When I wrote about Wade Garrett yesterday, I remembered something about his black t-shirt: He’s not the only cooler in the movie to wear one. The other of course is Dalton—but it’s not like he wears it all the time. The movie shows us he’s molded in Wade’s by deploying black in his wardrobe on three key occasions.

Attentive readers of Pain Don’t Hurt will have guessed the first by now: The Giving of the Rules. This takes place prior to Wade’s introduction, directly linking the older man’s debut to the establishment of his acolyte’s doctrine.

The second is the fight that takes place the night he and Doc have their first date, which is also the first time we see him on the job after we meet Wade. This reinforces the sense of succession while also tying Dalton’s romantic flourishing to the older man’s tutelage.

The third is his impromptu breakfast summit with Brad Wesley, during which Wesley brings up his checkered past and offers to hire him away from the Double Deuce. It’s not a t-shirt here but a collared shirt, as befits this more formal occasion. But the dialogue makes direct reference to an event in Dalton’s past that Wade will also bring up (while wearing a collared black shirt himself) later in the movie, and shows Dalton standing up to an asshole in a way that would do his mentor proud—even if he’d likely suggest getting out of Dodge afterwards.

Clothes make the man. Clothes mate the men.

Several martial-arts disciplines utilize the gi, a simple uniform developed over time with the physical and strategic demands of each particular discipline (judo, karate, whatever) in mind. Dalton, who in another life would have made a hell of a mixed martial arts fighter, likes to wear his out on the town sometimes. It’s the only outfit we see him in not once but twice: first on the day he takes a trip to the auto parts store and discovers that Red Webster is getting shaken down by Brad Wesley and his goons, and second on the day of his final mad battle against the Wesleyans. Dalton is wearing a gi when Red springs the original colloquialism “Does a hobbyhorse have a wooden dick?” on him in lieu of the traditional “Is the Pope Catholic?”, and again when he approaches his niece Dr. Elizabeth Clay in the middle of examining the x-ray results for her latest trauma patient and/or colonoscopy recipient to beg her to skip town with him so they can avoid the wrath of her insane Fotomat-owning ex-husband. But I assure you that in neither case did he slip this clean white garment on in anticipation of seeing action. It’s simply the film’s way of communicating that the Dalton Path stretches from East to West. In many ways it’s an equivalent signifier to stretching with a lit cigarette in his mouth, or waking up hung over from a late-night binge-read, or receiving a philosophy degree from NYU for studying “man’s search for faith, that sorta shit” prior to becoming a professional ass-kicker, or asking for a king’s ransom as a salary but living in a place that costs $100 a month and driving a car chosen specifically because it’ll function basically the same if it gets half-destroyed by angry drunks whose noses he’s broken, or doing tai chi by the water in between tours of every greasy spoon and dive bar in town. He is a human mixed martial art. Might as well dress the part.