As the Biden administration comes to an end, reviews are starting to pour in. It looks back at the pandemic, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the response to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the aborted second presidential campaign.
But style is rarely discussed. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind about this presidency, but it played a bigger role in building the narrative than might have been apparent at the time.
When President Biden took office in 2021, he promised a “return to normal” after the chaos of the Trump administration, a return to old-fashioned diplomacy, civility and bipartisanship. What that might look like was, in some ways, reflected in the… well, normal clothing of the first family.
It started with the inauguration, held during Covid. There may not have been an opening ball or even a huge crowd due to pandemic protocols, but that didn’t mean the government couldn’t use the spectacle for its own purposes. The first and second families all wore American designers (not to mention the masks to match their suits).
And not just American designers, but, in the case of Mr. Biden, Ralph Lauren, a man who built his entire identity on the American dream. Jill Biden, for her part, opted for labels designed by women, such as Markarian and Gabriela Hearst in New York.
It deliberately contrasted with the cartoon costumes of the January 6 rioters who had besieged the Capitol just weeks earlier, not to mention the gilded theater of the Trump administration, with a hierarchy of values partly reflected came into a love for luxury. labels from Milan and Paris.
In fact, it was a step back from the powerful White House imagery of the Obama administration, especially that of Michelle Obama, who so thoroughly rewrote expectations by using fashion as an expression of diversity and inclusivity that it became a popular interest in political clothing. that has yet to decrease.
The Bidens simply turned that interest to their own ends, offering for four years carefully tailored blue single-breasted suits, which were slim cut but not fashionably narrow. Four years of striped shirts and variations on the blue tie. Four years of shirt dresses for working women and ladylike floral dresses.
It’s not that they were boring. Mr. Biden appeared routinely on Washington best dressed lists and was praised by people like Tom Ford. It’s that they were chic in an accessible, archetypal Washington way. After all, they came to power with a wardrobe shaped by decades in the Washington establishment. Familiarity was part of their selling point, and their clothing helped make the case.
“Their brand stood for recognition and responsibility, and all their political promises were encapsulated in the way they dressed,” said Tammy Haddad, CEO of the consultancy Haddad Media.
Meet Biden Blue
When indeed she opened the Costume Institute exhibition at the Met in 2022, Dr. Biden on how clothing is used to “reveal and conceal who we are with symbols and shapes, colors and cuts.” She used the generic “we,” but she could have been talking about herself and the West Wing. (It was one of only two moments during Biden’s presidency in which Dr. Biden directly discussed her relationship with fashion in public.)
For example, she could have talked about how they went back to the tradition of wearing American clothes after the Trump years. Back to brands like Oscar de la Renta, who had dressed almost every first lady since Jacqueline Kennedy. And occasionally grumble a little about the attention paid to their clothes (because, you know, they had more important things to talk about). Even when they played the dress-up game with aplomb.
After all, this was a commander in chief who became so synonymous with one particular accessory, the Ray-Ban 3025 aviator sunglasses, that he didn’t just use them as a replacement for his first Instagram post but also handed them out as gifts to visiting heads of state and made them a visual shorthand found throughout campaign merchandise. This was a first lady who appeared twice on the cover of Vogue and a third time on its pages.
And this was a family that so consistently appeared in clothes of a certain shade of blue that, as Katie Rogers wrote in her book ‘American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, From Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden,’ it became known as “ Biden blue.” Consider the tie Mr. Biden wore for his three State of the Union addresses and for his farewell address to the nation, a color officially identified in the first White House Easter egg roll after the pandemic, with a “Biden Blue Egg,” like every Biden Easter afterward.
The Bidens even had a stylist. Granted, he wasn’t a full-time White House employee like Mrs. Obama’s stylist had been, but Dr. Biden (and occasionally the president) worked with him regularly. And in one of his final acts in office, Mr. Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Mr. Lauren, becoming the first fashion designer to be so honored, and on Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
Repeat performances
As Dr. Biden said when she donated her inaugural outfits to the Smithsonian, “I knew my clothes could help me say something important.” They could, she said, be “a voice for me” on days when her job was the photo shoot.
Sometimes Dr. Biden used her clothes to literally communicate, as she did with the Zadig & Voltaire jacket with the word “love” in studs on the back that she wore to a Group of Seven meeting in Britain (which was widely interpreted as a response to Melania Trump’s ‘I Real Don’t Care, Do U?’ jacket). Or the Christian Siriano dress with the word “vote” printed on it, which she wore to a campaign event shortly after her husband’s infamous 2024 presidential debate.
Sometimes she used clothing figuratively, as with Gabriela Hearst’s matching ivory dress and coat, both decorated “with the flowers of every American state and territory.” she noted when she presented the outfit to the Smithsonian. Her point, she said, was to signal that she intended “to be a first lady for all Americans — and do my part to bring our country back together.” Just as the embroidered sunflower on the wrist of the blue silk Lapointe dress she wore to the 2022 State of the Union was meant to show her support for the Ukrainian people in the face of the Russian invasion.
And sometimes, perhaps most importantly, she simply used her clothes to adjust expectations, re-wearing her looks in multiple moments of maximum public attention. She wore the same Brandon Maxwell polka dot dress to the Group 7 meeting (under that “love jacket”) and to the Tokyo Olympics. The same Reem Acra dress to a state dinner for the South Korean president and the wedding of Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan. The same black Schiaparelli suit for the funeral services of Queen Elizabeth II and Jimmy Carter. And the dress she wore for her wedding to Joe Biden in 1977 and again in 2024 with the 4th of July celebrations at the White House.
For his part, Mr. Biden preferred suits from Brooks Brothers and Jos. A. Bank, as well as Mr. Lauren, whose clothes he also wore to the wedding of Naomi Biden, his granddaughter, on the South Lawn of the White House. . Even when he normalized replacing the tie with a business-casual open collar and blazer, it seemed like it was its own form of occasionwear. The occasions were only, for example, a visit to the Texas border or a departure during a trip abroad.
The result was a way to model a certain kind of behavior — normal, sustainable, economic, detail-oriented — that has fallen out of favor in the Age of Influence, just as Biden policies fell out of favor. And in the wake of Trump 2.0, it looks less and less like a reset than a relic from another time.
Ultimately, and despite Mr. Biden’s affinity for Hoka Transports — maybe because of Mr. Biden’s affinity for Hoka Transports, which ultimately seemed less a reflection of his hipness than a reminder of his aging body — the Bidens’ style may have seemed out of step with the moment. But that in itself is part of the story.
