It doesn’t take much for Barack Obama to rile up a crowd. But when he took the stage at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night, the adoration baseline swelled into rapture. It didn’t hurt that, in his simple two-button suit and silvery blue tie, the 63-year-old former president looked good.
Cooler, even—as one of my stylish colleagues told me this morning—than he’d ever looked during his presidency.
It wasn’t a particularly voguish suit, though it fit him well: the sleeves displayed the right amount of cuff; the pants hit a notch above the talus. His pale blue tie—a soft nod to the Democratic milieu—was expertly knotted. (A thankful upgrade from when Obama, Joe Biden, and Bill Clinton nixed neckties altogether at a Democratic fundraiser a few months back.) “That’s, like, a fat power dimple,” noted my other colleague Avidan Grossman.
But as British GQ’s Murray Clark smartly put it, it was a suit that, “while seemingly unremarkable, became a much cooler thing in his hands.” This Midasian quality, if I may deploy a very Gen-Z concept here, must be a side effect of Obama’s perpetually buoyant aura. Which, sometimes, is even powerful enough to misguidedly convince you that maybe the bad tan suit was actually good.
“Obama’s suit is less a masterclass of technique than it is of energy,” Clark wrote. “His appearance speaks to the power of feeling comfortable in your own skin, of being relaxed in the mold of a politician.” After the way that the state of the suit in American politics has alternatively nosedived and stagnated over the last eight years, it makes sense we’d cave for even an ounce of oomph.
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