Some People Love ‘The Bear’ … for Its Style

The hit FX series “The Bear” is about many things: complicated family dynamics, grief, toxic workplace environments, Chicago, vocational obsession and, of course, food. But for some people, it’s really just a show about clothes set in and around a Chicago restaurant.

The show’s third season has already given plenty of fodder for style-obsessed viewers. In the first episode, Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen White, wears a weathered Barbour Ogston jacket in olive during a flashback; later in the season, he wears a cotton deck jacket from the work-wear-inspired Ralph Lauren sublabel RRL. J. Crew released a capsule collection — a hat, T-shirt, sweatshirt and work-wear jacket — emblazoned with the logo of the fictional business belonging to the Fak brothers from the show, played by Matty Matheson and Ricky Staffieri.

Unlike “Sex and the City,” which had Carrie Bradshaw’s Fendi baguette bags, and “Succession” on HBO that had its “ludicrously capacious” Burberry bag, “The Bear” wasn’t conceived with any major ties to the fashion world.

“I didn’t expect this, not at all,” said Courtney Wheeler, the costume designer on the show. “Our show isn’t outwardly about fashion, like ‘Sex and the City’ or ‘Emily in Paris.’ It’s what we think the world that these characters inhabit would feel like. That people respond to it is really awesome, but it wasn’t necessarily our intention.”

But since the show’s debut in 2022, it has become somewhat of a fixation for some to parse out what the characters are wearing, particularly the main character Carmy, a wounded yet fiery chef who turns his dead brother’s humble Italian beef sandwich shop into a temple of fine dining.

Online sleuths, for example, tracked down the exact plain white T-shirt that Mr. Allen White wears on the show for all three seasons: the 215 men’s loopwheeled T-shirt made by the German company Merz b. Schwanen, which costs about $85. The company, which opened its first U.S. store earlier this year, was unaware the shirt would be featured, and experienced a surge in interest, which led to the company’s website temporarily crashing.