John Travolta has wholeheartedly embraced the beret as his trademark since making headlines at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month. At Thursday’s DGA premiere of his directorial debut, Propeller One-Way Night Coach, he told Variety’s Marc Malkin that he adopted the hat idea to get a feel of being a director.
“Berets have been around for 800 years,” Travolta told Malkin. “You know, the military is old. I’ve been looking at all my pictures for 50 years and I can’t tell the difference. I started not being able to tell them apart, so I said, ‘Well, you’re not really an actor, are you?'”
“So I looked up these old-school directors, and they all wore berets, and sometimes they wore glasses, and they were probably reflective of this type of painter or musician, in a very conventional but wonderful way.”
Travolta told Malkin that he has at least 12 hats, which helped him appear on the best-dressed lists of Vogue, GQ, and Harper’s Bazaar in Cannes.
“Guys don’t have enough to do,” Travolta said. “The reason they’re making men wear skirts is because there’s something missing there…why not change that? We can have fun too.”
The “Saturday Night Fever” star also said he helped style her daughter Ella, who accompanied her on the carpet and also appears in the film. “I could have gone with twin berets, but today I decided to go with Brigitte Bardot.”
“Propeller Night Bus,” based on Travolta’s 1997 children’s book, is a one-hour film available to stream on AppleTV+.
Travolta said that fashion was on his mind from an early age. “My brother-in-law worked for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in the ’60s and styled me as a teenager. I wore my first bell bottoms, my first wide belt, my first double-breasted suit. I looked like Warren Beatty, Bonnie and Clyde. So I know[women]have more options than we do.”
