Donald Trump could not, in good conscience, be described as a chic man. He is not “sartorially elegant”, as the fashion designer Tom Ford has said of the current US president. He is neither trendy nor traditionally stylish. But is Donald Trump, nevertheless, a style icon?
That was the claim made by a sycophantic former aide, Stephen Miller, during an appearance on Fox News last week — one for which he has been widely panned. Miller had apparently been left incensed by a piece in the New York Times that lavished praise on “dapper” Joe Biden’s “timeless” style. It gushed: “Mr Biden gives offhand master classes on the wardrobe tricks that distract from the inevitable predations of time.”
Miller fought back. “The most stylish president and First Lady in our lifetimes are Donald Trump and Melania Trump. Donald Trump is a style icon!” he told — or rather shouted at — Fox anchor and Trump ally Sean Hannity. “He changed American fashion in The Apprentice — people spent the next ten years trying to dress like Donald Trump! So if anybody deserves a puff piece on their sense of style, it’s Donald Trump and the First Lady.”
The notion that Trump “changed American fashion” when he hosted The Apprentice is demonstrably absurd. People did not spend the next ten years trying to “dress like Trump”, and nor have they ever. Even his most diehard fans, who might emblazon their garments with Trump slogans, do not tend to kit themselves out in dowdy, oversized navy suits and TOO-long ketchup-coloured sticky-taped ties.
And yet, there has surely never been a more successful item of merchandise in US political history than the ubiquitous red “Make America Great Again” cap sported by both Trump and his legions of devotees. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former senior adviser, wrote in his memoir that sales of these caps were worth up to $80,000 per day during Trump’s first run in 2016, funding “most of the campaign’s overhead costs”. And Trump said last year that he had sold almost 2mn in total — that’s of course just the official ones at $50 a pop (you can buy unofficial ones for a few dollars).
So what is a style icon? According to Vogue, it is a person “whose fashion sense is instantly recognisable”; someone who has “never strayed” from their look, “keeping away from the hottest fashion trends. . . in favor of a more individualistic approach to dressing”. I would add a further criterion: someone who is confident in their choices and gives off the vibe of not having tried too hard.
Trump is all of these things. He has stayed far away from the hottest fashion trends. In fact, he has been dressing the same way and combing his flaxen mop over into that same wind-non-resistant hair helmet since the 1980s. When I went to a Halloween party dressed as Sarah Palin a while ago, I had to stick bits of paper with funny things she’d said on them on my jacket so people would get it (they still didn’t, alas). Dressed as Trump, I would have been unmistakable.
To miss the power and consequence of Trump’s personal brand is to miss a crucial part of his success and appeal. Part of this is about accessibility. Barack Obama — probably the best turned-out US president since JFK — looked equally at home whether schmoozing the elites of Hollywood, Davos, or DC: starry, expensive, in fashion, out of reach. Trump’s suits, on the other hand, might actually be made by Italian luxury brand Brioni and cost somewhere in the region of $10,000, but the impression they create is: I’m one of you.
And while being a Trump fan might not get you respect (or party invites from the coastal elites), what it does give you is instant membership of an unambiguous gang. The strong visuals — caps, yes, but also flags, T-shirts, jackets, bumper stickers, all carrying various in-jokes, memes and pro-Trump slogans (Let’s Go Brandon; FJB; Jesus Is My King, Trump Is My President , and so on), plus the notorious mugshot — are the glue that keeps the gang together.
Trump understands the importance of how things appear — rather than how they actually are — like no one else. I was struck by a recent interview he gave on Israel, in which he focused not on the government’s actions but on how they looked: “These . . . shots of bombs being dropped into buildings in Gaza. . . Oh, that’s a terrible portrait. It’s a very bad picture for the world,” he told Israel Hayom. “Whoever’s providing that, that’s a bad image.”
Trump lives in a TV world and he is the master of it. You might not like his “dictator chic” taste in interiors, nor his apparent contempt for decent tailoring. But he probably doesn’t care what you or the New York Times thinks. Of course he’s not stylish. But Donald Trump is, I’m afraid, a style icon.
