Ridley Scott is standing next to a tiger. The big cat is frozen in motion, leaping off its hind legs, broad mitts set to attack. This is the set of Gladiator in Kalkara, Malta. The year is circa 1999, which you might have surmised from the style of the shades worn by the crew members in the shot’s middle ground, framed between Scott, the animatronic tiger, and the back of leading man Russell Crowe’s head. The tiger had its moment, slain by Crowe’s Maximus in a pivotal fight scene. In this photo, though, it’s just a dusty stuffed animal in a fake Colosseum with a middle-aged director prodding its belly in a mock-neck T-shirt and baseball cap. Scott’s outfit here is rigorously basic, the only bit of ornamentation a metal bracelet on his left wrist. He’s dressed to sweat, to get dirty.

Film direction is a strange, amorphous occupation. Its precise duties, and the qualities required to consistently perform them, are tough to pin down. Directors are storytellers, struggling to conduct an orchestra of artisans and technicians, financiers and laborers, to get big ideas out of their own heads and onto screens. Some are puppeteer-therapists, coaxing performances out of their actors. Some are choreographers, others special effects experts. In almost all instances, they are called on to be canny problem solvers navigating a daily litany of complications: shrinking budgets, scripts in perpetual revision, tight timelines, difficult personalities. What exactly a director must do and how they do it depends on the nature of their film, which means that there is no singular uniform a director must wear. Since they have the freedom to dress as they please, what they put on to go to work each morning reflects a combination of practicality and spirit. A director’s choice of attire on set might offer information about both their film and their day-to-day sensibilities. It might also tell us something about filmmaking as a profession and style more broadly—photographs from film sets are their own little time capsules, showcasing habits of dress from their respective eras.

Though the archetypal idea of a film director tends toward chin-stroking auteurism, the actual work of direction can be physically demanding. The hours are long, often spanning entire days, predawn to postdusk. Conditions can be extreme—weather is a factor. You spend a lot of time on your feet, on your knees, in the muck, bent double, contorted, crawling, sprinting alongside a tracking shot. Comfort, or tolerance for discomfort, is key. Proper attire helps, like the kaffiyeh, biker gloves, and ski goggles Kathryn Bigelow wore when shooting The Hurt Locker (2008) in the Jordanian desert. Her jeans offered protection enough for her to feel comfortable kneeling on dusty train tracks, and her long-sleeve top sheltered her skin from wind-whipped sand. Look at her wrist on the set of Blue Steel (1990): Notice the three stacked cuffs, heavy jacket atop leather atop a thick knit fabric. Look up toward her neck: The way the collar of the leather is folded over suggests it’s biker gear. It’s a strong look, totally cosmopolitan, still current 34 years later, and it kept her warm on a chilly day of shooting.

Even in more temperate, controlled environments, the director gets active, digging into scenes with their actors. Imagine John Woo, shirtsleeves rolled up on the set of Bullet in the Head. Though he’s one of cinema’s most celebrated and influential action filmmakers, known for his intricately choreographed shoot-outs and set pieces, Woo turns up on set almost exclusively in business casual garb—button-up shirts, typically white, tucked into chinos or generously cut dress pants. He would look at home behind the counter of a regional bank branch. Woo’s might not be the most durable garments, but they’re flexible enough, and, hey, similar slacks-and-shirt ensembles worked for many of his gunslinging protagonists, like Chow Yun-fat’s hero cop “Tequila” Yuen in Woo’s 1992 classic, Hard Boiled. There is something appealing about how white-collar workaday both Woo and his characters dress. It makes these pistols-akimbo fantasies feel somehow accessible. Little seemed to change in Woo’s wardrobe once he made the leap to American cinema—Woo went Hollywood in only the most literal sense.

There is clothing one wears to work, and then there is workwear, a term typically used to describe a category of garment and accessory purpose-built for specific types of physically intensive labor. One key storyline in popular fashion through the back half of the last century is the commingling of these two categories—this tendency hasn’t slowed in the slightest. Fabrics and cuts initially intended for manual blue-collar labor became commonplace casual garb, some of the most ubiquitous and anonymous garments available to us. Denim is probably the best example of this phenomenon.

Modern blue jeans were invented in the late 19th century by tailor Jacob Davis and businessman Levi Strauss and worn by workers like miners and cowboys for their durability before catching on with civilians. The T-shirt has a storied history as a military garment and was adopted by laborers too.

The entry of jeans and tees into the firmament of global style had as much to do with their material attributes as their seismic semiosis—it’s simply a very functional ensemble, whether for labor or for leisure. Directors wear it to work for the same reasons the rest of us do.

Here is Steven Spielberg in a full look of faded denim. It appears broken in, well loved, softened by use. He’s on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), though with that pensive gaze, this shot almost looks lifted from a fashion campaign. The look is fairly typical for Spielberg in the mid-1980s, though it’s missing one element crucial to his popular persona: a baseball cap.

In the pantheon of directorially coded implements, the baseball cap slots in right next to the canvas folding chair with the name printed on the back. For filmmakers, the appeal of the ball cap is easy to grasp. Directing is a profession that depends on clarity of vision, and a brimmed cap provides shade and shelter in bright or rainy environments. It soaks up sweat. On a chilly day, it offers a bit of warmth.

Euzhan Palcy’s second feature, A Dry White Season (1989), is set in apartheid South Africa and based on a novel by Afrikaner André Brink that was temporarily banned after publication in that country in 1979. It is a complex story of racial injustice, a society in tumultuous transition, and the dire consequences a schoolteacher played by Donald Sutherland faces for trying to stand up for a victim of violent abuse. It was a small-budget passion project for Palcy, and a number of its principals worked for far less than their standard wages to make the production possible—like Marlon Brando, who came out of retirement to play a supporting role.

On set, Palcy sometimes wore a baseball hat with a device mounted on its brim: a tiny fan that blows inward onto the wearer’s face, powered by a small solar panel. On most, this contraption would look ridiculous, but Palcy’s aura—an all-white ensemble accented with cherry red and gold, T-shirt sleeves precisely cut to ever so slightly broaden the silhouette of her shoulders—incorporated it with ease. In an interview with The New York Times following A Dry White Season’s debut, while she was touring the film to festivals and galas, Palcy said: “In the days when I wasn’t being taken seriously, I wore long skirts—very conservative. But now, I dress any way I want to.’’

Here is Palcy, elegant in the extreme, on the set of Siméon, the 1992 follow-up to A Dry White Season. When your job is directing a film, if it works for you, it’s workwear.

Most of these images were taken by unit photographers. A presence on film sets for about as long as film sets have existed, their job is to take stills used for documentation and promotion. I’m interested in unit photography because it captures a particular sort of rupture: our world intruding on the world of a film. There, in the rift, we find absurd tableaux like Scott and his tiger. Photos like these are often referred to as “behind the scenes,” which sells them a bit short—they are above, beneath, and between them too. The director is usually the primary interloper, and their tell is typically their street clothes, often at odds with their film’s wardrobe.

I think these photos appeal to us because they freeze-frame the creative act—a new world half-wrought, all potentiality, its impact yet to be felt. We are attracted to action, and the utilitarian clothes worn by directors and their crews can help us to better understand the efforts poured into shaping these fictive worlds. The appeal of the individual outfits comes from a combination of our perceptions about the people wearing them, the contexts in which they’re worn, and what we know now about the films they helped make. These images depict films being made. That is to say: They are photographs of people at work.

From How Directors Dress: On Set, in the Edit, and Down the Red Carpet by A24 Publishing.