Mamdani is the perfect dress expression of today's successful thirty-year-old

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There's no shortage of emotion, but just to ask: who gave Zohran Mamdani the jacket he wore for his first speech as mayor of New York? Because it looks damn near like the ones all Italian restaurants of a certain prestige (even those in Manhattan once did; in the late 1960s, Le Perigord kicked out Truman Capote; he came back in Bermuda shorts but with an impeccable blazer; he had great legs, so they let him sit) keep in their wardrobes for the average American tourist, who arrives sleeveless and without a tie: a loose, boxy, short jacket, lacking in shoulders. "You can be sure he's a millennial by the way he doesn't know how to wear a jacket," fashionistas were babbling on social media a few hours ago, looking at photos of the campaign and especially of that fine speech he gave about immigrants, which sent Elly Schlein's followers on this side of the Atlantic into raptures .

In fact, the son of Mira Nair, a director idolized by fashionistas for at least twenty years and the complete opposite of what we, on this side of the pond, understand as an immigrant, is the perfect dress code for today's successful thirty-year-old. And, frankly, we have a perfect representation of this in the editorial office of Il Foglio: people wearing sneakers, chinos, and button-down shirts peeking out from crewneck sweaters. A jacket when needed, that is, when necessary. A friend who designs and makes jackets for a living observed that the ones Mamdani was forced to wear throughout the election campaign (there's always a significant segment of the electorate that finds reassurance in formality, and it would be a crime to lose their favor because they consider formality a boomer thing) are the so-called entry-level kind, the basic kind, the "give me a jacket because I have to go get a job" kind, which until recently was served by Brooks Brothers: the first shirts and the first suit came with the college degree certificate, often given as a gift by the proud father. Five hundred dollars, seven hundred at most, and the fear subsided.

In the opening scene of "The Secret of My Success," Michael J. Fox, arriving from a rural town in the Big Bad, acquires exactly this outfit to climb the corporate ladder where his uncle works and seduce the woman of his dreams. Forty years later, Mamdani is wearing a very similar outfit. The difference that sets him apart as the thirty-year-old he is today (and a bit of a rap pro, too, come on) is his shoes: no one before him had ever slipped a pair of lace-up ankle boots under his grisaille.

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