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energies working toward becoming
student president of the Institute of
Politics, which hosts visiting politi-
cians, Beltway journalists, and other
dignitaries up from Washington, D.C.
“I was definitely interested in politics,
and maybe even in pursuing it, but I
wouldn’t have imagined that politics,
for me, would wind up being local,”
he tells me as we cruise past the tiny
South Bend airport. “I would not have
guessed that I’d repeatedly pass up invi-
tations to run for Congress while may-
or. At the time, I would have viewed
Congress as a higher office.” He adds,
pointedly, “I no longer think that’s nec-
essarily the case.”
After graduating, he spent a year
working on political campaigns, in
Phoenix and the nation’s capital, while
applying for a Rhodes Scholarship. He
used it to enroll at Pembroke College,
Oxford, and its program in Philosophy,
Politics, and Economics, the traditional
starting gate for high-flying British pol-
iticians. After, he joined McKinsey &
Company, found the grind unfulfilling,
worked for the Obama campaign as a
canvasser (he had previously turned
down a job on Obama’s 2004 Senate
campaign in order to do work for John
Kerry’s presidential run), and joined
the Navy Reserve—inspired, he claims,
by a painting of his great-uncle in uni-
form. In 2010, he ran for Indiana state
treasurer and lost. The following year,
he ran for South Bend mayor and won.
One of Buttigieg’s strengths as a
candidate is that he is seen as being
able to speak to putative Trump vot-
ers: the struggling heartland working
class that wants change from a re-
mote-seeming government. “I think,
clearly, Democrats are concerned,
and focused on, How do you reclaim
Pennsylvania? How do you reclaim
Michigan and Wisconsin?” Cook says.
“Somebody who can win an election
in Indiana—well, maybe that conveys
over.” A concern, though, is wheth-
er he can mobilize women and voters
of color. Buttigieg has been haunted
by a decision he made, during his first
year as mayor, to fire the South Bend
police chief, who was under F.B.I. in-
vestigation but who was also the first
African American in the role. As we
pass the remains of the Studebaker
factories, I ask him what he’d say to
those who argue that yet another white
male candidate isn’t what Democrats
need in this year of all years. “I’m sen-
sitive to that,” he says, stiffening at the
wheel. “In the end, I think we just bring
whatever identity we have to the table.
Mine is of a young, gay, first-generation
white veteran mayor.” He holds that his
policies can be broadly empowering.
Buttigieg has been a vocal opponent of
gerrymandering, voter-I.D. laws, and
other ballot-box practices thought to
help President Trump’s odds. “If you
stand to be at a disadvantage when more
people vote, then the problem isn’t with
the voters,” he has said.
And he is not without advantages
of his own. Despite being a small-city
mayor, Buttigieg had an elite path out of
South Bend that left him well connected,
and he enjoyed warmth from the last
Democratic White House long before
throwing his hat into the presidential
ring: In a late-2016 New Yorker inter-
view, President Obama dropped his
name, seemingly out of the blue, as a
rising star—Buttigieg ran for D.N.C.
chair the following year—and former
White House adviser David Axelrod en-
thusiastically blurbed his memoir. When
I ask Buttigieg how he sees his position
as being continuous and discontinuous
with the last Democratic president, the
mayor talks admiringly about President
Obama’s scrupulous, analytical nature.
“He ran a White House that I would de-
scribe as extremely disciplined,” Buttigieg
says. “He was not afraid to be intellectual
and also was very wise, I would say, in
the way he handled the historic nature
of his presidency. I think the biggest
differences come not from individual
difference”—he pauses—“and more
from differences in our moment.” The
Obama administration, he argues, did
the best it could while facing a highly ob-
structionist Senate and House. With the
House majority now Democratic and the
country’s mood changing, he contends,
there’s room to push big ideas through.
“The next Democratic president, no
matter what their disposition, is just
going to be operating on very different
territory than Obama could, with a lot
more potential,” he says, in the dream-
iest tone I’ve heard from him yet. “The
next presidency could, I’d say, define an
era in no smaller way than either FDR
or Reagan.”
We have reached West Washington
Street, and Buttigieg glides his Chevrolet
into a parking spot opposite the building
where his campaign keeps its local office.
The tour is over, and the mayor looks
pleased. As he leaves the car, another
vehicle zooms past, and a young wom-
an calls cheerily out the window, “Hey,Mayor Pete!” The mayor—now a candi-
date for president—whirls around and
tries to answer her before she goes. @THE MAN WHO STYLED
THE WORLD
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 113
Abloh chose the name Off-White to
remind him that nothing is either black
or white, male or female, mass market
or aspirational: It’s often both—or nei-
ther. “I’m going to build a brand that’s
related to me and my generation,” he
told himself six years ago, when Off-
White began, ever so humbly, in Milan.
In high school, he says, “I could sit at
any lunch table: the sports kids or the
skate kids smoking weed or the preppy
kids. I liked being in the middle, to veer
in the space in-between. It’s almost like
an unpoliced land. That’s why I love the
millennial spirit. They’ll make an Insta-
gram where they’re Goth, and the next
week they’re dressing Harajuku. That’s
freedom. One of the biggest premises in
my practice is that it’s OK to contradict
yourself; it’s human.”
It is the day after his Off-White show
in Paris, and we are now at Louis Vuit-
ton HQ on rue du Pont-Neuf, sitting in
nearly the exact same spot where, eight
years ago, I interviewed another Amer-
ican designer in Paris known for an ex-
pansive, hyperarticulate view of fashion:
Marc Jacobs. At the time, Jacobs was
closing in on the end of his triumphant
seventeen-year reign as Vuitton’s cre-
ative director. Indeed, Abloh’s desk is
precisely where Jacobs’s was.
When Abloh was in his late 20s and
mostly DJing and “nerding out on the
details” of what he calls “lifestyle”—still
a consumer, not yet a creator—he saw
the 2007 documentary Marc Jacobs &
Louis Vuitton. “That was the very mo-
ment when I started to pay attention to
fashion,” he says. “Back then I knew of
Fashion with a capital F, as this thing
that happened in far-off places that was
intellectual, high culture, not for me, not
for the masses. I thought of fashion as
hard to describe—and it was supposed
to be hard to describe, because there
should be that barrier for it to feel im-
portant.” And then: “Marc Jacobs—an
American—came along and made his
own articulation of high and low and
somehow broke down the mystique and
the barrier. That’s my North Star.”
Delphine Arnault, the director and
executive vice president of Louis Vuit-
ton, is just a few years older than Abloh.
She is the CONTINUED ON PAGE 148