The Politics Of Style

From Indira Gandhi’s handloom saris to Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits and Narendra Modi’s monogrammed pinstripes, what politicians wear speaks volumes. PAHULL BAINS takes a closer look.

It’s safe to say that no Zara jacket has inspired more think pieces, on-air debates and angry tweets than Melania Trump’s “I really don’t care. Do U?” parka. Last summer, the First Lady of the United States donned this jacket on her way to visit immigrant families detained at the country’s southern border, and Twitter went into overdrive trying to decode the subtext beneath the literal text. Was she saying she didn’t care about her First Lady duties but had to do them anyway? Or was it plausible that she wore the jacket without considering the optics of its inflammatory message?

“It’s a jacket,” Mrs Trump’s spokesperson told the media at the time. “There was no hidden message.” A few months later, FLOTUS set the record straight during an interview, when she declared that she had worn the jacket “for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticising me. And I want to show them that I don’t care.”

Trump and her team’s disingenuous equivocating aside, both the public’s response and media coverage of the incident underscore the fact that what people in prominent positions of power—both men and women— wear is noteworthy.

“Everybody in the public eye spends real amounts of time thinking about their clothes and talking to their communications consultants about their clothes,” says Vanessa Friedman, chief fashion critic at the New York Times. “People are taking pictures of you all the time, and it’s going all around the world and people who look at those pictures are making judgements about you based on the pictures... That is simply the reality of the world we live in.”

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE