Quid Pro Bow! On George Kent's Impeachment Inquiry Bowtie

If you had a hard time following State Department official George Kent’s testimony Wednesday morning in the House’s first public impeachment inquiry hearings, I don’t blame you. The diplomat’s work in Europe is complicated. But I found myself struggling to follow along for a different reason: as Kent responded to congressional questioning about Rudy Giuliani’s one-man Three Stooges act, I couldn’t take my eyes off the spiffy little bowtie capping off Kent’s three-piece suit. He looked less like a diplomat speaking truth to power than a jolly English professor stopping by the woods on a snowy evening.

Kent’s choice in neckwear, to be sure, is not the most noteworthy thing to take from the hearing. (That would be, uh, everything else.) But just as Roger Stone’s egregious suits say something about his baroque self-conception, and James Comey’s Chelsea boots reflected his willingness to go cowboy on the matter of a few thousand emails, Kent’s bowtie is not without meaning.

It’s worth noting that Kent didn’t merely dress up for the occasion: while his Wikipedia portrait features a traditional necktie, nearly every other photo of him I can find sees him wearing a bowtie, including the one on his State Department profile page. There, a clue: Kent, with degrees from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the National Defense University, is also “a proud member of Red Sox Nation.” Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a good, old-fashioned Northeastern Elite! And one, at that, who comes from a long line of service-minded folk. “There has been a George Kent sworn to defend the Constitution for nearly 60 years,” Kent said early in his testimony, referring to earlier generations in his family who had served in government. Nothing suggests a respect for tradition quite like old-fogey neckwear.

But outside the family tree, both in Washington and the rest of the world, the bowtie represents a real choice. Because while much of political style is geared toward looking as indistinguishable as possible (remember Robert Mueller’s white button-downs?), the bowtie works differently. It is one of those pieces of clothing—like expensive sneakers, or a summertime scarf—that cannot be worn without its wearer knowing it will send a message.

That message is usually something like: I am traditional, but I am also whimsical. Of course, whimsy is in the eye of the beholder: noted Bowtie Boy George F. Will is a conservative commentator and also a baseball fan, and while those might seem like synonyms to you and me, Will seems to consider them representative of vastly different facets of his personality. And whatever attempt Tucker Carlson’s bowtie makes at whimsy falls eternally flat on its face. But in a politico-business moment where the open-necked dress shirt has largely replaced the standard necktie, the bowtie makes an even louder statement.

I don’t want to do too much armchair psychologizing, but Kent’s bowtie makes it hard to resist. Is there a better way to signify authority in a televised hearing than by wearing the fustiest neckwear possible? What better communicates “I was the adult in the room”?

Of course, Kent’s bowtie isn’t a special impeachment prop—it’s part of his uniform. But that’s enough to scare noted tough guy Sebastian Gorka, who wrote in a tweet—perhaps ironically, definitely inscrutably—that “the way [Kent’s] pocket square matches his delightful bow-tie” marks him “Clearly not a member of the Deep State, who hates @realDonaldTrump.” You can learn a lot about a man from who his enemies are—and even more from the people who publicly trash his bowtie.

Originally Appeared on GQ