Financial Times Europe - 19.10.2019 - 20.10.2019

4 ★ FT Weekend 19 October/20 October 2019

Trump’s bizarre ties

mean something, and

Johnson, aping them,

is up to something

Familiar ties —

Boris’s Trumpian

neckwear

T

here are many ways a

politician, out of ambition

or desperation, might

imitate Donald Trump.

But emulate his neckwear?

Trump’s ties are awful. Shiny, cheap-

looking,often a jarring cherry red, they

dangle four or five inches too long, with

the skinny end (for reasonsunknown)

Scotch-taped to the wide end.

Yet recent photographic evidence

leaves little doubt.Boris Johnson has

now adopted a Trumpian neckwear

strategy: bright crimson and hanging

well below the belt buckle.

An odd choice, superficially. On

reflection, however, the logic emerges.

What is the basic Trumpian product

that Johnson is flogging in the UK? The

idea that the establishment is a snobby,

lying, self-serving cabal working to

undermine and humiliate the real

people of the nation. And if you are

going to take a symbolic shot at the

elite, what better place to start than

the necktie, that symbol of hierarchy,

formality and urbanity?

Trump’s bizarre ties mean

something, andthe UK prime minister,

by aping them, is up to something.

Trump’s somewhat equivocal

supporter Chris Christie reports that

the president wears his ties so long

because it makes him look slimmer.

This is right — in at least a limited

sense. Before he became president,

I wondered why Trump wore his suits

several sizes too large. After several

years of observation, the reason has

become obvious. He is overweight,

and growing more so, and he thinks

the big suit helps conceal this. It may

or may not be a good strategy, but in

any case makes the long tie necessary.

A tie of normal proportion, worn with

the tent-like suits, would look absurdly

out of proportion.

Body type also explains why the

president, despite his eagerness tolook

like a man of the people, so rarely

dispenses with the tie altogether. His

neck is not his best feature. And the

scotch tape? Once you have that much

tie flapping around, precautions are

necessary. There could be an accident.

All this goes some way towards

explaining why Trump wears the ties

that he does — but says little about

their political significance, or why

Johnson might copy them.

Start by asking the most basic

question: what are clothes for? Not in

the practical sense

of keeping us warm,

but socially. A

friend of mine was

lucky enough to get

an answer to this

from the late and

legendary Clifford

Grodd, who for

decades headed the

high-end New York

clothier Paul Stuart.

“What matters

about a man is what

he says and what he thinks,” Grodd

told him. Good clothes direct attention

upwards, towards the head. They

should look excellent, but subtly so,

never distracting from the man.

“When someone compliments me on

my tie, I smile, thank them, then take

the tie home and cut it in half,” Grodd

told myastonished friend.

Now ask yourself this: where do

Trump’s ties — and now Johnson’s —

draw attention? The bright stripe, by

extending past the waist, sends the

eye directly to that region for which

both men have become notorious

over the years.

Grodd was so intent on sartorial

propriety that he preferred side-tabs

to belts: “I see a man in a shiny belt

buckle and I think, how vulgar — do

you want me to look at your crotch?”

For Trump and Johnson, crassness is

part of their act. Both have seen their

sexual infidelities and escapades

become public and, to date, paid no

discernible political price.

One born a multi-millionaire, the

other a pure product of the British

upper class, perhaps they are under the

impression that rejecting traditional

sartorial propriety will bring them

closer to an electorate that occupies a

social world neither have ever visited.

It is interesting to consider, from the

point of view of both politics and of

style, whether the pendulum will

eventually swing back the other way.

Subtlety of dress, of the kind that

Grodd espoused, has been in a straight-

line decline for decades, sometimes for

better and sometimes for worse. The

coarsening of our political life, in its

symbols and its rhetoric, is much more

serious — but, we must hope, more

cyclical too.

Robert Armstrong is the

FT’s US finance editor

Robert Armstrong

Style

Style

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Beauty From cryotherapy to|

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Why I’m

hooked on

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Flora photographed for

the FT by Lucy Ranson;

Below right; Harrods

Wellness Clinic; Aesop

treatment room

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I’m hooked on this facial. Even though

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Clinic,www.nydg.com

Prime Minister Boris

Johnson (left) with

President Donald Trump

in New York in September

Reuters

OCTOBER 19 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201917/ - 17:54 User:matthew.brayman Page Name:WKD4, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 4, 1