Was struck today by this new photo of Trump in a new, longer overcoat. Ignoring for the moment the sartorial incongruity of the MAGA baseball cap, let’s look at the carefully chosen semiotics of his abnormally long dark coat (and exaggeratedly wide shoulders).
Firstly, it’s not that cold in the states where Trump’s campaigning (look at how the crowd is dressed) so why is he wearing a longer than normal mid-calf length overcoat? To me it looks like a conscious reference to the long dark (admittedly usually black leather) coats favoured not just with Goths, but with school shooters and other outsider heroes in certain popular SF films. IOW iconographically, he’s the outsider bringer of retribution, while at the same time wearing the headgear of an older now marginalised generation.
Ironically, if one saw this sort of combination on a Paris catwalk it might be hailed as ‘radically transgressive’.
Whereas here I’d suggest it’s nothing to do with fashion, but simply messaging - though I have wondered if Trump gets his trousers from the same tailor as Kim Jung Un (but that’s for another post…)
“1924 is also the year the company (Hugo Boss) became a Reichszeugmeisterei - licensed supplier of uniforms to the Sturmabteilung (SA), Schutzstaffel (SS), Wehrmacht, Hitler Youth, National Socialist Motor Corps, and other party organisations”
Trump trying on orange for his prison jumpsuit? He was so proud that this garb (donned for the garbage truck stunt) made him appear thinner. It’s been painful to have his coarse and cruel opinions repeated so often by media. There are many psychologists who’ve been saying for years how he’s exhibiting various forms of dementia, etc., etc. The media jump all over Biden when he makes a gaffe, but they seem to give Trump a pass as do his followers. I really don’t understand how they reconcile it themselves by saying “He doesn’t mean it.” How do they even know when he does mean what he says? They seem happy to live constant lies, although perhaps they’ve been brow-beaten into thinking he is their only hope. I think they will be pleasantly relieved to have a sane president who actually cares about their welfare and not just his own.
Don’t know if there’s already a book about these long coats but suspect some academic has already been there, or is on his (edit )sorry, ‘their’ way - eg:-
I have family living in the USA. My son says that there are some Republican policies that he would support but no way would he vote for Trump. He thinks that Trump wants to destroy the democratic system and replace it with what is, for all intents and purposes, a dictatorship. A one party state. Not a million miles away from a country where a consultative referendum on Brexit becomes a mandate for change without the endorsement of the electorate.
It’s all over now, bar the counting.