Editorial. Shirt, suit, tie: politics also talks about "rags"

Tension in Washington. Curtain up. Zelensky arrives, gets out of the black limousine, and extends his hand to Trump. And then, suspense: what does the most powerful man in the world do? He congratulates his guest... on his outfit. Yes, his look. A lunar moment? Not really, if we recall the commotion on February 2 in the Oval Office, when the Ukrainian president was lectured like a schoolboy because of his fatigues. Anecdotal? Laughable? Pathetic? Perhaps. But in politics, clothes do indeed make the man—and sometimes, they send careers to the graveyard of ambition.

Memory: The Jean-François Mattéi "affair." Summer 2003, deadly heatwave, the Minister of Health interrupts his vacation to announce a dramatic human toll. Problem: he appears in a polo shirt, tanned like a Club Med vacationer. The image sticks to him, and he can kiss his political career goodbye.

A decade later, across the Atlantic, Barack Obama is also under heavy fire from the style police. No polo shirt or open shirt: this time, it's his beige suit that's causing a stir as he delivers a speech about ISIS. Beige! Republicans are screaming in outrage: talking about war in pastel, how indecent. The result: two whole weeks of controversy over the shade of a jacket and not a word about the Islamic State. The evidence is glaring: the power of clothes and the clothes of power are inseparable. Jack Lang and his "Mao" collar, François Fillon and his luxury suits, Ruffin and his football jersey, the "scruffy" LFI, the ties of the National Rally. The wardrobe counts as much, if not more, than the speech. Clothes, rags, second-hand clothes: in politics, they weigh a ton. The proof? This invasion of blue suits that are colonizing TV sets. Apparently, blue "puts a man down." Yeah... if the color of a suit had an effect on competence, we would have known about it a long time ago.