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. 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.
In our conversation, Guy analyzes how the casualization of clothing generally has resulted in a laissez-faire attitude among politicians, why Cary Grant looks more put together than today’s young “alpha males,” and whether we’ll ever elect a hypebeast president (spoiler: probably not in our lifetimes). Over the past 50 or so years, menswear has become much more casual. Can you explain how that happened? Many people think of the casualization of menswear as a postwar phenomenon, but the casualization of menswear goes back a very long time.
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