George Washington as Commander of the Continental Army, in the same style of uniform as he wore at the Second Continental Congress in 1775. Shocking.
Eh?
Did I hear that right?
Are Americans suddenly criticizing the dress of somebody appearing at a public function?
Oh yes, they are, and some are truly verklempt, or appearing to be. Consider Newsmax's Benny Johnson:
This ungrateful piece of sh*t does not have the decency to wear a suit to the White House -- no respect the country that is funding his survival.
Track suit wearing eastern european con-man mafia.
Our leaders fell for it. They have disgraced us all. What an incredible insult.
Oh my. An American criticizing somebody for how they dress. It's almost impossible to imagine.
I'm stunned.
I've commented on the decline on the dressing standard here quite a few times. And I do generally think that appearing in front of Congress, and being at Congress, should require formal dress.
And not just there, I'd note.
I don't know that I think that required of a man whose living under siege and who is a wartime leader of a country whose capital is within rocket range of what was thought, up until a few months ago, to potentially have the first or second most powerful military on earth.
Indeed, any rational observer of American dress has to know that Americans, generally, dress like slobs. Quite a few dress like children all the time. People toddle around in public markets dressed like their mothers just got them up for an early morning trip to the store in their pj's. People board planes in jammies. Some men wear knee pants all the time, even during the winter, choosing to affect a dashing infantile presentation in the worst weather.
And more than that, people appear at official functions poorly dressed all the time.
When I was first practicing law, as I noted here before, I didn't really have to tell witnesses how to dress in court. A while later, however, I'd get asked, and when asked I'd use the Protestant term "Sunday Best", even though I'm not a Protestant, as everyone knew what that meant. Later, however, I found that was no longer the case and I started to get lucky if people had a clean shirt.
The summer before last I tried a case in Denver in which a downtown Denver jury came in extremely informal clothing. Shorts, t-shirts, etc. Only the lawyers, the court staff, and the judge dressed up to the old standard. A couple of decades ago, this would not have occurred.
Just recently I attended a multiple day contested case hearing in which the lawyers were no longer wearing ties, something that would be a defacto breach of the old official standard that applied to us when we were first practicing. And I mean the latter. Ties were part of the official rules for male lawyers up until the time I started practicing, and they basically remain that for courtroom attire.
No, not me, I wore jacket and tie every day.
The panel hearing the matter wore formal clothes, however. Most of the lawyers, most of the time, did not. Not that they'd gone full informal, they were still wearing dress shirts and jackets, but no ties.
This is becoming increasingly common.
During the recent January 6 hearings, many of the witnesses fell well below what we would have regarded as the old standard. Not so low as the rioters, however, who were largely dressed down to the American standard.
I'd include in that dressing down, I'd note, the MAGA trucker's hat.
I'm not a trucker's cap fan, for the most part, anyhow, with some exceptions. I will wear real baseball caps from real baseball teams. Baseball caps, however, are actually not baseball caps, which have longer bills, but an evolution of them that has looked bad from day one. Thanks to the MAGA cap, now you see guys wearing sports coats and MAGA caps, which looks dumb.
Okay, I suppose we might ask if this is unprecedented? I truly don't know.
What I can say is that Zelenskyy is a wartime leader. When he was a peacetime leader, he favored dark suits, and was clean-shaven. Starting with the Russian invasion of his country, and the fighting in his own capital, he began to dress in a quasi military fashion.
He's not the first leader of a democratic country to do that. I'll omit non-democratic ones, as their leaders affecting military style dress is extremely common.
The best example is Winston Churchill who dressed eclectically frequently. We like to remember him dressed to the English standard, suit and bowler, but in actuality as he grew older he favored jumpsuits. In his visits to see FDR he wore them quite frequently, and was photographed by the press wearing them due to their uniqueness.
Churchill, who had started off his professional life as a career British Army officer, but who had official roles with the Admiralty later on, really like to dress in quasi Naval attire, even while Prime Minister, including in official meetings with the heads of foreign states.
Indeed, he truly did.
George Bush, George Bush II, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have all appeared at various times wearing various types of flight jackets, an unmistakenly military item. No, they didn't wear them in Congress, but they wore them. The two Bush's had both seen military service, as pilots, but President Obama and President Trump never did.
And let's not forget George Washington.
Washington famously appeared in Congress, as a member of the Continental Congress, that assembled to take up the problems with the Mother Country, dressed in the blue uniform of the American Continental militia officers.
We might regard that as formal wear, but that was the combat uniform of the time. Our failure to appreciate that is probably due to our inability to read the clothing of the time, but in context, quite frankly, it's shocking.
And it is pretty much what Zalenskyy did earlier this week, save for the fact that he's the besieged president of an embattled country, whereas Washington was implying that maybe the colonies ought to rebel against their established sovereign.
Oh well. The standard is reestablished. Trumpites, your call is clear. Off to Brooks Brothers to suit up, literally.
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