Fashion as a Political Modality

Somehow, the Barbour jacket is a symbol of a certain kind of person with a certain kind of personal politics, halfway between aristocratic and bourgeois, traditionally conservative until life forces its wearer to wear it until broken in manual work (and become populist) or to ditch it for a more appropriate dress style in government …

To write about a topic as… superficial, so to speak, as fashion and clothing could seem beneath the capacities of any great essayist, political philosopher, or simply of any good and well-read thinker.

Fashion, despite being a multibillion-dollar industry in our age of consumer capitalism, tends to be forgotten, if not demeaned, in the high intellectual circles of academia and politics, but not to the point it becomes irrelevant. Rather, it becomes an introspective, even esoteric element of the struggle for power and authority.

For those familiar with such intricacies, some names and references should come to mind with no trouble, such as Martin Greenfield, Savile Row, and, interestingly, Michael Anton.

The first could be a bit forced since Martin Greenfield is known as the tailor-to-go of many American Presidents, whereas the second might be easier to understand since Savile Row is the street in London known for hosting a number of high-end bespoke suit boutiques and tailor workshops.

But Michael Anton? What does the former Trump administration officer have to do with fashion, and more importantly, why should we care about it?

For starters, Michael Anton is not merely anyone in the political philosophy sphere in the United States: a senior fellow at the (West Coast Straussian) Claremont Institute, which frequently publishes his tirades in their Claremont Review of Books (both under his own name and pseudonymously), Anton also worked in the financial sector for Citigroup and Blackrock, as well as a speechwriter for for Rupert Murdoch, Rudy Giuliani, Condoleezza Rice and, according to some, even George W. Bush himself.

The student of Harry V. Jaffa ended up appointed by Donald Trump to the National Security Council as his Deputy Assistant for Strategic Communications, a short stint in the big leagues before returning to his natural element, education, with a dual job as a tenured professor at Hillsdale College’s DC grad school campus and as a member of the National Board for Education Sciences that oversees the US Department of Education.

In addition to this outstanding list of achievements, Michael Anton, who not only is a top scholar of Niccolò Machiavelli, also managed to publish a book on men’s fashion around 2006, before his shot at politics. Under the pseudonym of Nicholas Antongiavanni, he parodied Harvey C. Mansfield’s translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince and tried to offer his aesthetic advice to John Elkann, the leading scion of the Italian Agnelli family that owns and controls a large share of the Italian (and North American) automobile industry through their stakes in Fiat Chrysler.

This little book, The Suit, has become since then a guilty pleasure and a working guide on men’s fashion for many others in business and politics in the United States, and among those inspired by it, we could count the former president of the Mises Institute, Jeff Deist, who in 2022 gave a talk on this very topic to a select group of young fellows, including myself, on how to dress well on a budget.

I remember clearly having talked to Jeff after his lecture and mentioning Anton’s book, with which he indeed was familiar, and from which he took a couple of lessons he adapted for us in his presentation.

Of course, the perspectives of Anton and Deist differed in many senses, for Anton was trying to promote the ‘higher’ political virtue of Dandy-ism for the merchant-princes of today, whereas Deist was merely guiding a couple of young and talented, albeit hippy-ish, economics and politics scholars to better their appearance and improve the overall image of the Austrolibertarian movement as one of well-adjusted professionals.

We could mention that both the Claremont and the Mises Institutes, under their respective influence of Anton and Deist, adopted a more populist approach in their strategy, getting closer to Trumpism in the US and insisting, at several points, on the merit of secession in case the American Left were to retake power at a federal level.

But this essay is about fashion more than about politics, so with this mention, we should consider instead other issues that are more relevant to our topics, such as dandiness and the general aesthetic men have in modern society, irrespective of their politics.

I begin with the mention of dandiness, or Dandy-ism, for it is deeply linked to XIXth century Romanticism, and even if some precedents of such phenomenon are found in both the macaroni fashion of powdered wigs and a certain bourgeois aesthetic of the musk-perfumed, street mobs of the Thermidorian Reaction during the French Revolution (appropriately called Muscadins), it really gets into its own with the advent of the Napoleonic Age, with figures such as Marshal-King Joachim Murat and poet-revolutionary Lord Byron noted for the emphasis they put on their personal fashion in their respective lives and careers.

The Muscadins, in particular, represented a reactionary trend to the fashion adopted during the Revolution, for their well-maintained appearance was a direct contrast to that of the Jacobin sans-culottes, which they opposed, since they were the thugs of Robespierre, the fanatical tyrant the moderate faction they supported had just deposed.

Napoleon’s second-in-command Murat, later on, took on the style of the French jeunesse dorée (the aristocratic golden youth that survived the Revolution) despite not being of noble descent and ended up becoming King of Naples, his many portraits made during his stellar rise under his brother-in-law’s protection painting an image of a well-dressed officer with a knack for dashing hussar uniforms to distinguish himself both as a horseman in battle and as a statesman in court.

As for Lord Byron, his dandy-ish tendencies are more documented among his acquaintances than for himself since many of his friends, such as the Comte d’Orsay, copied the double-breasted sportscoat and top hat style of George Bryan “Beau” Brummell, the original Dandy who defined the general masculine aesthetic during the regency and reign of George IV (of whom Brummell was also a friend).

In any case, such links between men’s fashion and politics are not new, but they seem to represent a particular expression of the dialectical forces in history, with styles getting adopted and rejected in consideration of the power forces at play.

Other examples in history could include the Phrygian cap adopted during the same French Revolution, the fez imposed from North Africa to the rest of the Ottoman Empire in the XIXth century, the expeditionary uniforms of the colonial Belle Époque later hijacked by the many fascist movements of the 20s and 30s (with Hugo Boss dressing the German Army during that time), and the leather jackets popularized by James Dean into what became the greaser movement during the 50s.

But back to Michael Anton’s The Suit and Jeff Deist’s advice on professional clothing, there is an interesting trend on how the modern Right in the United States has decided to present their men in the trenches of political and business war, and that is with the relatively simple, yet elegant combination of the classic suit.

Other, less formal variations of the overall ‘rightist’ attire also include Hawaiian shirts and a non-threatening ‘business casual’ look that lacks symbolism but still represents the last shades of order from the conservative paradigm of life after World War II in America.

There is, of course, the counterpart in the Left, both domestic and foreign, with many differing styles from the guerrilla look to the Mao suit and, lately, to the corporate-approved look of flannel shirts and jeans that make a parody of the working attire of blue-collar workers.

Men’s fashion, as such, is not simply the cloth that covers our bodies from heat and cold in the open but is, by all means, a statement of our political inclinations in an increasingly polarized world where our external appearances define leanings and loyalties from the most simple visual cues.

In our (more or less) global market economy, options for menswear are as diverse as their combinations can be. Every piece of clothing can be found in cheaply mass-produced and finely crafted and tailored versions. Clothing styles, thus, depend not only on different wealth levels among individuals and populations but also on personal and cultural taste, which, by default, can say more about the actual status of a person than the number of their bank accounts.

For our titular political dandy, Michael Anton, the mark of class in power and industry is the bespoke suit tailored to the specific people they are made for.

In his many essays and interviews on the topic, Anton even goes as far as to draw a certain genealogy of fashion styles adopted by US presidents, commenting on their respective rises and falls according to whether they were true to themselves by getting into the world of custom-made, high fashion, his favorite examples being those of JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, and W. (Bush Jr.), and when it comes to style, he also favors two particular national traditions, the British of Saville Row bespoke tailoring, and the Italian of the Milanese fashion houses that dressed the dear prince of his sartorial mirror, Gianni Agnelli, grandfather and predecessor of the aforementioned John Elkann.

He does not seem to care too much about the actual looks of the clothes as long as they represent this idea of the well-dressed dandy, the “stylish dresser“, that varies “the modes of his clothing, and, while always avoiding those which should not exist at all, he judiciously mixes models, colors, and patterns to effect a less studied and more nonchalant look.”

But Anton, like many other aesthetes of his kind, also proudly leans into some of the most problematic aspects of dandyism, that is, merely being a “Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress…” as wisely put by Thomas Carlyle in his novel Sartor Resartus.

Now, the issue may not be very well, only about the fact of dressing well for the sake of dressing well, for this practice reveals a larger socioeconomic reality that many other up-and-coming dandies and aesthetes may come into: dressing well is ridiculously expensive.

I am not even talking about bespoke suits when it comes to prices, but even about chain store, prêt-àporter clothing, which, when cheap usually means low quality but easily replaceable.

A solution for such a problem seems to be lying around in Jeff Deist’s advice: that is, to find good quality clothing that will mean their actual costs in time. Or at least that will keep their subjective value at the moment of purchase up to the end of their service life.

Maybe behind his reasoning was an unspoken reference to the Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness, which states that poorer people stay in poverty given that the products they buy, especially when it comes to clothing, are indeed cheaper but subpar, quality-wise, thus needing more frequent replacement that adds up into higher expenses in the long run compared to more expensive clothes that are bought at higher costs at first but need no replacement for a longer time, thus cutting replacement costs in the same time span.

After all, Deist belongs to the Austrian School tradition in economics, and one of their tenets is the idea of time preference, the valuation of a certain good in the present compared to the future and, with it, the cost opportunity of acquiring it in different moments.

A coincidence in both Anton’s and Deist’s outlook on men’s fashion is the reference to Brooks Brothers as a common brand for formal wear, while at first demeaning it as not dandy-ish enough and looking at it approvingly for its formality and long-term use quality. And yet, Bro Bro is not a brand affordable for everyone, at least not outside the circles these two belong to.

***

At this point, I could mention my own journey into men’s fashion and aesthetics as one that mirrors pretty much everything else in my life: through intergenerational learning and tradition and the comparative method.

I remember clearly the different kinds of suits, both bespoke and shelf-bought, my father was wearing from when I was a toddler to when I graduated college, and how with time, he slowly switched to a more relaxed everyday look with jeans, chinos, and tweed sports jackets, as well as his weekend outfits, from branded tracksuits when we used to do sports together to the more practical Hilfiger windbreakers we both still wear every now and then. My dad, as the pragmatic man he was and still is in these aspects, usually left his clothing choices to my mom, who was more knowledgeable about brands, textures, and styles.

It should be no surprise, then, that the styles I’ve adopted in my life have been deeply influenced by their own perspectives on fashion, perspectives that were born of their many work travels during the late 80s and early 90s.

If I were to put a tag on them, on us, when it comes to our fashion, I would call us preppy. Or posh, as a former girlfriend of mine used to call me. Pastel colors, knitted sweaters, polo shirts… The idea of what we used and still wear was to look serious. Not elegant per se, nor particularly wealthy, but serious. A high contrast to what most of our Hispanic American countrymen would try and less apparent than what our Italian fellows would show. Very American, in a sense. Or no-nonsense, as it could be better put.

But there was not a political or ideological meaning in our appearance, not at first, anyway. We tried to look like serious people: a serious professor, a serious lawyer, a serious journalist, a serious wife, a serious husband, a serious child, and a serious student. We showed our faces and showed our clothes as seriously as anyone with clean minds and clean hands could do.

But as soon as the culture wars began to affect us during my early adolescence, our clothing became a statement: what used to be a smart look for my parents soon took regal and religious undertones, and so did mine. My dad wearing suits was a direct challenge to his uncaring Marxist colleagues at work and the progressive parents of other kids at my school, and my mom wearing high fashion and crosses in her jewelry became an aesthetic scolding to the women in her circles. We didn’t change, but our circumstances did and the clothes we wore took meanings we did not expect at first but that we embraced at last.

My first aesthetic rebellions began as such: one year I tried to be a t-shirt, jeans, and hoodie-wearing teenager, but that did not last long, and soon enough I was back at polo shirts and chinos, a look I kept in college after my prep school hiatus in which as part of our uniform we had to wear our bespoke suits with the school’s coat of arms on the breast pocket every Monday. I now look back at those years with fond memories.

By the end of that period in high school, I began to find my own style in unexpected ways, such as the beige linen suit I wore during many Model United Nations debates and for my school government campaign, which has followed me until now, and the classic navy sports jacket and khakis that many other preps have used in history.

A later aesthetic rebellion had me rejecting blue jeans altogether as a reaction against the herd mentality, fully embracing chinos as my everyday choice of pants due to their easier compatibility with more formal styles.

But as I entered grad school, I found other, more ‘local’ fashions that, if not incompatible with the general style that had been in my family until then, were certainly different and, moreover, were statements themselves. But not of reactionary opposition to the status quo, as we used to do with what we wear, but of a certain belonging to specific communities.

The first of these fashions is the waxed cotton jacket, commonly called a Barbour jacket by the quintessential brand that makes them. I had known about these jackets for a while before I got my first one, but the moment I acquired my own, I realized the many paradoxes of this military-looking jacket, usually used in hunting trips, being a central piece of the preppy fashion style.

Maybe because it is particularly suited to a (New) England autumn weather, which makes it useful both for the campus of an Ivy League university and for the forests surrounding the estates of the families that send their kids to Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Or maybe because I soon realized this was also the kind of jacket Ernesto ‘Che‘ Guevara wore during his motorcycle trip around South America before he became a hardened guerrilla revolutionary.

It was also a common topic of discussion I had with an investment banker acquainted with my family back in Latin America when he saw me wearing one, and later as we shared the maintenance ritual of re-waxing the jacket every now so to keep it in good waterproof shape.

Somehow, the Barbour jacket is a symbol of a certain kind of person with a certain kind of personal politics, halfway between aristocratic and bourgeois, traditionally conservative until life forces its owner to wear it until broken and worn off in manual work (and become populist) or to ditch it for a more appropriate dress style for government or business, that of the classic suit and tie (and get their personal politics challenged and re-shaped by the implacable forces of the urban, financial world).

Then, there’s a different kind of jacket, or janker to be more exact, that I found in Europe as I arrived to pursue my studies in the Old World.

I had known about this style of jacket for a while as well, with the mandarin collar and the Alpine wool (loden) cloth, and while they were apparently strictly Oktoberfest clothing, I soon found that they were also for everyday use in Central Europe, or at least, in Austria and Bavaria, where they are traditional garments.

The trachtenjanker, as I found they were called, was not only a local fashion but also a signal for people of a certain religious quality to find each other in a country (and a region) increasingly polarized by politics.

It should be no surprise, then, that in the same way Dr. Marten boots are a staple of the punk and especially of the skinhead movement (in its apolitical sense, without any far right nor far left connotations) for their working-class aesthetics, the trachtenjanker, in a sense, has become the quintessential piece of clothing in the wardrobes of European royal pretenders, proscribed nobles and traditionalist Catholics, who associate it with the overall vibe of the fallen Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Both my Barbour and my trachtenjanker were hard finds, particularly considering the means I disposed to get them as both a student on a scholarship and a young professional at the start of the corporate ladder at the moment I acquired them.

But somehow, these two jackets represent a political aesthetic truer to my life experiences than whatever a bespoke suit could show, despite Michael Anton’s insistence on the latter as a sign of modern dandyism. They also follow more closely Jeff Deist’s advice on good quality clothing, not specifically tailored, but meant to last and maintain its value for long enough.

I remember having a friend, a fellow law student, back in Latin America tell me that my Hilfiger windbreakers gave me a certain look similar to the ones some Mafia, Camorra & ‘Ndrangheta crown princes had in contemporary movies and series such as Gomorrah. This was certainly not the first time we’d been associated with such dangerous groups on a mere aesthetic similarity, as my dad was both thought to be a CIA agent in university and a mob boss by my high school chaplain due to his preference for dark suits over less formal clothing.

I wonder what my friend’s reflection on me wearing a Barbour or a trachtenjanker could be. Maybe more aristocratic or simply outright pretentious. But unsurprisingly, they are my favorite pieces in my wardrobe. They are particularly unique, even if not bespoke, for they are rare and represent belonging to groups not anyone partakes in. Something of an open secret, but a secret nonetheless.

The old saying asks if the monk makes the habit or if, the other way around, the habit makes the monk. I consider that both ways are right: the monk and his habit are in symbiosis, for the monk cannot be a monk if not in a habit, and the habit marks the quality of the monk as such.

The clothes we wear show our external appearance, among other things, but also mirror our internal choices. The pieces we pick, the fabrics they are made of, the combinations, and the styling all come to a representation of an internal order that says more about the person wearing the clothes than about the clothes themselves.

Fashion also has a communitarian sense: our clothes mark a shared group identity, and they serve to identify our fellow group members in the open and in the wild. They mark our allegiances and our loyalties to our platoons, our places, our times, and our beliefs.

In an age such as ours, Michael Anton’s approach to the bespoke suit as a mark of the higher aesthetic virtue reminds me of Russell Kirk’s take on eccentricity as a conservative value (one of pure individualism, making it more liberal than communitarian). But our age also makes such eccentricities a privilege fewer people can afford nowadays.

I am not an opponent of the bespoke suit, and for instance, I think it’s a much-needed eccentricity to be acquired at the right moment as a rite of passage in adult life. But then again, such a luxury needs to be well-earned, which makes it an incentive, rather than a mere garment, and rather an expensive one, to wear. Many people might never be able to achieve such an objective.

The solution, if so, to this problem lies in authenticity, for being genuine with our personal aesthetics reflecting our internal politics is not really a matter of expensive taste, but rather of good style according to the most basic principles of aesthetics, that is, of order and complementarity, which, ultimately, means nothing but a personal application of the idea of beauty to our personal appearance.

So be it.

Join the Club

Like this story? You’ll love our monthly newsletter.

Thank you for subscribing to the newsletter.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later.