Doctor Who: The Main Inspiration Behind Each Doctor's Costume

7. The Seventh Doctor

Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy the Seventh Doctor
BBC

The costume for Doctor number seven was significantly toned down when compared to his predecessor, with clothes that could be considered a bit more normal - something that wouldn't look too out of place for an ordinary human.

This was John Nathan-Turner's main goal when devising the Seventh Doctor's look. He wanted to step away from the more peculiar designs used for the Fifth and Sixth Doctors, and asked costumer Ken Trew to come up with something that "wouldn't make people freak out if he was walking down the street."

From here, Trew outfitted Sylvester McCoy in a simple jacket and trousers, keeping any eccentric elements - like those question marks on his sweater - to a minimum.

Each piece of clothing was made by the Doctor Who costume department (except the panama hat, which was purchased and retrimmed), with the sweater being based on a very specific source: a 1930s golfer.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!