The year is 2011: AllSaints is making a fortune, the uploading of 623 Big Night Out photos to Facebook is considered normal, and everyone is losing their tiny minds over a dreamy, Eighties pastiche of an action film that sees Ryan Gosling beat several proverbial shades out of horrid men to synth-pop lullabies by professionally awkward indie acts. Drive, the 2011 hit by director Nicolas Winding Refn – his only hit, perhaps – was huge. Is huge, in fact.

Few action films have so delicately peppered real, convincing emotion into one long blockbuster set piece. This could've so easily been Jason Statham in The Transporter (if you've never heard of it, don't bother). But instead, the heist film is artier, and loftier, and better-dressed. So sharp it is that Drive convinced several men to take the charmeuse Harrington jacket IRL, scorpion and all, oblivious to the fact that they were cosplaying as an actual murderer.

ryan gosling drive jacket
Raymond Hall
ryan gosling drive jacket
Alamy

But for all of Drive's LA fantasy, a world in which bank robberies are daily, and damsels need rescuing with a wadded briefcase, the film gave the Harrington jacket a shot in the arm. Simpler, more classic versions began to seep into The Culture once more. Not since Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crowne Affair had the classic enjoyed such a big Hollywood endorsement – and it's still going.

Just last week, Gosling revisited the jacket that launched a thousand Halloween costumes. Though instead of a carbon copy, the 41-year-old's Harrington went Gucci. There's a monogram there, but it's subtler than the logomania of show-offs past, hidden instead within a check. No scorpions here! And, it's another strong entry to what's been a very well-dressed stumping tour for Gosling's absurd action flick, The Gray Man.

First the costume of emotionally stunted British actors, then that of mods, Northern Soul kids, Britpoppers and indie Cindys, the Harrington jacket is still on the back of a man who helped keep it at the top. And it wasn't just the decision of a wardrobe department: Gosling's backing a Harrington now because he liked a Harrington then. "Ryan had been really inspired by these 1950s Korean souvenir jackets," Drive's costume designer Erin Benach told now defunct pop culture blog Grantland in 2011."We started to think 'wow, that might look really cool'... So we built it piece by piece." Over a decade later, there's still plenty of miles in the tank.