Joe Biden’s Plate Full Of Fashion

But guess who Stephen Miller thinks is the real style icon?

The New York Times often reminds readers that President Joe Biden is old, which we’d never notice otherwise. This week, the breaking news is that Biden is bold old and well-dressed.

“Joe Biden is a dapper guy,” Guy Trebay writes in “The Biden Guide to Dressing Younger.” “He always has been.”

Trebay recalls Biden’s “meet cute” with First Lady Jill Biden. He showed up for their first date dressed in a sport coat and loafers, and Jill, who’d previously dated men who wore “T-shirts and clogs,” thought, “This is never going to work, not in a million years.” (Maybe he was only wearing a sport coat and loafers. That’s a bit forward on a first date.)

Dr. Biden recalled the situation differently in a 2014 Vogue interview. Biden’s formal attire and manners made him stand out amongst Jill’s ragamuffin college classmates. After their first date, she told her mother, “I finally met a gentleman.” They have remained together and clog-less ever since.

Trebay, who is 71, keeps describing Biden as “dapper” and a “natty” dresser. Those are awesome words, but I’m not sure they make either man seem younger. Trebay claims Biden’s style “was one that sometimes skewed Gatsby,” but there are no recorded images of Biden in a pink suit.

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A Washington magazine article, published the day I was born, directly compared the 31-year-old senator and recent widower to Robert Redford’s Jay Gatsby with his “natty pin-striped suits, elegant silk ties, and black tassled loafers. He dresses rich.” This wasn’t that long after his wife was killed in a car accident, so the Gatsby reference seems a bit tasteless.

Designer Todd Snyder said the president’s “style is timeless and doesn’t have any expiration date.” Biden should put this on his campaign merch. Trebay suggests that Biden’s fashion sense reflects an active compensation for his advanced years.

“Bodies change as we age,” said Keith Dorsett, the district manager of Heimie’s Haberdashery, a venerable men’s clothier in St. Paul, Minn. All but the fittest of men are bound to experience a degree of muscle loss across chest and shoulders as they age, along with a loss of flesh across the back and postural shifts. The scale may insist that you weigh just what you did at 30. It cannot account for how some of those pounds turned into a muffin top.

Now that we’re all done giggling over “Heimie’s Haberdashery,” let’s move on to the next ridiculous passage, where Trebay laments that “we are no longer in a world where haberdasheries exist in abundance” — as if he’s writing from Downton Abbey. He claims that all “we are left with is the sad tells of aging: a sport coat with scarecrow shoulders, a sleeve drooping past the wrist, trouser hems puddling around one’s shoes.”

This article just took a very Prufrock turn.

Trebay credits Biden with having “retained the lessons picked up” at all the fancy haberdasheries, and he’s continued to “refine them even as he occupies the highest office.” Maybe you’re just not paying attention with the actual problems he’s solving, but Biden is giving his own “offhand master classes on the wardrobe tricks that distract from the inevitable predations of time.”

These “tricks” are all a masterful misdirection from Biden’s sagging shoulders, bony behind, and “aging skin.”

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

Trump, The Style Icon

The Times article is arguably just yet another entry in its ongoing “How Old Joe Biden?” series. Imagine an article during the 1992 election that went out of its way to remind readers that a presidential candidate was once compared to Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Your major takeaway is “damn, this guy’s old.”

Nonetheless, Sean Hannity and Stephen Miller still whined about the “fawning” story on Hannity’s show Tuesday, because it seems as if neither man has heard about the Streisand Effect.

Miller’s response was absurd North Korean-style propaganda about his Dear Leader Donald Trump. I’d probably advise skipping the clip and just reading the transcript below. Don’t spend your finite time on this earth looking at Stephen Miller.

“Since we’re addressing the subject of style, the most stylish president and first lady of our lifetimes are Donald Trump and Melania Trump. Donald Trump is a style icon. He changed American fashion in The Apprentice. People spent the next 10 years trying to dress like Donald Trump.”

You almost hope this is bad comedy. Miller is on the short list for attorney general in another nightmare Trump administration, but he’s clearly not far away from lying in the bath, telling his soap, “It is not I who am crazy. It is I who am mad.”

It’s true that during the early days of The Apprentice, some desperate applicants would show up at casting calls in a three-piece suit, but they were currying Trump’s favor not cosplaying as him.

“There is something fundamentally wrong about wearing a three-piece suit to an amusement park,” Liane Bonin wrote for Entertainment Weekly in 2004. “And yet hundreds of hopefuls applying for the third season of NBC’s The Apprentice … have done just that on a Friday morning in July, opting to swelter in line at the Los Angeles-area Universal Studios theme park for a chance to impress the star of the show.”

There’s a reason you don’t see the phrase “fundamentally wrong” in most Vogue fashion spreads.

Miller, who’s worn spray-on hair on live TV, ranted, “So, if anybody deserves a puff piece on their sense of style, it’s Donald Trump and the first lady.” This is classic MAGA. They believe they deserve everything and everyone else deserves nothing. They are constantly seething with resentment because the very people they hate and oppress refuse to celebrate them.

This isn’t just politics, though. The Duke of Windsor palled around with Nazis but he had a bold sense of style and was known as one of the “godfathers of fashion.” Trump is garbage who dresses like garbage. He’s a self-proclaimed billionaire whose suits don’t fit and his pants are baggier than M.C. Hammer’s. When he attended a white-tie event with members of the Royal Family, his black suit jacket was way too small. The Duke of Windsor popularized the necktie style now named after him. Trump wears his own ties way too long and attaches the back of the tie to the front with tape. That’s not fashion.

It has long bothered MAGA that their ambivalent queen Melania was a former model but no one important cared. Pretty much from the start of Trump’s term no serious fashion designer wanted to dress the not-quite-first lady. If gay men hate you, you’re not a style icon. You’re the human version of a polyester blend.

Melania was reportedly peeved that Vogue put actual style icon, trendsetter, and useful person Beyoncé on its September 2018 cover.

“Anna [Wintour] gave the September issue of Vogue cover — complete, complete, complete, everything — to Beyoncé,” she whined in a conversation with former friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff. “She hired Black photographer. And it’s the first Black photographer ever doing cover of Vogue.”

I’m sure Klan Weekly would’ve put Melania on the cover and hired a white photographer to capture that single facial expression.

Melania’s only major style moment was when she wore an ugly jacket with “I really don’t care, do u?” printed on the back on a trip to visit immigrant children her husband had separated from their families. It was intended as a jab “at the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me.” The result was tacky, cruel, but not at all stylish.

Here’s a 1974 clip of a young, dapper Biden discussing campaign finance reform with a man in a bow tie, who unlike a certain Time Lord does not look cool.

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