Actually, the fact that Hickey wore clothes taken off the dead - Irving’s coat, Fitzjames’s boots - can easily be read as just another whim of his dark nature, a kind of particular depravity, a pointed desire to possess high-quality items in order to elevate himself, and so on. That interpretation definitely makes sense. Ah, Hickey, thinking that if he dresses like a member of the upper class, it will somehow change something in him. An officer’s coat, an officer’s boots. It really looks like someone is trying to claim a place that isn’t theirs.
I genuinely like that reading, and it’s clearly there - you don’t have to dig far to see it. And at the same time… isn’t there also a layer of practicality here? How much higher quality would an officer’s clothing be compared to that of an ordinary sailor? How much faster would a regular sailor’s clothes wear out under constant physical labor? I’m not even talking about the boots - the script itself notes that one of Hickey’s boots was torn.
By the way, secondhand clothing was just as common back then as it is now. Clothes were expensive. In the 1840s, mass production wasn’t widespread yet, only a few could afford custom-made garments, and people often had to buy used items. And of course, you often had to take whatever was available - clothes too big or too small, ill-fitting shoes. You bought what you could afford, and what you could find.
I like to joke about Hickey’s oversized coat or those too-big boots - it’s almost an embarrassingly obvious metaphor about someone not quite measuring up, and all that. And yet, for Hickey, this was probably just an ordinary situation - wearing other people’s ill-fitting clothes because that’s all that was available to him. Of course, I’m not trying to excuse Hickey’s looting - that’s a fantastic villain detail, I love it! And still, on some level, his awkward appearance might once again turn into a kind of class commentary. He wears other people’s ill-fitting clothes because he needs them - not in some symbolic sense, but in a very real, practical one. For survival, likely as many times before.
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