-ups weeks before the film was even released.
In recent months, the tortoiseshell headbands worn by Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and brought back in the FX series Love Story have created a frenzy at pharmacies across New York where they are sold.
And now, a cream-coloured knit cardigan with foxes on it, worn by Ryan Gosling in the new sci-fi blockbuster Project Hail Mary, is a hit.
But this time, fans can’t buy it ready-made. And that’s precisely what makes it all the more appealing.
The sweater worn by Gosling’s character – Ryland Grace, an endearingly unkempt schoolteacher and molecular biologist thrust into an interstellar mission to save Earth, with a rocklike alien creature, Rocky, by his side – is based on a knitting template from the late 1950s by Canadian yarn and crafts company Mary Maxim.
Fans are now making their own cardigans, taking TikTok or YouTube followers along on weekslong knitting journeys in tutorials that have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
And some are hosting in-person knit-alongs.
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The knitting kit at Mary Maxim sold out within a week of the film’s release, according to Mitch McPhedrain, the company’s chief executive and the great-grandson of its founder.
There is a waiting list of over 1,000 people for a modern version of it.
“Maybe it’s the fact that it’s not that easy to get that people want it,” McPhedrain said.
“I have a lot of friends, now that this has kind of taken off, who are like, ‘Can you get me a sweater?’ and I’m like, ‘Well, I can get you the supplies.’”
Jaclyn Ziegler, 25, started knitting her fox cardigan about a month ago and still has a week’s worth of work left before she completes it.
She has shared each step on TikTok and has found a receptive, enthusiastic audience.
“There have been so many people asking if they can buy the sweater from me,” she said in an interview.
Similarly, Leann Anderson, 32, started knitting over a month ago and recently posted a picture on Threads of her completed sweater side-by-side with a still of Gosling.
“The next day, I opened Threads, and people were asking if I would make them sweaters,” she said in an interview. “And I was like, ‘Oh, wait, yeah.’”
She reactivated her Etsy account and has since sold six sweaters for over US$500 (approximately RM1,985) each.
Her recent decision to increase the price to almost US$900 (RM3,573) hasn’t deterred buyers, she said.
The costume designers for Project Hail Mary, Glyn Dillon and David Crossman, were tasked with dressing Grace, Gosling’s character, as an underdog; as someone who would seek daily comforts even when marooned in space, someone human as opposed to a slick, macho superhero.
“We were looking at knitwear and dressing gowns, all sorts of things,” Crossman said in an interview.
In 2024, Dillon, while out on a last-minute trawl for props and costume pieces, chanced upon a hand-knit version of the cardigan peeking through racks of clothes at a vintage fair in north London.
He bought it, thinking that if it didn’t make it into the wardrobe rotation for Grace, he would keep it for himself.
That afternoon, he took it with him to a fitting with Gosling.
“When we were with Ryan in the fitting room, he spotted it and loved it,” Dillon said. “So I had to give it up as being my own.”
The problem with the original cardigan, though, was that it featured snarling wolves and bloody paw prints, Crossman said, which the team thought might have been too much for a schoolteacher.
They modified the design from a wolf to a fox, and got a team of knitters on the job.
Grace is seen wearing that cozy cardigan before liftoff, on an otherworldly beach, at a bar and on the spaceship, light years away from home.
Dillon said that he had his own collection of Mary Maxim cardigans but that he didn’t get to keep either the wolf or the fox version from filming. Neither did Crossman.
The film, the biggest box office hit of the year so far, has drawn a vast, nerdy audience.
There are countless Reddit threads discussing the accuracy of the astrophysics in the film. Book clubs are poring over the novel that inspired the film.
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Even Nasa’s space engineers, in response to the astronauts aboard the Artemis II mission describing the scene before them, quoted Rocky’s signature line: “Amaze, amaze, amaze!”
Then there are the crafters. Some are creating Lego versions of Grace and Rocky, while others are rendering them in embroidery patterns that can be downloaded from the film’s official website.
“People used to speak about going from owning a product to experiencing a product, and now it’s about belonging to a microculture that surrounds a product,” said Christopher Morency, a brand consultant and fashion journalist.
Some consumers now value “having to actually do something for it” more than just buying a logo T-shirt, he added.
“It feels like a quiet affirmation,” Anderson, the Etsy seller, said, “That even in uncertain or chaotic moments, there is still meaning in what humans choose to make. We create music, art and clothing by hand.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
