The State of the Suit in Trump’s D.C.

D.C. has long been a town of sober suits. Is the Trump administration changing all that?
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Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

The American flag can’t seem to stay out of the spotlight this year. Conservative political commentator Tomi Lahren was widely criticized for wearing it as a Halloween costume, while Colin Kaepernick and kneeling NFL players are accused of disrespecting it. Now the flag is cropping up on the inside of suits. Hill-bound politicians, Fox News hosts, and schmoozers who’ve taken up residence at the Trump International Hotel have traded in their navy- and gray-lined suits for new ones brashly lined with American flags. In a D.C. where partisans compete to see who can scream most patriotically, the American-flag-lined suit has emerged as a surefire way to blare one’s allegiance. It’s a suit that says “Merry Christmas” and absolutely never “Happy Holidays.”

The custom suit liners that have caused a stir were designed by Knot Standard, a custom menswear company with a showroom in D.C., which originally started making them for customers to wear on the Fourth of July, according to the shop’s founder, Matthew Mueller (no relation to special counsel Robert). But they became everyday wear about a year ago when someone in the Trump administration—Mueller won’t say who—purchased one and started wearing it to the office. Knot Standard has now made about 250 in the past year, dating to November 2016, up from 200 in the same time span a year earlier—but, most importantly, up one Fox News correspondent, several government employees, and presumably the former press secretary, too.

“It's at the point that I saw a photo on the front page of The Washington Post, and it was a jacket blowing open with an American-flag liner, and I didn't know we'd made it,” says Mueller. (Mueller wouldn’t confirm, but that description seems to match a photo of former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer.) Visibility on people like Spicer and SEAL Team 6 member turned Fox News correspondent Rob O’Neill has driven up demand for the liners. Mueller says they’re now worn across the government’s branches, as well as by politicians’ family members.

Patriotic suiting seeping into the nation’s capital might not be all that shocking if D.C. style weren’t so historically bland. “You don't want to be the one to stick out,” says Meredith Ascari, the D.C. showroom director for suit company Alton Lane. “[Clients] don't want to walk in and have co-workers be like, ‘Who are you trying to impress?’ ”

That means many choose to adhere to strict codes and rules: In D.C., a blue that’s slightly lighter than navy is considered “embarrassing” and too flashy, while full names, rather than just initials monograms, inside the suit are “too ostentatious,” Mueller says. Alton Lane, which has shops in D.C. as well as New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and others scattered around the South, says that 92 percent of the suits it’s sold in D.C. are either gray or blue (actually two percentage points lower than Charlottesville and Nashville). Thirty-nine percent of the suits were gray—five points higher than any other city Alton Lane sells in.

So how is it that flashy red-and-white stripes and a patch of blue filled with twinkling stars made it into a suit lining where just a full name was previously considered risqué? To understand why the liners—and a whole crop of high-end suits as well—are suddenly hot-ticket items, you have to understand how style trends work in D.C.

“As politics goes, you can develop cults of personality across any administration,” Mueller says. “There seems to be a little bit of groupthink, so if someone does it, everybody does it.” A new administration doesn’t just bring hope or change or promises or policies. It also brings new modes of dress.

When Barack Obama came into office in 2008, he brought a hip, young crowd with him, like the Pod Save America boys. In 2013, The Washington Post, in an article titled “March of the Millennials,” cited census figures to attribute half the city’s recent population growth to the age group. And the rebellious youth brought new preferences for dress with them: slimmer, more modern cuts and, without completely deserting tradition, a willingness to experiment with previously off-limits suit colors (see: Obama’s tan suit). “Now,” Mueller says, recalling the Obama era, “people are going into the White House wearing blazers and lime green linen plants. It's a different world... The city is completely different than it was in 2007.”

Trump, due to his unpopularity in the city, apparently doesn’t have the same influence. “This is a special case, because people aren't really fond of Trump,” says D.C. stylist Corey Roché. “They're not receptive to his style of dress.” But his presence hasn’t gone totally unnoticed—those in his inner circle and those hoping to gain access to it are trying to impress the new boss with a souped-up wardrobe. And they use these boring but extravagant suits to play dress-up as the stereotypical politician—an idea that Trump, who often notes that his cabinet members look straight out of “central casting,” is obsessed with.

You see this attitude most clearly among people like former Ronald Reagan staffer and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who spends lavishly on recognizable names. People like Manafort want to use their clothes to show off, but it’s less about how the jacket looks and more about the brand name inside. Mueller says the frantic competition to outspend and outdress colleagues is inspiring irrational behavior among clients. He recalls a scenario from the day before we spoke: “We had a guy who came in and said, ‘I want the most expensive thing you have from Loro Piana, and let me see the label first,’ ” he says. “The guy bought a few suits for 30 grand and walked out.”

Roché works with a conservative client who’s only recently started demanding the type of brand names that would impress anyone—like, say, the current president of the United States. “I was kind of shocked because [my client] is not normally like that,” Roché says. In the past, this client, whom Roché declined to name but described as a “higher-up” on the Hill, but not in the administration, was open to lower-end brands: Topshop, Hugo Boss, John Varvatos. Now he “wants nothing but high-end products” from Tom Ford, Gucci, and POTUS’s label of choice, Brioni. Roche attributes the new obsession to heightened pressure to dress this way. “He feels as though he needs to match his adversaries,” says Roché. “That's become the new battleground,” adds Mueller. And while more money is being spent on suits, we’re not seeing the results in terms of better style—it’s the same blacks, blues, and grays as always.

The rush for impressive name brands has led to even more formal wardrobes—gone are the lime green pants of yesteryear. According to Alton Lane’s data, the shop is selling twice as many black suits as compared to last year. “Trump International Hotel is a really good example,” Mueller says. “That is where everybody goes to have lunch or hold meetings or in some way show favor one way or the other—that place is navy blue, charcoal city. There's nothing bright and shiny in it, other than the gold on it everywhere.”

D.C.’s return to hyper-conservative suits only makes the rise of flag-lined ones that much more surprising. And while flag-lined suits are an outlier, the reason for their popularity is no different than the one that drives many other style choices in D.C.: what Mueller called “groupthink.” Mueller says he sold the first flag-decorated suit to someone in the administration as early as last November—he described him as the “maven” who kickstarted the trend. Mueller attributes the interest in the linings to our increasingly partisan and politics-obsessed climate. Knot Standard used to get plenty of requests for suits lined with sports-team logos or even family portraits, but now Mueller estimates the American flag is the most popular option by a ten-to-one margin. Before, a customer might have said, “I really, really care about my sports team,” Mueller explains. “Now the American flag kind of ranks up there.”

Like so many other once-quotidian items—Papa John’s, Keurig, L.L. Bean, New Balance, the Detroit Red Wings, tiki torches—our suits have become markers of partisan affiliation. One of the stylists in Knot Standard’s D.C. showroom compared getting the flag on the inside of the suit to putting it “on the back of my pickup truck.” The implication is clear: Getting the flag on the inside of your suit is meant to echo Trump’s America-first message. Mueller expands on the wearer’s thinking: “I want to put this inside my jacket, I want people to know that I go to lunch at the Trump International Hotel, and I want to get recognition for this.”

A flag-lined suit might seem like a small gesture, but D.C. style has long subsisted on subtle symbolism. Stylist Roché says that he works with clients who are fastidious about the type of signs they’re putting into the world with their clothes. He’s worked with clients who demand that diagonal stripes on a tie are going to the right, to signal their conservative leanings. And earlier this year Spicer’s upside-down flag generated plenty of press coverage; some conspiracists even theorized it was a secret message that all was not well inside the White House. People are certainly watching—and interpreting what they see.

Fox News correspondent O’Neill wears his flag-lined suits on television; the day we chatted, he planned to wear it with cowboy boots to a conference where he was speaking. He says he likes the suit because it’s “patriotic” and pops on television. He bristles at the idea that this is something that only plays well on a place like Fox News, but seems to highlight the divisiveness in the same breath. “I don't know,” O’Neill says. “I think that pretty much every type of person around the country—everyone's receptive to this, pretty much. They're so nice, [Colin] Kaepernick might even wear it.” He adds, “The majority of America is pretty happy with the flag, regardless of what kind of loud press you hear.”

There’s no doubt the flag-lined suits are evident of a very contemporary juiced-up patriotism. O’Neill got married earlier in this year, and his groomsmen wore the flag-lined suits. “I had a pretty famous rock star in there that wore it, too,” O’Neill says and briefly pauses before naming the pretty famous rock star. “Kid Rock was in my wedding. He dug it.”

What did he think about the suit?

“He loved it! He's patriotic as hell,” says O’Neill.

“I think he said, ’Merica.”


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