006 Have we hit peak sartorial diplomacy?
006 Have we hit peak sartorial diplomacy?
On what Kamala Harris has done for fashion 'tells,' Eve Babitz and the best jacket I've bought in ages.
Kamala Harris at the DNC in custom Chloe. Picture: Instagram
As a fashion journalist for many years, including the peak mid-aughts ‘look of the day’ era - I am well acquainted with sartorial diplomacy. I have analysed to the nth degree what a person of some profile or power has worn to look for clues. After-all, if you believe like I do in fashion as a form of cultural anthropology, full of ‘tells’ about who a person is and how they want to move through the world, a person’s wardrobe is rich terrain. Especially when you consider how this might fit into wider arcs about what the world values, how to get power and how to retain it. I’ve written about Boris Johnson’s shambolic style representing a disdain for regular people who’d smarten up for a big job and the time Barack Obama wore a leather jacket (look of the day!) where I really quite sagely noted at the time, “Remember when Malcolm Turnbull wore his on Q&A? It's a precarious line between looking smart and looking like you're a mild-mannered accountant one blink away from buying a very ill-advised motorcycle.”
There’s been think pieces on Brigitte Macron upending the ‘French girl’ trope by being outright sexy (as an older woman!) and the time Hilary Clinton also wore a leather jacket. Clearly I spent a good deal of the mid-aughts on the leather jacket beat. I cannot find any of the reams of articles I wrote about Michelle Obama (apart from this recent one on evolving your look), whose sartorial diplomacy was unparalleled. This included championing American designers, wearing affordable J. Crew (the sweaters), getting her arms out or wearing local designers for diplomatic occasions. Obama, who loves fashion, still has incredible fashion pull. As Lauren Sherman reported in Puck this week, the Monse - New York label founded by Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia, who also work at Oscar de la Renta - look she wore to the DNC this week has already clocked up more than 800 pre-orders for the navy vest. Add in the matching trousers and it adds up to around USD 2 million sales in a week, a life changing amount for an independent brand.
As Sherman noted, “It’s reminiscent of Michelle Obama’s early days in the White House, when she made designers like Jason Wu and Thakoon household names. It certainly speaks to her power, but I’d also like to point out that the suit has a very forgiving silhouette and would look great on pretty much anyone.”
Which brings me to vice president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As has been reported, Harris hasn’t ever wanted to use fashion as her thing. She doesn’t want to be a fashion plate, which is something a lot of women in power can relate to - fashion can be a marvellous tool for identity and value signalling, but it can be a distraction also. It comes with the job of people in power, but it’s loaded for women. Men, on the whole, can get away with a whole lot more than women can when it comes to acts of slovenliness, not championing the ‘right’ designers or having no sense of style at all.
Harris does have a sense of style. She’s found the true secret source of power - a signature look that makes her look great and that in which she not only clearly feels calm and in control, but exactly like herself. She sticks to well-cut suits and pussy bow blouses or T-shirts. As has been widely reported she often wears Chloé, now under the direction of Chemena Kamali. For those inclined, there’s criticism that she’s wearing European designers rather than American, that these clothes are too expensive for a political figure. But of course the same criticisms are not thrown at her male counterparts in navy Brioni suits. Her clothes might resist the more obvious ‘tells,’ of sartorial diplomacy, but they signal a shift for women of position and profile. As one of my favourite fashion journalists Rachel Tashjian wrote in The Washington Post,
“You wonder if the reactive, anxious response we often have to discussing what female politicians wear comes from the fact that so few of us know which clothes to put on to make us feel joyful, confident. That doesn’t mean wearing a designer suit or an Instagram-bait dress. It means that, when you are prepared — whether for a job interview, a date, the biggest performance of your life — what you have on your back gives you that extra little boost.”
The story Harris’s clothes tell is that you can wear a really good suit, or whatever makes you feel ready for anything, and just get on with things. It’s actually a major power move.
(Also if I had been doing a look of the day on the first glimpse of Kamala at the DNC I’d totally have said her suit - "coconut brown” - was also a cheeky nod to Barack Obama’s internet busting tan suit controversy. May politics return to trigger points such as this rather than, well, where we are right now.
Books
I’m just about to finish Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and it is a brutal read! Nobody touches the nerves of women’s inner lives and deepest unspoken fears quite like Ferrante.
I’m packing Coco Mellors’ new book Blue Sisters for a long flight today (and I really recommend her first novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein!).
This article marking the 50th anniversary of Eve Babitz’s cult memoir Eve’s Hollywood, is a reminder to read everything that Babitz has ever written.
Babitz once described herself as a “spy in the land of the privileged,” writing semi-fictionalised accounts of glossy, hard LA life. Her party girl ways - her sexual conquests included Harrison Ford and Jim Morrison! She famously played chess naked with Marcel Duchamp for photographer Julian Wasser! - sometimes detracted from her unsentimental incisiveness.
As her agent says in the article of the comparisons between Joan Didion and Babitz (that nude chess photo was used on Didion’s Play As it Lays) “Joan Didion was always the smart one and Eve was the sexy whatever.”
I love that her work is getting the renaissance it deserves. She died in 2021 and without knowing the real context (who knows anybody’s real context!?) her life seemed sad, in the end.
I’d rather hold onto this quote from Babitz: “What I wanted, although at the time I didn’t understand … was everything. Or as much as I could get with what I had to work with.”
Also if you want to talk about ‘It-girls,’ Babitz was it.
& Nice Things
The best thing I’ve bought lately
The Harris Tapper Tilmans blazer
Recently I bought a boxy (and foxy) little collarless white jacket from Mango and I got so many compliments when I wore it this week.
I don’t love it quite as much as my Harris Tapper Tilmans blazer that I wear to death. But I have come to the realisation that a collarless jacket is exactly the thing you need when you want to feel polished but not too blazer-y. It feels a little bit French girl, forever the goal, because it’s just insouciant enough and it looks as good with jeans as it does a midi or a mini.
As an aside, I’m trying to learn French with the goal of one day being one of those old ladies who goes to the South of France for language immersions and it’s very hard and humbling! I posted to Instagram questioning how I was ever to learn French grammar when I was barely taught English grammar in school and was inundated with responses. I spoke about it with one of my former editors last night and he said perhaps we do understand the rules of grammar intuitively, even if we couldn’t name a dangling participle, or whatever. I found this comforting. Also sometimes I think you can place too much attention on the technicalities and the tools and forget the important part is the ideas, the creativity, what you have to say. None of which is helping me with my French. At this point I will never progress past asking if someone has a dog.
Annie xx