Every four years, Washington puts on a different kind of dress code. The hotels fill, the parade route is pressure-washed, and the city – for one week – seems to remember that the people who pass through it tend to stay in pictures longer than they stay in office. The week passes, the buntings come down, and the city begins to discover, slowly, what kind of administration has actually arrived.
A year ago, almost to the day, the new administration took the oath. We dressed a number of clients for the events surrounding it – the morning itself, the swearings-in across the days that followed, the official balls, the quieter receptions that fill out an inauguration week for the people who actually have to be at them. Then everyone went back to work. We have spent the twelve months since watching, as we always do, what the year’s sartorial pattern actually becomes.
We have been on the corner of Tysons since 1969. In that time, fifteen presidents have taken the oath, and we have watched what the year after each of those oaths looked like in the city’s actual working dress. An administration’s first year is when its dress culture stops being a campaign aesthetic and becomes a working code: what is worn into the cabinet room, what is worn for the photographer at the bottom of a hearing-room staircase, what is worn standing beside an ambassador on a Tuesday morning that did not seem like it was going to matter and then did. That working code is the one we watch.
What does not change
What stays constant across administrations, in our experience of fifty-seven years of watching, is the formality of the moments that actually matter. A floor speech is a floor speech. A confirmation hearing is a confirmation hearing. A state arrival ceremony in cold January is the same ceremony it was in cold January eight years ago. The cameras have not gotten kinder. The transcripts have not gotten shorter. The photograph that reaches a viewer in Wisconsin or in Berlin still does most of its communication before a single word has been read.
The people who pass through Washington tend to stay in pictures longer than they stay in office.
This is the part of the city’s dress code that does not move. The principals of any administration learn it within weeks if they have not learned it before. A confirmation hearing does not reward a slim cut from this season’s runway. It rewards a notch lapel of moderate width, a quiet drape through the chest, a trouser that breaks once and gently on the instep. The cloth should be sober. The shoes should be polished. The shirt should be the right color of white and not a slightly creative one. The wearer’s job is to be a face on the page, not a garment on the page. The garment is supposed to disappear into the seriousness of the occasion.
We have built a great many of these garments in the year just past. Some for first-time principals who walked into a hearing-room photograph and immediately understood what it asked of them. Some for senior staff who have done it under previous administrations and know exactly what to commission and how long it should last. The work is the same. The clientele rotates; the discipline does not.
What does shift, administration to administration
What does change, year to year and administration to administration, is the surrounding texture: the dress culture immediately around the principals. Some administrations are more formal in their working day than others. Some bring a regional sensibility – a different cut of jacket, a different posture toward a tie, a different relationship to the difference between business and business-formal. The Washington shop floor is unusually attuned to these shifts because the people we dress are often, in their first months in the city, calibrating exactly this. They want to know what the room they are about to walk into actually expects. We try to tell them honestly.
What we will say, observationally, about the administration whose first year is now closing: the working day in this Washington has trended sharper than it has at moments in the recent past. Fits are closer; trousers are cleaner at the break; jacket lengths have come up a quarter-inch. Chambray and casual textures are appearing less often in the rooms where the photograph is being taken; a clean worsted is appearing more. None of this is a value judgment. It is what we have measured, literally, on a year of clients.
The half-canvas baseline has held its position as the right floor for almost any client we see. We do not build fused garments here, and we never have, and the year’s clientele has reinforced for us why that floor matters. A cabinet-meeting photograph caught at hour four of a working day rewards a chest that lies clean against the shirt, and a fused chest does not. The math is the same as it has always been; the year’s clientele has simply arrived at it more quickly.
The year still in front of you
The first year of an administration tends to be its most visible. The second year is, in a different way, its most photographic – that is when the program becomes the record. State dinners, foreign visits, swearings-in for a second wave of agency leadership, the slow accumulation of confirmation hearings that fill the chambers’ calendars through the spring and into the summer. The wardrobe a working principal builds in year one carries them through year two. The wardrobe built well in year one quietly carries them through years three and four as well.
If you are reading this and the calendar in front of you contains any of those moments – a hearing, a delegation, an official trip, a swearing-in, an evening event at one of the chiefs-of-mission residences that has lately become a more active part of the city’s calendar – start the conversation now. We commit to a seven-week production window, with another four to five weeks built in for first fitting and final alterations. That is a real eleven to twelve weeks of runway for a garment built properly. Twelve weeks moves quickly in this city.
Whatever the administration, whatever the party, whatever the position the wearer holds in the city, custom is how the serious people in this town have always dressed for serious moments. We have been at it a long time. We have watched fifteen presidents come and go from the front of our shop floor. The cycle continues, and the work – quiet, exact, specific to the wearer – continues with it.
If you are planning ahead for a Washington moment in the year ahead, you can start a conversation about a custom suit any time.
– Brett
