The problem for Bovaird? Cast and crew gear isn’t typically sold to the public. So while the hoodie OJ wears looks like a vintage piece, it’s really a reproduction that’s been aged to perfection. To make it pop, Peele considered yellow and green (Emerald’s name made that color too obvious) but eventually went with orange. “Because it would look so striking out against the sky,” Bovaird says. She adds that everyone seemed to have opinions about it: “Nobody knows what to say about a 1930s costume, but T-shirts and hoodies, everyone gets into it.” You don’t see them changing clothes,” Bovaird says, “but that’s the that’s the implication, because they’d gotten wet. Some time had passed, they all got stoned. And by the time they get to the café, O.J. has the Rage shirt on and it’s kind of a turning point, where they’re really fired up, ‘We’re gonna do this thing!’ So I wanted those particular shots to be very, like ‘RAAH!’ (she kind of roars), and Jordan went for it.” But of course, it’s no coincidence, and Variety caught up with the film’s costume designer, Alex Bovaird (“White Lotus,”“Sorry for Your Loss,” the forthcoming “True Detective” season 4) to explain. And while that doesn’t explain why the O.J. and Emerald characters are wearing the shirts as well, the answer lies in a minor off-screen plot point: After the disasters at the Haywood ranch, the characters had regrouped at Angel’s apartment and the siblings borrowed some of his clothes. Emerald ends up in a Jesus Lizard shirt that’s literally eye-popping. “It just looks really striking against the natural world,” Bovaird says. “It has an animal on it. It’s a wolf.” (If you’re looking for more meaning: The Jesus lizard is another name for the common basilisk, a reptilian species that could, at least in the mythical world, kill a man with its gaze. In Nope, the alien entity doesn’t eat what doesn’t look it in the eye.)

He’s quite different from a lot of directors; he’s just obsessed with the details of wardrobe,” says Bovaird, who also recently worked on HBO’s The White Lotus. “That can be a bit daunting because you can’t just show him and him be like, ‘I like that one.’ It doesn’t work like that with him. With him, it’s very much like, ‘That’s a good idea. That could work. What about this idea as well?’ He puts a lot of his personality into this movie.” In the end, the fact that Bovaird couldn’t get her hands on a single vintage Scorpion King hoodie was for the best. Sun, sweat, and dust created a need for dozens of sweatshirts. “We probably have 50 orange hoodies and now I’m like, ‘Oh, I should have kept a few,’” Bovaird says. “I’ve got one.”

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In the finale of Nope, OJ wears a beat-up Scorpion King crew hoodie with a Panavision logo on one of the sleeves. “You ever go onto a film set, there’s a lot of people wearing the T-shirt from the movie they made two years ago,” says Bovaird, who points out that since Scorpion King was, like Nope, made by Universal Pictures, it made it easier for the licensing department to clear the item. “So we wanted to tell that story as well—that he was a film worker.” She also says that there is “kind of a Nirvana-like thread to this,” mentioning the presence of the most obscure band featured on a T-shirt in the film: Earth, an instrumental duo led by Cobain’s friend Dylan Carlson. “Earth was the band that Kurt Cobain’s best friend started, and Kurt loved the Wipers and the Jesus Lizard.” (In fact, Nirvana covered the Wipers’“D-7” and “Return of the Rat,” and released a split 7″ single with the Jesus Lizard in 1992.) We Need to Talk About Gordy How Keke Palmer Earned Hollywood’s Trust ‘Nope’ Isn’t Easily Digested. That’s Why It Works. ‘Nope’ With Jordan Peele!