Man, Joel from The Last of Us is such a guy, right?! He's emotionally stunted, he refuses to entertain your silly, silly questions about life before the apocalypse, and he doesn't even kiss his girlfriend goodbye before she blows herself up to allow his escape. What a hard ass, bro! And if all that wasn't as toxic as the killer Portobello mushrooms that have turned the planet into one big athlete's foot, he even dresses like the quintessential man in manly films about men: field jacket, beard and one big lumberjack's flannel shirt.
For an adaptation as novel and thoughtful as The Last of Us, that firmly cements the HBO smash hit in the grand tradition of apocalypsewear. Because there's a checked shirt in almost every film about the world's end. In the bleakest father-son bonding tale ever told, 2009's The Road, Viggo Mortensen wears a flannel shirt under many layers of feather down/impending doom. Comedy This Is The End (2013) sees Seth Rogen navigate the end days in a checked shirt (like almost every other film he's in). Chris Evans' checked shirt in ice age train heist Snowpiercer, Netflix's 2022 post-apocalyptic series, may be ragged and hidden beneath a mashed-up sweater, but it's still a checked shirt. Why is it, then, that when the world burns, we reach for the flannel?
The Last of Us' induction into the lumberverse was intentional, and reflective of a living, breathing world, says the series' costume designer Cynthia Ann Summers, who is in something of a celebratory mood on the phone: The Last of Us has just been renewed for a second season. "When I met with [showrunners] Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, they sold this to me as a love story. And I was like… it's a game where everyone dies?" she says. “But no, it's a love story to humanity, that's the success of the game.”
It's this human touch that played into the costume designer's brief on-set. “Cut to 20 years after the outbreak, and if we really get to the bottom of it, what's gonna survive? What's gonna last?” says Summers. “It's going to be workwear. Denim has been around for centuries in a sense, and it's been a global staple of our lives.”
And the world's end doesn't mean the end of self-expression. Summers says that colour, brands and textures were of great importance in bringing The Last of Us to life: survivors are trying to tell us who they are, but with limited resources. So for Joel, a tough, no-nonsense, emotionally weathered construction worker from Austin, Texas, that meant layers and layers – both figurative and literal. “He's become very hardened over these years. He lost his daughter. He's just existing. That's it. Some people will flourish, and some are not [flourishing], and that's reflected in his wardrobe,” says Summers. “The shirt is from Wrangler. He wears jeans. He's very utilitarian and to the point in his look.”
To The Last of Us' credit, it was made in consultation with real-life scientists to give some level of plausibility to the series' bad trip plotline. But interestly, workwear couldn't be further from ideal apocalypse gear says John Hudson, an RAF survivalist expert who has authored several books about staying alive when the shit hits the fan.
“In the RAF, everywhere you go, there's a poster on the wall that says ‘are you dressed to survive’? Because you're fine in a cosy warm cockpit, but if you have to crash land in the middle of nowhere, the weather will probably be rats,” Hudson explains. In The Last of Us, horizontal rain can be just as dangerous as the shroomies. “That's why we say ‘cotton kills’. So a flannel shirt is all wrong for all the different kinds of hostile environments we train in, peace or wartime, like the desert or the Arctic,” says Hudson. “If there's a burn, flannels will go up like a candle. More importantly, for the day-to-day stuff, they're walking around without heating, it's raining, it's in the temperate US. When cotton gets wet, it sucks the heat out of your body. It might not wick away moisture so well. Just really don't wear it during the apocalypse.”
But the worst bit? “Cotton socks,” says Hudson. “You'll likely only have a few pairs when the world ends and that will increase your likelihood of a fungal foot infection. That's the last thing you want, really.”
As an expert in not dying, Hudson also points to other potential issues that may elude civvies – and the clothes that would make everything so much worse. “We teach people how to not get caught behind enemy lines – sort of like avoiding the zombies – and if you make a noise, they'll find you,” he says. “Synthetics like Gore-Tex may seem appropriate for the situation, but they're noisy. They crackle. In your move in those fabrics, the zombies will hear you. And if you go near anything hot, it'll just melt.”
Flannels are wholly impractical, then. If one was to do a last-minute pack for the apocalypse, Hudson recommends wool: it's natural, it works in all weathers, and it makes very little noise, and it's the least gross option. “Wool doesn't smell that much,” says Hudson matter-of-factly. “You don't need to wash it very often, because the days of basic hygiene would be pretty much over in The Last of Us.”
The abundance of flannels and denim, though perhaps a death wish IRL, could be reasoned by the trolley dash that is apocalyptic shopping. You'd find this stuff in surplus stores. You'd find it in thrift stores. There's lots of it, it wears well, and, in The Last of Us' Boston setting, is the de facto national dress of New England with its blue-collar heritage and fickle climes. But that doesn't explain its ubiquity in all other post-apocalypse fiction. Snowpiercer is set on a futuristic train that orbits the planet on an endless cycle. The Road is abstract and metaphorical in its lucid flashbacks and ambiguous end. Realism isn't always the biggest priority in apocalypse movies.
But, perhaps, our natural inclination for flannels, checks and lumberjackwear isn't so unnatural. It speaks to survival, to the innate hunter-gatherer we all want to project when our skills in coding and marketing are made redundant overnight. The Last of Us' Joel is perhaps the patron saint of this guy. He looks like the sort of man who can outlast a zombie outbreak. Whether rightly or wrongly, his clothes look like the sort of things that'd outlast a zombie outbreak. And humans are creatures of habit, if nothing else. Even in the apocalypse, an old adage rings truer than ever: dress for the job you want, not the job you have.
