By Rachel TashjianThe Washington Post Tim Walz wore a navy suit, white shirt and blue tie to formally accept the Democratic nomination for vice president on Wednesday night in Chicago. Big whoop. That’s what all the men wear for a moment like that.
But in the two weeks since Walz was catapulted to the national stage, Democrats have seized on his offstage style as evidence of his authenticity. Walz’s casual attire has been a constant refrain this week at the Democratic National Convention. Sen.
Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) spoke just before Walz, saying that Minnesotans “love a dad in plaid.” A video narrated by Walz’s wife, Gwen, depicted him in the orange and camo of hunting mode.
Former president Barack Obama touted Walz’s workwear Tuesday night: “You can tell those flannel shirts he wears don’t come from his political career. They come from his closet – and they have been through some stuff.” On Monday, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, described Walz as doing his work “with a big heart, a buffalo-plaid jacket, and a bottomless bag of snacks” – as if he’s running instead for World’s Greatest Dad.
The campaign has played up this aesthetic, too. Hours after Walz’s first public appearance as the Veep candidate, in Philadelphia, the campaign started selling a camo-print hat emblazoned with “HARRIS-WALZ” in hunting-season orange. Walz was wearing a camo hat when Harris offered him the job by phone, according to a video of the exchange (which might’ve been staged, for all we know).
The idea is that these workwear clothes make him relatable and even “real” – that his wardrobe isn’t politically motivated but something pure. Workwear is prone to adaptation and ironic styling. (Now that conversations about appropriation have made most people hesitant to remix most kinds of culture-specific dress, rural White culture may be the last “safe” aesthetic to remix.
) Workwear brands like Realtree and Carhartt have been worn and remixed by Japanese subcultures, Bushwick hipsters and designer brands such as Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. You can see nearly as much Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops merch in downtown Manhattan as you can in rural Pennsylvania. But the Harris-Walz campaign wants us to know that there’s nothing ironic or cloying about Coach Walz wearing it: This guy is the genuine article, wearing genuine articles.
Gwen Walz, wife of Harris’s VP pick Tim Walz, is also a longtime teacher /*! This file is auto-generated */!function(d,l){"use strict";l.querySelector&&d.addEventListener&&"undefined"!=typeof URL&&(d.
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contentWindow.postMessage({message:"ready",secret:t},"*")},!1)))}(window,document); Does Walz’s sartorial reputation create a foil for JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, who claims to be in touch with the working and middle classes but has spent much of his adult life in the realms of Silicon Valley and the Ivy League? Vance is usually seen in a blue suit and red or blue tie, although he did wear a plaid shirt and jeans during a visit to the southern border earlier this month. (And he has his own hang-ups about what constitutes authentic style: In one section of his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” he dismisses pajamas as “an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cubes makers.
”) Walz wore an L.L. Bean barn jacket while touring a Minnesota farm with President Joe Biden last November.
And he has campaigned in T-shirts, and shared photos of himself in hunting attire while, well, hunting. Democrats want to foreground that he wears these clothes not to appeal to a middle-class voter from middle America; he wears them because he is a middle-class voter from middle America. Walz’s wardrobe is one of the Democrats’ best arguments that theirs is not the party of the coastal elite.
Walz doesn’t need to do the usual pageantry of rolling up his shirtsleeves or loosening his tie to look relatable. Politicians, especially those in a race for the White House, usually undergo some kind of glow-up. Edges are softened or sharpened.
Designers make custom pieces. Stylists are consulted on fabrics, brands and hairstyles. Perhaps a uniform is established.
These changes are sometimes successful, and sometimes the source of scandal. Hillary Clinton adopted a wardrobe of pantsuits in the 2016 election. John Edwards got a $1,250 haircut in 2008, while Sarah Palin’s campaign wardrobe cost $150,000.
Even Harris – whose taste for boot cut pantsuits and boxy-shouldered pantsuits has remained largely unchanged for the past decade – has made perceptible updates to her look over the past year. As Harris’s allies salute Walz for being real with his Realtree, she is actually getting a bit fancier. She has incorporated more European luxury brands, such as Chloé and Valentino, into her wardrobe, and has even been criticized on social media for wearing a pricey necklace by Tiffany & Co.
But here’s the trick: Walz is rarely seen at public events wearing the Carhartt, plaid jackets and camo he’s so celebrated for. That may be why he’s touted for this wardrobe while Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.
) – whose Carhartt collection was at first a selling point – now looks stubborn instead of folksy. Walz is more willing to put on a tie. And the country has gotten to know him in the tieless shirts, blue suits, blazers, sneaker-soled dress shoes and khakis that high school teachers or government employees also wear.
But the overall impression of Walz is that underneath the Brooks Brothers is a man who’d rather be field-dressing a deer. It’s funny to imagine a political party foregrounding a woman’s down-to-earth wardrobe: We just love the senator for wearing those Lululemon leggings. To be taken more seriously, at this level of politics, a man dresses down and a woman dresses up.
Both Harris and Walz are reserved dressers. Harris wears ostensibly the same pantsuit in different colors, which has made it difficult to criticize or latch onto any detail of her attire, and she has largely (so far) sidestepped the sartorial scrutiny that many female politicians have experienced. But Democrats have politicized Walz’s clothes, describing them as essential to his identity.
Why fixate on his clothes and not hers? Maybe the campaign wants to show Americans that Harris’s progressive vision pops best with an old-fashioned, even conservative look..
