Welcome to Style Detective, a new series from T Magazine. Each month, we’ll investigate readers’ questions regarding the items and objects they can’t stop thinking about — and can’t track down. Subscribe here and click this link to submit your own questions.
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| © Twentieth Century Fox/Photofest |
“For years, I’ve been looking for the striped bathrobe that Roddy McDowall’s character wears in ‘Escape from the Planet of the Apes’ (1971). It’s a heavy terry cloth robe with orange, green and yellow stripes — trendy colors at the time — and a beautifully cut collar. This, and only this, is the bathrobe I want, although a similar one would also do.” — Nina, Vienna, Austria
How thrillingly specific! “Escape from the Planet of the Apes,” which is widely considered the best of the four sequels to the 1968 original, “Planet of the Apes” (no comment on the more recent reboots), starred the British American actor Roddy McDowall, who returned to the franchise as Cornelius after another actor, David Watson, had temporarily replaced him in 1970’s “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.” Before succumbing to a rather tragic fate, the chimpanzee scientist appears onscreen in this plush bathrobe, which is, as you note, made of a heavy terry cloth with notched lapels rather than a more traditional shawl collar.
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| Roddy McDowall in the 1971 film “Escape from the Planet of the Apes.” © Twentieth Century Fox/Photofest |
Terry cloth is recognizable for its pile — loops of thread that are left loose in the weaving process to create a soft, fuzzy texture. The fabric is said to have made its way from Renaissance-era Turkey, where it was produced on hand looms, to 19th-century England and France: “terry” was likely derived from the French tirer, meaning to pull, a reference to its loops. Its absorptive properties made it a popular choice for bath linens and robes. By the latter half of the 20th century, it was often used in sportswear by brands such as Ralph Lauren and Esprit. As the journalist Barbara Ettorre noted in a 1979 Times article, “Terry cloth is out of the bathroom and stepping into the office, the board room and the dinner party.” The material has also made a resurgence this year, appearing in the spring 2026 collections from Balmain, Lacoste and Norma Kamali.
To find this particular robe, my first instinct was to go straight to the source. Unfortunately, Morton Haack, the costume designer for the original “Apes” films, died in 1987. Undeterred, I tried my luck on the internet. Although online marketplaces have made it much easier to track down specific vintage pieces, their limited quantity and unregulated quality make those hunts more of an art than a science. While I found plenty of striped robes from the 1970s, those lapels eluded me. I asked my friend David Moses, who sells vintage clothing under the name Winning & Losing, if they knew any specialists who could point me in the right direction. They connected me with Erin Silvers of Zingara Vintage, a Rockaway Beach, Queens-based collector and upcycler of — get this — vintage terry cloth pieces.
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| Spring 2026 terry cloth looks, from left: Lacoste, Norma Kamali and Balmain. From left: Courtesy of Lacoste; courtesy of Norma Kamali; Ik Aldama |
After rummaging through her inventory, Silvers found a double-breasted jacket by the defunct American clothing and sleepwear label Pleetway that featured that exact stripe sequence and coloration. She very graciously removed the jacket from its original packaging to examine it more closely. Despite the similarities, Silvers spotted differences. “The robe [from the film] is a jacquard velour, sheared on one side to create a velvety finish,” she said. “The jacket is a looped jacquard — lesser quality but the exact same colorway and order in its pattern. Brands often copied other colorways and styles, changing only either the finish or the pattern. Since mills often used the same dye houses, multiple brands tended to produce very similar products. It’s safe to assume that there were many variations of this robe available at the time.”
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| A double-breasted terry cloth jacket from Zingara Vintage, although similar to the robe in the film, isn’t quite the same. Erin Silvers |
Though the “Apes” original might evade us, Etsy and eBay searches turned up striped ’70s robes from brands like Van Heusen, Mr. Teri of California and Saks Fifth Avenue’s private label. I’m cautious to share links as one-of-ones can disappear in an instant, but contemporary approximations abound. The Brooklyn-based label Dusen Dusen sells a variety of robes and slippers in vivid striped terries, like this one in yellow and red. Or you could go with this striped robe woven by artisans in Turkey. If you wanted to get really granular, you could book a virtual consultation with Zingara Vintage and select the exact deadstock fabric and silhouette you’d like for your robe. Whatever you choose, I hope it leads to intense lounging.
