Why Do Roger Stone and Co. Love Bad Clothes?
Each day this week, Roger Stone walked into a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., like he was modeling the latest antique styles from a long-shuttered bespoke tailor called something like Wiggy & Cheats. He wore his signature round Cutler and Gross sunglasses, which make him look like the guy you stay away from at a Steampunk rave, and sculpted his white hair into a villainous white combover. And as I looked at photos of him waving and grinning his way into the courtroom, where he is on trial for lying to the government and witness tampering, I kept wondering something.
Why is the far right so into clothes? And why are they so bad?
Stone loves clothes. Just this week, his outfits read like the diary of a man who gets high on the tailoring equivalent of something you are not meant to smoke:
Monday: a black, black suit with a white shirt and a knit tie, with a pair of black boots.
Tuesday: a gray suit, with pocket flaps on the jacket and pleat-front trousers, and a pink dress shirt.
Wednesday: a deep charcoal suit with a spread-collar blue striped dress shirt and a white-and-navy striped tie.
Thursday: a Prince of Wales check suit (the kind of thing that photographs horribly) with a blue spread-collar dress shirt and a black tie.
Each outfit has been accented with a pocket square that looks like he took the white flag of surrender, dyed it some sad, odd color like a criminal disguising himself on the run, and starched it back into obstinacy. He looked like the Uncle Fester of Savile Row: Put a lightbulb (or an incriminating document) in his mouth, and he can make it light up.
Stone clearly loves the rules, the prestige, and the exclusivity of bespoke clothing. Spread collars, pocket squares, and pleat-front trousers aren’t things you see even at white-shoe law firms or on Wall Street anymore; in the United States, this kind of natty, by-the-obscure-European-books dressing is now an eccentricity. He even gets his jackets made with three-roll-two buttons, where the top button is placed under the lapel and never used—the kind of tailored menswear-head detail that guys mostly get just to flex their arcane knowledge (or to try in vain to look like James Bond). Nonetheless, these looks have been somewhat subdued even for Stone, who’s worn everything from a black beret and leather jacket to a top hat and full morning dress—attire that’s so difficult to get anywhere beyond the confines of Savile Row that you’d almost consider it a costume. Stone’s obsessive dedication to the sartorially garish certainly makes it seem that way—costumey.
Perhaps the new, muted style of Stone is a sign of humility after he was barred from using social media by the judge in July of this year—an event to which he wore a double-breasted seersucker suit, like he was there to hand out ice cream. But this is also a part of a sartorial strategy. In January of this year, he created a video guide for the Daily Caller on how to dress for your (read: his) arraignment, saying, “You have to think long and hard about what you’re going to wear for your arraignment.” Probably only Anna Sorokin, the SoHo grifter who used a celebrity stylist as her courtroom-wardrobe consultant, could take that with all the sincerity Stone intended. He says he chose not to wear a double-breasted suit because you should never dress above the voter—and besides, you can’t do the Nixon victory-V in a DB. So single-breasted it is! He mentions that his Richard James suit, which appears to be the same one he wore Monday, is some 30 years old, his voice motoring on in a haughty gravel. For Stone, the elitism and the obsolete character of tailoring is a fetish. He gives obsoletism a double meaning.
Stone isn’t the only fashion despot on the right. On Wednesday, he spent his lunch break with two other fashion fanatics: Milo Yiannopoulos, the bottle-blond high school villain who also loves dubiously tailored clothing, and Gavin McInnes, who is so invested in his “look” that he is almost indistinguishable from a circa-2007 Williamsburg barista who specializes in something moronic like penis latte art. (Admittedly, that’s not far off from his actual origin story.) For Yiannopoulos and McInnes, even more so than Stone, a dedication to style has never been done in such bad faith. They look like Macklemore backup dancers.
McInnes, of course, is the leader of the Proud Boys, a group that the Daily Beast recently called Stone’s “personal army,” and another alt-right group with a misplaced passion for fashion. They’ve made Fred Perry polo shirts an almost official uniform, to the brand’s understandable torment, although the polo’s association with right-wing politics dates back at least 50 years. The Guardian recently wrote that the far right loves Fred Perry because “mainstream fashion is the new camouflage,” a way to normalize their radicalism—but the mainstream American guy isn’t wearing his polos with too-tight chinos or whiskered jeans, or at least hasn’t been since Bruce Weber was shooting Abercrombie catalogs. Fred Perry is a country-club brand, and these aren’t men who skipped playing the back nine to go harass journalists in their homes. These are men who want to revert to an earlier way of being, even if that was only ten years ago. As with Stone, their way of dressing is an insistence on playing by old rules.
What all these looks share is a maniacal devotion to an imagined Anglo-Saxon culture as expressed through style. Of course, even the most ardent tailoring or menswear fan will tell you that there isn’t really a “right” way to do anything—the joy of bespoke tailoring is its personalization, its room for personality quirks and subtle expressions of individuality. But when it comes to the clothing of the far right, it seems that the more rules you know, the more protocol you pull out from the footnotes of the handbook, the more superior you are.
“I know how to win, but it ain’t pretty,” Stone allegedly e-mailed to Bannon—who, you might recall, is an enthusiast of British Barbour jackets—in the summer of 2016. The ugly truths are now evident to anyone who looks. A well-made suit can only hide so much.
Originally Appeared on GQ
