Good morning! Have you noticed that politicians’ (already bleak) fashion sense has coalesced around some particular styles? Today, senior correspondent Rebecca Jennings digs in.
—Caroline Houck, senior editor of news |
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David Dee Delgado/Getty Images |
Male politicians dress badly for a reason |
Americans may be paying less attention to political news ahead of the 2024 election, but when they do tune in, they’ll be greeted by a sartorial landscape that’s different from the one they remember four years ago. Legions of Republicans are copying Trump’s shiny red ties in a bid to win his (and his base’s) favor. Suits, at least on younger politicians, have gotten significantly tighter. And we’re officially in the unfortunate era of the “dress sneaker.” DC fashion has always been notoriously bleak, steeped in the regressive gender and respectability politics that govern the nation’s oldest bureaucracies. But this year, more than ever, there seems to be a uniform for male Republicans.
Here to explain what’s going on in this particular election cycle is Derek Guy, the San Francisco-based founder of the blog Die, Workwear!, who’s perhaps better known as X’s “menswear guy,” having exploded on the platform in 2022 for his informative threads and quippy comebacks.
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Rebecca Jennings: What do you think about all the Republican men copying Trump’s ties? Derek Guy: I think Republicans are wearing the bright red tie to signal that they’re a Trump Republican as opposed to a Romney Republican.
It’s not just the bright red tie, it’s that they’re often wearing satin red ties, a very shiny material that Trump wears. Historically for men, it’s usually the tie you’d wear in the evening. But Trump wears a satin red tie even in afternoons and mornings, because it’s the strongest, punchiest way to wear a red tie. Other Republicans have picked up on that and bought essentially the same tie when you see them coming out in support of Trump. |
The first time I really noticed that was the very first Republican primary debate for this presidential campaign. So many came out in bright red ties, and the only men that didn’t were Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, both of whom said they wouldn’t support Trump if he were the party’s nominee. They were totally scorched by Republicans for that.
As everyone has noted, Trump has taken over the party. It’s this kind of careful thing where candidates want to stand up to him and say that you’re an alternative, but then you also have to court his base of diehards. Rebecca Jennings: Do you find that Democratic politicians are taking a different approach to fashion than their Republican counterparts?
Derek Guy: I don't know if there’s a significant difference between how Democratic and Republican politicians dress.
The contrast is more evident across generations. Men in their 30s and 40s tend to favor slim-fit clothing, whereas men in their 50s and 60s favor fuller-fitting clothes.
Some of this comes out of experience. I can’t imagine President Biden or Trump wearing the kind of clothes we see on Rep. Gaetz because they would instinctively know that suits shouldn’t fit like that. I think this comes out of the fact that they grew up in a generation where tailored clothing was more common, and so they’re more familiar with it, whereas I suspect Rep. Gaetz only started wearing suits with any regularity after he was elected into office in 2017.
There are noticeably bad dressers on both sides of the aisle, but in slightly different ways.
I can’t imagine a Republican opting to dress like Sen. Fetterman because I think there are more pressures on that side of the aisle to conform to notions of respectability in dress.
But ill-fitting attire is hardly a partisan issue. There are some members of Gen Z who are getting back into fuller-fitting silhouettes, which is great. But they’ve yet to get into elected offices in a way that makes their dress sense noticeable in political life. |
Rebecca Jennings:
We’re now seeing Mark Zuckerberg start to wear a chain and grow out his curls. Do you think there’s a world in which, in a couple election cycles, there will be streetwear-influenced political dressing? Derek Guy: No, not streetwear.
The thing about clothing is that it’s so tied to signaling issues dealing with class, race, and often coded as respectability. What we term “respectability” is often middle-class whiteness. Streetwear does not convey that.
Mark Zuckerberg can get away with it because he’s a billionaire. But politicians and people who work in offices often have to affect this uniform of middle-class whiteness, and I think it’s going to be the default uniform, at least for the rest of my lifetime. I think they’re still going to do button-up shirts and sometimes jeans. Rebecca Jennings: How do you think male politicians and other powerful guys can dress better? And why aren’t they doing that already?
Derek Guy: US politicians have dressed more casually since at least the 1970s. Politicians are people too, and they exist in the same world as we do. They’re influenced by the same casualization trends.
John F. Kennedy is often credited with having killed the hat for not wearing the hat at certain parts of his inauguration, and in the ’80s, when you see some politicians campaigning, you'll notice that they lose their jackets. In the late ’90s to the early 2000s, you start to see men lose the tie, so they’re only campaigning in a dress shirt. When Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for the presidency, he wore a quarter-zip sweater. Some of it is a desire to not look too stuffy. When you're walking into a town hall with everyone dressed casually, you don’t want to be seen as the suit.
Personally, I think they would look better if they put on a tailored jacket and found ways to dress down a jacket that was not an orphan suit jacket with jeans. That’s the one unique thing about Donald Trump: He’s the only modern president who refuses to dress down outside of, like, golf courses. He always wears a suit. You rarely see him without a tie. We all know that these people are very powerful. Most come from privileged, wealthy backgrounds. I think they should just wear a tailored jacket and we should all just give up the charade that just because you’re dressed casually, you’re somehow one of us.
As an electoral matter, I don’t think that’s changing. Politicians are still going to want to dress down to seem more relatable to voters. |
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