"A style tip for the campaign trail: Dress down for success" by Beth Teitell Globe Staff / January 7, 2012
Mitt Romney is parading around New Hampshire in mom jeans. Rick Santorum is rocking a sweater vest. Jon Huntsman’s collar always seems to be open.
When did the American presidency become the only job in the universe for which the applicants dress more casually than the incumbent?
As the race for the Republican nomination intensifies, why is one contender dressing like Mister Rogers’s brother (Santorum), and others less willing to wear a suit than a teenage boy would be (Romney, Huntsman)?
Blame the lousy economy and high jobless rate, the celebrity culture, and, according to one historian, Richard M. Nixon, the president who redefined uptight, wearing a suit and wingtips to the beach.
“Even if underneath it all they are power hungry, they have to dress like a self-denying public servant with gravitas,’’ said Simon Doonan, creative ambassador at large for Barneys New York.
At a time of hostility toward the 1 percent, he said, “it’s important to appear insanely average.’’
Even if you are a multimillionaire.
Of course, “just folks’’ campaign wear isn’t new. The red plaid shirt that Lamar Alexander wore in the 1996 Republican primary and General Wesley Clark’s argyle sweater in the 2004 Democratic race are probably better remembered than any of their positions, as is Scott Brown’s man-of-the-people barn jacket from the campaign to fill the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s seat.
Some candidates are still dressing up, although Newt Gingrich, former House speaker, did appear after the Iowa caucuses looking sloppy in an open-collar shirt, Governor Rick Perry has periodically worn cowboy boots, and US representative Ron Paul’s suits fit so poorly that he might as well be wearing a sweatshirt.
Then that is the man you should be voting for, America. Got his off the rack.
But Robin Givhan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning observer of style, said this campaign seems more sartorially informal than past races. The “million-dollar question’’ is whether dressing (down) to impress works, said Givhan, a style and culture correspondent at the Daily Beast and Newsweek.
“If you are someone like a Mitt Romney, who is known to the public as a business person, as ‘a suit,’ and you’re suddenly wearing jeans and crew-neck sweaters, that might not seem authentic.’’
Not at all.
Or, as Nick Sullivan, fashion director of Esquire magazine, put it: “Clothes do communicate things about you without you having to say anything, even if it’s a lie.’’
Just like a newspaper.
Indeed, the casual Romney and Huntsman - with their trim builds, tans, good hair, teeth, and shirts - look more like lawyers working on the weekend than the middle-class and blue-collar workers they are wooing.
Romney, as many voters recall, was very much a suit-and-tie candidate in 2008, when he mounted his first presidential bid. But he is determined to display a more casual side this time around and even joked on Piers Morgan’s CNN show, “Well, I stopped wearing my suit to bed at night.’’
Kate Betts, author of “Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style,’’ explained why it is important for candidates to seem easy to relate to. “We live in a celebrity culture, where celebrities are supposedly just like us,’’ she said, “and politicians and presidents are celebrities, too, so they have to adopt that formula.’’
Gee, WHOSE FAULT is THAT, Globe?
And if true, Ron Paul should win in a landslide.
Ellen Fitzpatrick, a history professor at the University of New Hampshire, attributes the need for accessibility in part to the cultural fallout of the Watergate scandal. “The idea of the president as a removed, distant figure is not admired anymore,’’ she said. Casual campaign wear is “an effort to close the gap and portray one’s self as a man of the people,’’ she said.
The enormous growth of the news industry since Nixon’s time and the introduction of social media into the mix mean that appearances are more important than ever. No wardrobe choice goes unphotographed....
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The Globe deserves a dressing down for front-paging such s***.
