Voluminous though it is, our daily regimen of news-reading is not so far-ranging that it routinely takes us to the fashion pages. The dress code is rather lax here in Kansas, and we’re not the foppish sort, so we normally don’t see any need to be au courant on haute couture.
A high-minded obsession with the presidential campaign recently led us to the style sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post, however, as writers for both of those august publications have weighed in on the sartorial sensibilities of the presumptive Republican nominee and his running mate. Bearing in mind the Bard’s admonition that “the apparel oft proclaims the man,” we thought it would be worthwhile to learn what a more studied eye might discern from the Republican ticket’s togs.
Katherine Boyle of The Post was more or less complimentary regarding Mitt Romney’s attire at a recent a campaign event, approvingly noting that with his “carefully rolled sleeves and an ice-blue tie,” Romney “looked polished, the way presidential candidates often do.” She spent the rest of the article considering the appearance of Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, and was considerably less generous in her appraisal.
“But Ryan (Wis.) appeared rumpled, slightly sloppy for a vice-presidential candidate,” Boyle wrote. “As if he’d flown in hours before and mistakenly picked up someone else’s suitcase. His starched, white shirt bunched at his stomach. His dark jacket drooped, better suited for a man of the cloth than a man on a presidential ticket.”
Having likened Ryan to a man of the cloth, perhaps the most damning insult a Washington Post fashion writer can sling at a person, Boyle continued for several paragraphs in a similarly snarky vein. She sneered that Ryan “seemed oddly unconcerned about the clothes he wore,” quoted the president of a “Washington-based media and image-consultant company” saying that Ryan looked like “a rumpled, think-tank policy wonk sort of guy,” and twice complained that Ryan’s suit seemed oversized.
The author also speculated that Ryan’s gauche wardrobe was a “strategic choice,” ingeniously calculated to endear him to the similarly fashion-challenged rubes out there in flyover country who might suckered into voting against Obama. Being rubes from flyover country ourselves we took a long look at the photograph of Ryan accompanying the article and found no fault with his suit, which looked very much like the same one that politicians have been wearing for the past several decades, so she might be on to something. Then again, we are also “oddly unconcerned” about the clothes Ryan wears, and are far more impressed by the evidence that he actually is a think-tank policy wonk sort of guy.
Meanwhile, back at The New York Times, fashion writer Cathy Horyn seemed more concerned with what lies beneath Ryan’s baggy clothes. Describing the ticket as “cute Republican dudes,” Horyn quoted Politico’s description of Ryan’s “dreamy bedroom eyes” and “buff” body, noted the TMZ web site’s frantic quest for a shirtless photograph of his famously chiseled physique, and predicted that Ryan would figure in the “sex dreams of Republicans, who apparently, unlike Democrats, need this kind of thing.”
We were surprised to learn that Democrats have no need of sex dreams, especially after Horyn’s own newspaper ran a famously lurid opinion piece by a Democrat who explicitly describing her recurring dream of the president emerging from a hot shower, but the remainder of the article suggests that Horyn has many odd opinions regarding the two parties. She also disparaged the bagginess of the vice presidential candidate’s clothes, enlisting a colleague to speculate that Ryan was trying to compensate for an insecurity about his masculinity by choosing a roomier outfit, and found him too sloppy to “bring youth and vigor and a kind of Ayn Rand boldness to the G.O.P.” In a rare nod toward bipartisanship Horyn complained that “the tightfitting ideology of politicians nowadays is reflected in their narrow clothing choices, Democrats and Republicans alike,” but she ends with a gushing tribute to the fashion sense of Hillary Clinton, and one gets the distinct impression she considers being a Republican the most appalling fashion faux pas of them all.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 