Truss’s £4.50 earrings v Sunak’s £450 Prada shoes:
what do your clothes say about you?
Our wardrobes speak volumes, as Liz Truss and Rishi
Sunak’s fashion choices show. But the social signals our clothing gives out are
ever changing
Lauren Cochrane
and Ellie Violet Bramley
Sat 30 Jul
2022 17.50 BST
As Rishi
Sunak and Liz Truss square up to become the next Tory leader, it’s not just
what they say that is gaining column inches. Their sartorial statements also
speak volumes.
Last week,
stories on what the candidates wore had them in opposing corners – with vastly
differing budgets. Truss’s £4.50 earrings from Claire’s Accessories were
contrasted with Sunak’s big-budget style choices, including a £450 pair of
Prada loafers, and a £3,500 bespoke suit.
If
politicians’ clothes are always analysed – think of Theresa May’s quirky
leopard kitten heels or Barack Obama’s can-do rolled-up sleeves – the debate
around what Sunak and Truss wear comes with the backdrop of the cost of living
crisis. It’s focused around price, and the status that these items attempt to
signal. It raises the question: how do style status symbols work in 2022?
Even during
a cost of living crisis, fashion’s expensive symbols of status retain power,
and remain popular with consumers. Financial results for fashion brands were
released for the first half of 2022 last week. Revenues were up 48% at Moncler,
where a short down jacket with the bear logo on the sleeve costs £1,235. At
conglomerate LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton and Givenchy, revenues in the
second quarter of 2022 were up 19%, with luxury bags credited. A classic Louis
Vuitton Speedy with monogram is £1,030. Meanwhile, Sunak’s favourite, Prada,
saw its first half sales rise 22%. Its popular Cleo shoulder bag – with Prada
triangle logo – is £1,800.
“Clothing
has been deeply embedded with status for millennia because clothing is a social
language,” says Emma McClendon, fashion historian and author of Power Mode: the
Force of Fashion. “It’s the way we make our bodies socially legible.” The
symbols shift over time. “The way you show strength and power might be different
in 2022 than 2016 or 2012,” she explains.
Status
symbols of any moment are defined by what the dominant elite looks like. In the
digital era, that is the Silicon Valley super-rich, figures who are more likely
to be in hoodies and trainers than the suits of the traditional establishment.
Mark Zuckerberg, hardly a style icon in the conventional sense, masterminded
this shift. McClendon argues his casual outfits were “a really conscious
thumbing his nose at the suited Wall Street sense of success. Because,
ultimately, what this is about is how each given era or each given individual
is trying to define success and power.”
Sunak has
bought into the Silicon Valley definition. For photos of him working on the
budget at the height of the pandemic in 2020, he was pictured in a hoodie from
Californian brand Everlane, a choice intended to frame him as a poster boy of
contemporary success and prosperity.
Discussion
around status symbols also takes in class and who is “allowed” to wear these
coveted items. This also changes over time.
Twenty
years ago, Danniella Westbrook was on the cover of the Sun in head-to-toe
Burberry check, causing outrage – and the fashion house to reduce the amount of
check it used for fear of alienating its upper-class customer base. Daniel
Rodgers, a fashion writer who wrote about the impact of Westbrook’s outfit,
says that the look would be less disruptive now. “It’s increasingly difficult
to tell if someone’s middle class, working class or upper class because of the
way that the internet and social media blurred all of those markers,” said
Rodgers.
He does,
however, see women in the public eye still provoking outrage for stepping
outside their perceived boundaries. “Kim Kardashian is an example,” he says.
“Pre Kanye, when she was beginning to get dressed by luxury houses such as
Givenchy, people were like, ‘why is this basically Page Three girl getting
access to this?’ It really displaces a lot of people’s [ideas of] class. It’s
something so embedded within us, so for someone to transgress those boundaries,
for a lot of people, that’s offensive, [because it’s] not respecting the kind
of natural order in the world.”
Signifiers
are further complicated in that status can now come from the “cool” and
authenticity often tied up with working-class culture. “There are pop stars or
public figures trying to pick up the tropes of the working class and align
themselves with something that seems more authentic,” says Rodgers.
Rachel
Worth, author of the 2020 book Fashion and Class, says this is not new. She
points to the French revolution when “it became dangerous to be wearing
high-class fabrics such as silk. While looking casual and working class became
politically correct.”
Worth,
whose forthcoming book is focused around sustainability, also argues that
status now can come from signalling you are conscious of your carbon footprint.
“These things go in cycles,” she says. “In the 19th century, secondhand was superior,
even for working people. It’s like we’ve come back to that.”
“It is
fashionable to be a knowing consumer,” agrees Caroline Stevenson, head of
cultural and historical studies at London College of Fashion, “to know where
your clothing came from, to carefully curate your wardrobe and to show
appreciation for the more refined things in life.”
In the
public eye, this is either – as with the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex –
demonstrated through rewearing outfits or – as with Carrie Johnson – renting an
outfit. Last year, she wore a rented dress to marry the prime minister. In this
context, Sunak’s and Truss’s consumption of new items, whether fast fashion or
high end, could be seen as bad form, in the same way that Kylie Jenner’s boast
about using her private jet to travel 17 minutes between two Californian
airports triggered her branding as a “climate criminal” in a viral tweet.
McClendon
says that what the two candidates wear communicates different takes on status.
If Sunak’s are “classic symbols of wealth – the bespoke suit, the designer
duds”, Truss’s earrings are “a sort of reverse status [symbol] … There’s a
sense of status, of power within a democratic system, representing the people.”
Charlie
Porter, the author of What Artists Wear, believes Truss’s choice to wear fast
fashion chimes with her cheap thrill policies. “[She] is campaigning to cut taxes
for short-term feel-good benefit,” he says. “The promise is of more disposable
income in the face of rising fuel and grocery bills. Disposable income usually
means shopping. Shopping makes people feel good in the short term, often at the
expense of what could do them good in the long term.” Sunak’s luxury items,
meanwhile, “can be used to skewer the wealthy, while still being items of
desire and aspiration”.
He added:
“I think we’re in a really complicated moment with wealth because there’s both
the prolonged pandemic, inflation, the financial woes, but also sustainability.
That makes aspiration really complicated.”
Style
status symbols are alive and well in 2022 but, as ever, it’s far from simple.
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