Some new(?) images from the film

[Jessy7217]

The pattern is not an exact match, no. (I would guess that whoever created that shirt in the first place probably wasn't consciously thinking about the flag.) But I think it's undeniable that they have strong similarities, what with how both of them consist of stripes of light blue, light pink, and white. The fact that it looks greenish in the picture is due to the lighting, I think.

Probably not. It could be. The only way to know for sure, is for whoever decided on that sweater, to say.

[Jedi Apprentice]

A member here, I don't remember which, bought some of Eli's clothes from the film and showed them to us.

After a quick search, it looks like this thread by djrees56 is what you're referring to.

It's pretty evident that Eli, for obvious reasons, didn't care about what he looked like, or personal hygiene for that matter, until he met Oskar, so the film-clothes are pretty much in keeping with that idea. Some clothing masculine and some feminine but all dilapidated.
Apart from Eli asking Oskar, luktar jag bättre idag?, he did seem particularly happy, and expecting of Oskar's approval, when he put on Oskar's mums dress in the "twirl scene". Albeit we are, and always are, working from the mind-set of a 12 year old and also one who lives and survives upon non-binary identification.
I would suggest the confusion and doubt about eunuch Eli's sexual identification and the film/novel's open-ended conclusion might be the thing that many of us are attracted to, but also the reason why others don't like the novel/film. An audience being left unsatisfied with everything not tied up in a neat little pink bow is not how movies are supposed to end. While the doubt and moral/ethical/gender confusion for me is the very thing that I find most attractive.

I agree with all of that, but it's not really what I'm asking. I'm not wondering whether the shirt looks masculine or feminine, but rather about the coloration of it. The trans pride flag, for reference:



I don't personally view Eli as transgender (though that's a whole other discussion), and in any case, wearing a shirt with colors resembling the trans flag isn't something he would've been consciously thinking about in-universe--mostly because, as mentioned, the flag wasn't created until almost two decades after the events of the film. My thinking is instead that the costume designer Maria Strid possibly chose to include the shirt as a subtle message to the audience about Eli's gender--or at least how she personally viewed that aspect of the character.

EDIT: Finally got around to double-checking the film. Eli wears the shirt in question in four (or five or six, depending on how you count) scenes, making it the one piece of clothing he's shown wearing the most: "Hit back" and the first Morse conversation, the hug behind the kiosk ("If I wasn't a girl..."), at the hospital, and the bed scene ("I'm not a girl"). Two of these scenes touch on the character's gender identity, so... I dunno. The resemblance to the flag could simply be a big coincidence, of course, but I'm inclined to think it isn't, based on the fine attention to detail in every other aspect of the film.

Also, I apologize if I'm pointing out obvious things that have already been discussed to death in the past, but as far as I could find, this specific detail hasn't been pointed out before.

I higly doubt such combination of colors in Eli's sweater was supposed to represent the trans flag. Neither Lindqvist nor Alfredson ever said that they or Strid used the colors of that sweater to allude the trans flag. In fact, in the DVD audio commentary, both authors talk while watching the movie about EVERYTHING that appears on screen, including Strid's work in the wardrobe department (they even talk numerous times about the funny white hat Larry uses), but they make no mention of the colors of Eli's clothes. It was surely a simple coincidence. By the way, if Strid viewed Eli as a trans girl, then she wouldn't have understood the character at all, as Eli is obviously not a trans person, but a mutilated boy