Hard Fits: Osita Nwanevu — Part 2
Menswear depolarization, the worst dressers in Washington, and ring guy representation
Welcome back to Hard Fits, an interview series about menswear and the men who wear it. Today: the second part of my conversation with author and journalist Osita Nwanevu. Catch up on part one here:
A few minutes ago you said that politicians have been dressing shitty for as long as you can remember, and that it seemed to change at some point in the past. Can you nail that down any more specifically? Is there an era in which things transition?
I don’t really know. We all see these black and white pictures of Kennedy in the Sixties, right? It’s very hard to imagine John F. Kennedy standing on a hay bale [laughs].
With his back problems, he’d really have a hard time…
He probably would have.
I just spent the weekend up in Hyde Park, New York for a conference, I went to the FDR Museum. People understood that part of his appeal, part of what people liked about him, was that he was this sharp-looking guy.
An aristocrat.
An aristocrat, yeah. So like, I don’t know. There’s this dance that people expect you to do now where in the right settings, on the right occasion, you’re wearing the suit, but you need to be able to illustrate that you can unbutton your collar in a particular way and have a beer that an aide has handed to you and is making sure you’re not drinking too much of. And again, it’s kind of tiresome.
Trump broke from that pattern. He’s eluded that register entirely. The way that Donald Trump looks is just the way that he looks. He’s not amending that within the context of a particular setting. He’s just going in as Donald Trump all the time, and I think that’s probably part of why people like him so much.
So I can’t pinpoint the time [political dress worsened] exactly. But maybe we’re on the cusp of a new era.
We can only hope. You mentioned earlier the “Sunday Announcer” style, which seemed characteristic of certain Republicans. If you showed me pictures of two different marginal House reps who I didn’t know, I feel like I would have a pretty good sense of which one was a Dem versus which one was a Republican, but I have hard time pointing out exactly what gives me the sense beyond the obvious, like age and race. How would you characterize that difference, or do you believe there is one?
On the Hill, I don’t think the average male member of the House is going to look that different from party to party. I think maybe you’d see Democrats making bolder sartorial choices on average, in terms of like, the color of the suit they’re wearing. But no, I think there are just a couple people who are particularly notable for their dress, in good ways and bad. Y’know, Jim Jordan is notable for bad reasons—I don’t know how many copies of that yellow tie he has hanging around somewhere. But I don’t think that in Washington you see that many dramatic differences between the men.
I will say, though, that one that I’ve noticed—have you seen these Jubilee videos that people have been sharing on social media?
Where whoever sits down in the middle, and there are like 20 people surrounding them?
Exactly. They’ve done a couple of these where the 20 people they have surrounding the person they’ve invited are far-right Republicans. And there’s been this online discourse about how much those guys now resemble your stereotypical hipster from the 2010s. Men with man-buns talking about how they think we should be a white ethnostate. And people have found this really jarring, and sorta indicative of the cultural valence of some of the styles we’ve been used to as consumers. I’m not really sure what it all means.
I do think conservatives have spent a lot of time and money trying to infiltrate youth cultural spaces to try to recruit people. They know that they can’t take it for granted, as Democrats have, that the youth will be on their side. And it’s always this youth pastor, sitting backwards in a chair type of fashion—they’re always trying to stretch themselves in that kind of way.
Conversely, on the left, you see a lot of people—and I don’t think it’s necessarily in reaction to anything—but Mamdani seems to be indicative of an interest in more traditional styles of dress. Most famously the Menswear Guy, Derek Guy, on Twitter, is pretty outspoken about his left-ish politics, but he’s also making the case for traditional menswear, or at least articulating why the tradition is important to him.
So it seems like the signifiers that we’re used to aligning on one side or another of the aisle are kind of in flux, and I’m interested in seeing where that ends up shaking out.
It’s like with the 2024 election, there’s the narrative of race depolarization. This is almost like stylistic depolarization.
Menswear depolarization, right.
Can I ask you for quick takes on a couple other male political figures?
Sure.
JD Vance.
[Pause] Um…
I’m sure you love his politics, obviously, but just his appearance.
I’m generally an opponent of conspiracy theories. I think they’re a bad way of interpreting politics in the world. The biggest one that I’m nonetheless committed to is that JD Vance does in fact wear eyeliner. [Laughs] I’m pretty sure he’s doing something.
I’m not judging him, and I don’t think that’s something to be necessarily ashamed of. But I do think that’s a thing that’s happening that people are denying is happening—at the very least, when he goes on TV. This is another thing: every man who goes on TV is wearing makeup. Jesse Watters is caked up as he’s talking about how like, effeminate liberal men supposedly are. So at least on that level, I think JD Vance is doing stuff.
As far as his suits and stuff, I haven’t examined his cut in much depth, but he seems to be doing the standard politician thing. At something in Washington he’ll wear a suit, and I think he’s the kind of person who’ll go out on the campaign trail in 2028 and stand on a hay bale and do the rolled up sleeves routine.
Gavin Newsom, my governor.
I just… I don’t know that the American voter will be able to tolerate the amount of product that is in his hair.
I look at Gavin Newsom, and I see a shark—like, somebody who you’re probably gonna get scammed by. It’s the slick-back, it’s the cut of his suits, it’s his whole manner of being. I guess we’ll see what the American voter thinks of that.
Pete Hegseth.
Oh my goodness. I do have thoughts about his suits—I think his suits are too tight from what I’ve seen. They cling to his body and make him seem very constricted. So I’m not really sure what’s going on there. But he’s one of the people who’s made the leap from TV directly into politics, and I think he’s carried some of that slickness with him. He always looks like he’s just coming off some cable hit, even if he hasn’t been.
Back in the 9/11 era with Bush when I was coming up and starting to pay attention to this stuff, there was always the American flag pin on the lapel. And the way that Hegseth has perverted that concept, where he’s got the American flag pocket square, and the American flag lining in the jacket, and the American flag belt buckle, and the American flag socks, I just…
[Laughs] These are all violations, from my understanding, of the flag code. I’m not an expert, but my impression was that you were not supposed to use the American flag as willy-nilly as he and other people seem to be. I guess people don’t really care about that, and I don’t know that they should, but it’s interesting to note for a conservative.
Last one, another 2028 Dem frontrunner who’s maybe going through his own sartorial update: newly-bearded Pete Buttigieg.
Yeah, the beard stuff is really interesting. I think Pete is ok. I can’t really conjure up many thoughts about his dress, which is I guess where most politicians want to be. I have noticed in general, though, in Washington, this beard thing happening.
The person with the biggest glow up—and I think people should actually be writing about this, because it’s so remarkable—the biggest glow up I’ve seen in politics in my lifetime is Thomas Massie. He’s this Republican member of Congress, a Libertarian going up against Trump on certain things, and he’s been making a lot of media hits for that reason.
He’s like the one guy on their side advocating for the release of the Epstein shit.
That’s right. But like, he looks unrecognizable. And I think it’s kind of the facial hair, it’s kind of the whole ensemble. He got rid of the glasses…
I see this, yeah.
He looks very, very different. Ted Cruz grew a beard…
Awful beard. [Laughs] One of the worst beards in Washington.
[Laughs] But people think, for whatever reason, that it’s the thing to do now: to make yourself seem more masculine, to make yourself seem more ordinary. And I think that’s also a political shift. There was a time where, if you look back at a presidential poster, people were wearing the sideburns and the crazy facial hair, and that kinda faded out. And I guess we’re seeing a resurgence or return of beards in a real way.
Maybe we’ll see a bearded President. I don’t know if the country’s ready for that. Maybe that’s Pete. Maybe Pete’ll be a couple of first.
This has been great talking about some of the highlights (and lowlights) of DC dressing. Just a few questions, if you wouldn’t mind, about your own sense of style. How did you develop that interest?
I don’t really know where it came from specifically. I do remember that when I was in high school I was involved in Model UN, and everyone had to dress up for the conferences. I remember liking that process when a lot of people hated it. A lot of people thought it was one of the worst parts, one of the parts they didn’t like about participating. I remember always liking the process of getting suited up and choosing a tie and the whole shebang. So maybe there’s something innate about it.
As long as I can really remember, I had a passing interest in menswear, and that kinda burgeoned in college. I did not dress especially well when I didn’t have to in high school, and that gradually changed. I don’t know. I think people come to it in different ways, and I don’t know why it happened for me. But as I’ve become somebody who goes on television or appears on panels, it’s also become a kind of professional necessity to think about these things.
There’s also kind of like, a background—I don’t know if you want to call it ideological—question for me. So when I see people in Washington, or people on Wall Street, or wherever it happens to be, abandoning traditional rules of dress, foregoing the ties and foregoing the jackets—again this effort to pretend, to posture as though they’re ordinary people, but they’re billionaires—like, what does that actually mean?
I wrote about this a year, year and a half ago. There’s this photo that was taken at the G7, with all the world leaders—
Without the ties.
Without the ties.
They all look like shit!
They all looked bad. But it struck me, like: what does it mean that somebody with the power, as a U.S. President, to annihilate all life on earth looks like they hang? I feel like that person shouldn’t look like they can hang.
Right.
There’s some kind of fundamental dishonesty about that. Even in workplaces where they’ve eliminated dress codes, there are implicit codes, and implicit ways that you’re judged. People will suss out what kind of label you’re wearing even if you’re not wearing a tie. So have we really abandoned rules and made ourselves more free? Or are we actually sublimating these distinctions and differences in a way that’s kind of insidious?
Also, just for me, there’s this aspect of personal expression. I think that a tie adds something interesting to an outfit. I think it’s one more way you can express yourself and throw in some personality at a time when it seems like we’re all being pushed to abandon facets of individuality and individual creative expression for a kind of like, gray slurry society. And I want to resist that. I want to resist the Silicon Valley-ification of all parts of our life and culture, and I think that starts with being intentional about the way that you dress.
Individual flourishing. It kinda aligns with the argument of the book.
Exactly.
As a writer, how do you dress on a daily basis?
Right now [gesturing at himself] it’s kind of indicative. I’ll wear a button-down shirt, usually Oxford cloth with a button-down collar, and either jeans or slacks of some kind. That’s my everyday wear. In the summer, when I can, I’ll shift over to my collection of band t-shirts that are like, tight and packed away in a cabinet. I moved recently, and they haven’t been as accessible as they ordinarily would be.
That’s one thing about me. I really like music, I go out to concerts, I go to punk shows. When I’m out there, I’ll wear the jeans and the shirt and like, Chuck Taylors. And then I have this whole other thing where I’m going on a panel, or to some kind of event, and I’m wearing a more conventional outfit. And I like both of those things. I think that both of those things are who I am as a person.
I’ve thought, too, about how difficult it is to represent both sides of me in one outfit. I think the ways that people try to do this are usually bad. There’s a phase that I went through in college where I’d do the t-shirt and the blazer. Like, not a good idea! I don’t think it works. But it’s very hard to convey a full sense—at least for me—a full sense of all the different parts of you in the space of one particular outfit. Like, I like wearing suits. But also, I’m not—I hope I’m not—a square. And so what are the accoutrements? What are the sort of things that add a little bit of flair to whatever I’m doing?
I’ve gotten into jewelry for that reason. I’m becoming a ring guy, for better or worse. I was pleased to see Mamdani is a ring guy. It’s good to see that representation out there.
Lastly: favorite jacket?
This is actually pretty easy. I went to a wedding in India that a friend of mine was having, and we spent a little bit of time in Jaipur, which is a kind of artisan city in that region. And he took us to a couple spots where we looked at some jewelry, but also this big fabric shop. It’s this huge warehouse, they had all kinds of fabrics, and he was like, “If you talk to these guys in the back here, they’ll take your measurements and they’ll get you a jacket in less than a day.” Just have your measurements done, and they’ll bring it on the back of a motorcycle to your hotel.
Whoa.
It was crazy, and so I did it, and it’s still my favorite jacket to this day. Standard blue, a little textured, which I like. I hope we move to more textured looks in suits moving forward. But this thing’s got a little protection. I wear it all the time. You can do it with jeans, you can do it with more formal pants. It’s very, very versatile, and the fit is great—not too bunched up and tight, it’s got some room to it.
Unfortunately, it’s not a “go out and buy this” thing because you’ve gotta go to Jaipur and talk to these guys.
