Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis talks with diners at Vinton Family Restaurant in Vinton, Iowa, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. DeSantis was on a two-day trip across Iowa.
AP Photo/Thomas Beaumont
Desantis understands that fashion is incredibly important to a politician’s image.
Jimmy Carter’s love of cardigans might well have cost him a second term.
This is how fashon has impacted candidates’s chances in the polls.
What does a president look like? In the age of social media more than ever, a candidate’s appearance can make or break their chances of winning (or keeping) their office.
These days, politicians often have stylists who help them make decisions about what to wear, but the image is theirs alone. In recent years, Obama rocked a tan suit one time and faced censure from Republicans and the hoi polloi for seeming “unpresidential”; and Hillary Clinton’s rainbow of powerful pantsuits became her most enduring image.
It’s not all suits and shirts, but shoes too. Thanks to the statistically unlikely truth of American presidents being taller than average, it’s alleged that Ron DeSantis has taken to boosting his height with custom shoes in order to boost his chances at success.
DeSantis understands that fashion is incredibly important to a politician’s image, and is hoping to seem tall enough to compete with competitors like the 6’2″ Donald Trump on the campaign trail. For his part, Trump isn’t taking the threat seriously, unleashing his trademark mockery on Desantis. Will DeSantis’s (alleged) sartorial gambit have the desired effect, or precisely the opposite?
Here are a few other presidents and presidential candidates whose fashion choices had major impacts on their candidacy and career.
A portrait of James Monroe circa 1800.
Stock Montage/Stock Montage/Getty Images
James Monroe: Retro or old fashioned?
By the time James Monroe took office in 1817, he was the last of a dying breed. The final president to come from the ranks of the Founding Fathers themselves, Monroe was known for his honesty. Making cabinet appointments from across the political spectrum, he represented the desire for national unity during the Era of Good Feelings that followed the War of 1812.
Monroe was the last president to appear in breeches in portraits and in public. Breeches, trousers which buckled at the knee, were already past their prime—men in the 1810s were wearing full trousers. Though Monroe did wear trousers too from time the time, he was best known for his outdated, plain, “old style” dress, which was a way of aligning himself with the history he was a part of. Showing off his ankles signified his honest politics and how he wanted America to unite again like it had at the start.
Horace Greeley, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Horace Greeley: Neckbeard of doom
Horace Greeley is best remembered today as the editor of the New-York Tribune, a newspaper which at one point was the most popular paper in the country. He was a major force behind the settlement of the West, popularizing the slogan “Go West, young man,” in his publications, and a supporter of radical reforms and movements like temperance, worker’s rights, and abolition.
A lifelong eccentric, Greeley’s concession to fashion was that he refused to bend to it. Sporting a rotund potbelly, a fluffy white neck-beard below a clean-shaven face, and ill-fitting trousers, he was the ideal target for caricaturists. A fellow editor, who looked down on Greeley’s failure to dress according to his station, wrote: “He lays claim to greatness by wandering through the streets with a hat double the size of his head, a coat after the fashion of Jacob’s of old, with one leg of his panta. loons inside and the other outside of his boot, and with boots all bespat tered with mud, or, possibly, a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other, and glorying in an unwashed and unshaven person.”
When he ran for president in 1871 against Ulysses S. Grant, running on a somewhat contradictory platform of equal rights and reconciliation between the North and South, he was relentlessly mocked—most effectively by Harper Weekly’s resident cartoonist Thomas Nash, who portrayed Greeley as a crank, a fool, and a hypocrite. The campaign was a success—Nash’s, that is. Greeley was defeated soundly by Grant, winning only six states, and died less than a year later, affected deeply by his failure.
Hulton Archive / Stringer / Getty Images
Chester A. Arthur: Shopping addict
The 21st president Chester Arthur was not elected president, but instead was a Vice President who succeeded to office following the assassination of President Garfield in 1881, only four months into his term. Over six feet tall and dignified, Arthur had become increasingly fashionable as his political star rose, and by the time he became Vice President had begun avoiding all his old friends and spending more time with political and fashionable elites.
When the news came that Garfield was dead, many worried that Arthur would be more committed to looking good than he would to being a good president. Known as a dandy and a man about town, he earned the nicknames “The Dude President”— “dude” at that time was a slang adjective meaning “showy”— “Elegant Arthur” and “The Gentleman Boss.” He loved silk scarves and big hats, and his friends reported that he kept more than 80 pairs of trousers in his closet and would change his outfits up to several times a day.
Gore Vidal called him “the most fastidious and fashionable president.” He spent the equivalent of $15,000 on a Brooks Brothers shopping spree to celebrate his swearing-in, and the equivalent of over $2 million on renovating the dilapidated White House to the most au courant style. Despite these priorities, he did achieve some things while in office, including establishing the Civil Service Commission and passing the first Federal immigration law, and he ended his single term surprisingly well-respected.
AP Images
Jimmy Carter: Cardigan crisis
Jimmy Carter’s folksiness was on full display two weeks after he became president in 1977, when he wore the same cardigan he’d worn to dinner on an evening fireside chat broadcast on national TV. No stylist was involved in this—it reflected Carter’s honesty, as well as being a visual tool to support the rhetoric of his speech, which urged Americans to conserve energy, perhaps by wearing a sweater instead of turning on the heat.
Carter continued to rock the cardigan throughout his term as President, supporting his image as a man of the people, casual and cozy. But by the time he went up for re-election amidst the Iran hostage crisis and increasing inflation, no amount of homespun knitwear could boost his chances.
Ronald Reagan’s celebrity image and Hollywood-perfect suits and ties won in a landslide victory over Carter’s knitwear and generous, liberal approach to the presidency. Would he have won if his image had been more of a match for Reagan? Probably not, but the contrast certainly didn’t hurt Reagan’s chances.