Growing up in London in the 00s, I was surrounded by suits. On City boys darting around the Square Mile. In Hyde Park, where Arab dads in baggy suits kicked footballs with their children in honeyed light. At school, where cheap grey suits were our uniform. The suit has always been a costume of seriousness that signals powerfulness and performance; all the things I was apparently supposed to want if I ever intended to become a \u201cman\u201d. But until recently, my generation seemed to wear them less and less, and they had all but disappeared from my consciousness.<\/p>\n
Then came the newly elected New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who was sworn in at a private ceremony dressed in a sober black overcoat, crisp white shirt and an Eri silk tie from New Delhi-based designer Kartik Kumra of Kartik Research<\/a> \u2013 styled by US fashion editor, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. Buoyed up by an ingenious campaign<\/a>, he caught the imagination of the world like no other New York mayoral candidate of recent times. But whether he was throwing his hands in the air at a hip-hop club<\/a> or at a premiere party for the film Marty Supreme, one thing on his campaign trail rarely changed: he was almost always in a suit. Loosely tailored, modern with soft shoulders, yet conventional and ordinary, his is a typically middle-class millennial suit \u2013 well, as typical as it can be for a generation that rarely bothers to wear one.<\/p>\n Mamdani at the Marty Supreme premiere afterparty with Odessa A\u2019zion, one of the film\u2019s stars, on 16 December 2025. Photograph: John Nacion\/Variety\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cThe suit is in this weird position,\u201d says men\u2019s fashion writer Derek Guy (AKA Twitter\u2019s <\/strong>\u201cthe menswear guy\u201d) over the phone from California. \u201cIt\u2019s been dying a slow death since the end of the second world war,\u201d with the real dip arriving in the 1990s with \u201cthe rise of business casual\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s basically only worn in the most formal locations: weddings, funerals, to some extent, court appearances,\u201d Guy says. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of like the kimono in Japan,\u201d in that it \u201cessentially represents a tradition that has long ceded from daily life.\u201d Many politicians \u201cwear a suit to say: \u2018I am a politician, you can trust me. You should vote for me. I have authority.\u2019\u201d But while the suit has historically signalled this, today it performs authority in the hope of winning public confidence. As Guy explains: \u201cSince we\u2019re also living in a liberal democracy, politicians want to seem relatable, because they\u2019re trying to get your votes.\u201d In many ways, a suit is just a subtle form of drag, in that it performs masculinity, authority and even proximity to power. Or at least how politicians are expected to look.<\/p>\n In many ways, a suit is just a subtle form of drag in that it performs masculinity<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Guy\u2019s words stayed with me. On the rare occasions I need a suit \u2013 a wedding or formal occasion \u2013 I dust off the one I bought from a Tokyo department store (from high-street brand Global Work, which is like Gap) several years ago. When I first picked it up off the rack, it made me feel sophisticated and expensive, but the slim cut now feels pass\u00e9. I imagine this will be only too familiar for many of us in the diaspora whose parents come from somewhere else, particularly global south countries.<\/p>\n Richard Gere in American Gigolo (1980). Photograph: Photo 12\/Alamy<\/p>\n It\u2019s no surprise the working man\u2019s suit has fallen out of fashion. Like a pair of jeans, a suit\u2019s <\/strong>silhouette goes through cycles; a particular cut can therefore define an era \u2013 and feel quickly outdated. Take now: looser-fitting suits, reminiscent of Richard Gere\u2019s famous Armani one in American Gigolo, might be in vogue, but given the cost, it can feel like a considerable investment for something that\u2019s likely to fall out of fashion within five years. Yet the appeal, at least in some quarters, endures: in the past year, John Lewis says it has seen tailoring sales increase more than 20% as customers \u201cmove away from the suit being everyday wear towards an appetite to invest in something special\u201d.<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s preferred suit is from Suitsupply, a Dutch label that retails in the \u00a3400-\u00a31,200 range, placing it firmly in the mid-market bracket. \u201cMamdani is very much a product of his background,\u201d says Guy. \u201cA relatively young person in his 30s, he\u2019s neither poor nor exceptionally wealthy.\u201d To that end, his mid-level suit will resonate with the demographic most likely to support him: people in their 30s and 40s, college graduates making middle-class incomes, often frustrated by the cost of housing. It\u2019s exactly the kind of suit they might wear themselves. Not cheap but not extravagant, Mamdani\u2019s suits arguably don\u2019t contradict his proposed policies \u2013 a rent freeze; building 200,000 permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilised homes; fare-free public buses; and universal early-childhood care.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could never imagine Donald Trump wearing Suitsupply; he\u2019s a Brioni person,\u201d says Guy, referring to the luxurious Italian suits that Trump wears, which cost from\u00a33,480-\u00a310,600 off the rack: \u201cHe\u2019s extremely wealthy and grew up in that New York real-estate world. A power suit fits naturally with that tycoon class, just as more accessible brands fit naturally with Mamdani\u2019s cohort.\u201d<\/p>\n Barack Obama wearing his \u2018shocking\u2019 tan suit, in August 2014. Photograph: Saul Loeb\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n The history of suits in politics is long and storied: from Obama\u2019s \u201cshocking\u201d tan suit<\/a>, now infamous enough to have its own Wikipedia page<\/a>, to Justin Trudeau\u2019s and Emmanuel Macron\u2019s suspiciously polished, tailored sheen, and the \u201cMerkel rainbow<\/a>\u201d of colourful jackets and slacks worn by the former German chancellor. As Jeremy Corbyn learned<\/a>, the suit doesn\u2019t just dress the politician; it has the potential to define them.<\/p>\n Perhaps the point is what Dr Matthew Sterling Benson-Strohmayer, an economic historian at the London School of Economics, refers to as the \u201cperformance of banality\u201d, <\/strong>summoning the suit\u2019s long career as a uniform of political power, with Mamdani\u2019s particular choice tapping into a studied modesty, neither shabby nor showy \u2013 \u201crespectability politics\u201d in an inconspicuous suit \u2013 to help him appeal to as many voters as possible. But Benson-Strohmayer thinks Mamdani would be aware of the suit\u2019s military and colonial legacy: \u201cThe suit isn\u2019t neutral; historians of empire have long noted that its contemporary origins lie in military or colonial administration.\u201d He also sees the suit as a form of protective armour: \u201cI think if you\u2019re Brown, you aren\u2019t going to get taken as seriously in these white spaces.\u201d The suit becomes a way of signalling legitimacy, perhaps especially to those who might question said legitimacy.<\/p>\n This kind of sartorial \u201ccode-switching\u201d is hardly a new phenomenon. Even Mohandas Gandhi, whose most iconic image was him cross-legged in a hand-spun dhoti with a shawl draped over his shoulder, once donned a three-piece suit as he trained as a young barrister in London. These days, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has started swapping his usual fatigues for a black suit, albeit one without the tie.<\/p>\n In every seam and stitch of Mamdani\u2019s public persona, the tension between insider and outsider is visible<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The suit Mamdani chooses, according to David Kuchta, the author of The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity, is symbolic\/significant. \u201cAs a Muslim child of immigrants of Indian descent and a democratic socialist, he is under pressure to conform to what many American voters look for as a sign of leadership,\u201d he says, while simultaneously needing to walk a tightrope by \u201cnot looking like an elitist selling out his non-mainstream roots and values\u201d.<\/p>\n Man in black \u2026 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy meeting the Dutch king, Willem-Alexander, in The Hague, on 16 December 2025. Photograph: Robin van Lonkhuijsen\/AP<\/p>\n But Kuchta is acutely aware of the double standards applied to who wears suits and what is read into it when they do. \u201cThat may come in part from Mamdani being a millennial, able to adopt different identities to fit the occasion, but it may also be part of his multicultural background, where code-switching between languages, customs and clothing styles is common,\u201d he says. \u201cWhite males can remain unnoticed,\u201d but when women and ethnic minorities \u201cattempt to gain the power that suits represent,\u201d they must carefully navigate the codes associated with them.<\/p>\n In every seam and stitch of Mamdani\u2019s public persona, the tension between somewhere and nowhere, insider and outsider, is visible. I know well the awkwardness of trying to fit into something not built for me, be it an inherited tradition, or the culture I was born into, or even a suit. What Mamdani\u2019s sartorial choices make clear, however, is that in politics, appearance is never neutral.<\/p>\n