Travolta told Variety that he adopted the look while preparing to step behind the camera for the first time, reasoning his way through film history to arrive at a very specific headwear conclusion. “I looked at all the photographs of me for 50 years and I can’t tell you the difference,” he said. “I said, ‘You’re not an actor really. Why don’t you dress like one?’ So I looked up all the old school directors and they all had berets and sometimes glasses — it was cliché but in a wonderful way. They were probably reflecting painters and musicians of the type.”
The logic held up commercially. Travolta says the berets landed him on the best-dressed lists from Vogue, GQ and Harper’s Bazaar during Cannes. The internet was less reverential — he sported four different berets across a single weekend at the festival, sparking a wave of jokes and a dedicated social media archive of each look. Travolta, characteristically, found the whole thing amusing.
The film itself carries far more personal weight. Propeller One-Way Night Coach, now streaming on Apple TV+, is adapted from a children’s book Travolta wrote for his son Jett in 1997 — a semi-autobiographical story set in 1962 about an eight-year-old aviation enthusiast and his mother traveling cross-country to Hollywood. Jett Travolta died in 2009 at age 16. Travolta’s daughter Ella Bleu co-stars as a flight attendant.
At the Cannes premiere, festival director Thierry Frémaux presented Travolta with a surprise honorary Palme d’Or. “This is beyond the Oscar,” Travolta said as he accepted the award.
On the beret’s broader cultural argument, Travolta was equally emphatic. “Guys don’t have enough to do,” he said. “They’re putting men in skirts because there’s a lack of something there — why not change it up? We can have fun too.” He also credited a fashion-industry brother-in-law who styled him as a teenager in bell-bottoms and double-breasted suits. “I looked like Warren Beatty, Bonnie and Clyde,” he said. “So I’m very aware of how women have more options than we do.” As for his daughter Ella, who joined him on the red carpet at Cannes, he said they considered matching berets before settling on something different. “We could have done twin berets, but today we decided to go Brigitte Bardot.”
