The jacket worn by Paul Mescal’s William Shakespeare alone should win an Oscar for its performance. In a very artistic and cool looking movie — take a look at Jessie Buckley’s maternity wear — that jacket stands alone.

The movie is Hamnet, and when it came on screen, and it had such a presence, it immediately took me out of the movie for a second and had me thinking about 1600s England fashion. Who would have made this? Why would they have put those dope-ass slashes all across it? Was this common? Would Shakespeare have been cool enough to pull this off? Did they borrow this from Timothee Chalamet?

Thank god for the level of detail in movies that are dedicated to their craft. GQ did an interview with Malgosia Turzanska, the movie’s costume designer, and not only is it an actual textile someone would have worn (apparently it’s called a “jerkin,” which is unfortunately way less cool), it’s used as a metaphor and changed as the movie goes along.

The other major textural component of William’s look are the slashes on his jerkins, the sleeveless jackets he wears. The first jerkin we see him wearing features only little scratches, meant to represent the lingering traumas of growing up with a violent father. Later in the film, after returning from work in London, his outfit has become grayer and more hardened-looking.

“It’s the first time that he puts on a shell, and it’s like he’s calcifying a little bit in the life that he’s in,” Turzanska says. The look is this time punctuated by little slashes in the leather vest. The small nicks, which the designer notes are “not inaccurate,” become much larger slashes in his final outfit. Where real-life jerkins in the style would have finished the ridges on the slashes, Tarzanska kept them raw, appearing almost as though William cut up the leather himself.

“I wanted to make sure that it had the violence of his feelings at that moment,” she says. “Silent screams. They’re like all those holes. That’s what it is to me. It’s him opening up and screaming silently.” It’s these details, which Mescal says “give you a hint, or an access point into his psychological landscape.”