When the first season of HBO’s smash-hit dystopian series The Last of Us premiered two years ago, the broader television-watching public developed an insatiable appetite for its star, the actor Pedro Pascal. Around this same time, people were liberally deploying the term “daddy” to describe the then 48-year-old actor—including Pascal himself, who coquettishly said that “daddy is a state of mind” in a viral clip from Vanity Fair’s YouTube Channel. But Pascal had also begun to lean into the daddyish persona through his clothing, as his stylist Julie Ragolia filled his press-tour wardrobe with saucy cardigans, dorky-hot glasses, and grandfatherly high-waisted pants, all of which starkly contrasted with Pascal’s ultra-masc wardrobe on the show. A few months later, the actor turned the daddy dial up to 11 when he wore a pair of above-the-knee Valentino shorts to the Met Gala. As was surely the intention, the crowd went wild.
It all felt like a form of stunt dressing—fun and excitingly queer, yes, but also a bit labored. (As Ragolia cheekily tweeted back then, “I’m not a celebrity stylist. I just enjoy shaking up the internet for people.”) Despite starring on a hit show, reaching a new level of fame after decades of being a working actor, and otherwise looking devastatingly handsome, Pascal never looked quite comfortable in these meme-friendly red-carpet looks.
Now, though, with Pedro Pascal currently promoting The Last of Us season two, he and Ragolia are running back the same playbook. He’s still leaning into the fashion-daddy vibe—even if the whole “daddy” bit has become, as all things do, sort of cringe now. This week, he debuted a full runway look—a professorial tartan blazer, a cobalt cashmere turtleneck, and black leather pants tucked into a pair of quad-skimming leather wader boots—from Saint Laurent designer Anthony Vacarello’s fall 2025 menswear collection, which juxtaposed bourgeois suiting with fetishistic footwear. (In a press preview, Vaccarello called it “respectable on the top and kind of dirty on the way down.”) The look had a lot going on, but fans went wild nonetheless; Ragolia knowingly shared the ensemble on X with a meme from The Devil Wears Prada, emphasizing the kinky, thigh-high boots of it all.
At various press events in recent weeks, he’s been sticking to a similarly sexy-paternal palette. For an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, he wore dark-rimmed glasses and two bulky plaid blouses tucked into starchy wool trousers by the Italian heritage brand Zegna; at the Los Angeles premiere of the upcoming action-comedy Freaky Tales, he looked like the most handsome circa-1980s dad waiting in the parking lot to pick up his kid from the school dance in pleated khaki slacks and a brown Loro Piana leather bomber jacket.
His most curious look as of late, though, was the one he wore to a Last of Us panel at SXSW earlier this month: a red, high-necked Overcoat jacket tucked into an unbelted pair of—if you can believe it—blue skinny jeans. What were Pascal and Ragolia trying to say with this getup? Was it a funky Marty McFly homage? A nouveau ode to the scene-loving lumberjack? Or maybe it was just designed to confuse us into talking about it—in which case, well, mission accomplished.