You remember the 28th of August 2014. Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, walked into the White House briefing room to address the nation on one of the most urgent security situations of his presidency. ISIS was advancing through Syria and Iraq. Russia was moving through Ukraine. The cameras were on. The world was watching. And when Obama stepped up to the podium, the American political establishment lost its mind over the colour of his suit.
It was tan. A light, summer tan suit, made by his personal tailor. That was it. That was the scandal. Within minutes of the press conference beginning, there were over four thousand tweets about the suit. A congressman from New York told a cable news channel that ISIS was watching and would not be afraid of a president in a tan suit. Lou Dobbs called it shocking. Representative Peter King told CNN that Obama looked like he was on his way to a party in the Hamptons. The substance of what the president had actually said, that the United States had not yet developed a complete strategy for dealing with ISIS, was buried under an avalanche of commentary about the shade of a man’s clothing. Obama later said it was “kind of crazy people were so mad about it.” He was right. It was crazy. And it was also entirely deliberate.
Because here is what actually happened in that briefing room. The people who wanted to discredit what Obama was saying did not attack his strategy directly. They attacked his clothes. They used the suit as a proxy for everything they wanted to say about him without saying it. The suit became the argument. The clothes became the weapon. And a generation of politicians watched it happen and took notes.
Fashion Is Being Used to Manipulate You
Clothing has always carried political weight. What changed in the modern era is the precision with which that weight is now deployed. Political leaders and their advisors understand something most of the public does not think about consciously: before a single word leaves a politician’s mouth, the clothes they are wearing have already told the room who they are, what they stand for, and who they are speaking to. The wardrobe is the first speech. Everything that follows is a footnote.
Volodymyr Zelensky understood this better than almost any world leader of his generation. From the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he abandoned the suit and tie entirely. Every appearance, whether in front of NATO heads of state, the British parliament, the United States Congress, or a camera in a dark Kyiv corridor, he wore military green. Olive shirts, army polos, the clothes of a man on the frontline rather than in a conference room. The message was not subtle and it was not accidental. He was telling the world that his country was at war, that he was in it with his people, and that anyone who sat across from him in a tailored suit while his cities burned should feel the weight of that contrast pressing down on them. It worked with extraordinary effectiveness. He became one of the most recognisable political figures in the world on the strength of a wardrobe that cost almost nothing.
Then Donald Trump complained about it. In February 2025, Zelensky visited the Oval Office in his military attire and Trump offered a sarcastic aside as he entered the West Wing: “He is all dressed up today.” The meeting deteriorated into one of the most publicly fractured diplomatic encounters in recent American history. By June 2025, attending the NATO summit in The Hague, Zelensky appeared in a dark military-style blazer with dress trousers. By August, meeting Trump again at the White House, he wore full black. “I cannot believe it,” Trump told reporters. “President Zelensky, you look fabulous in that suit.” One of the most documented political power plays of the year was a man changing his jacket. The meeting went smoothly.
Zelensky’s military green had been a declaration of war. His black suit in August 2025 was a declaration of something else entirely: that when the most powerful office in the world tells you to dress differently, sometimes survival requires compliance. Even that compliance was a political statement. Every inch of it was calculated.
Melania Trump has spent two tenures as First Lady conducting an entire parallel political commentary through her wardrobe, one that often said the opposite of what her husband’s administration was claiming publicly. When she travelled to visit migrant children being held at the border in 2018, she wore a Zara jacket with the words “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” printed on the back. Her office said it had no hidden meaning. The rest of the world disagreed, loudly and with justification. When she arrived at the Texas border wearing a sharp white Philip Treacy hat, it was read as a retort to the media criticism she had just absorbed. When she wore a military-style olive coat on a diplomatic visit to Egypt, commentators across several continents called it a colonial reference. Whether these choices were deliberate provocations or spectacular accidents of styling is a question nobody in her circle has ever answered honestly. What is certain is that each one generated days of coverage and shifted the conversation away from whatever policy her husband was implementing at the time. The clothes were always doing political work, whether she intended them to or not.
Trump himself built an entire aesthetic around a red baseball cap. The MAGA hat was not designed by a political strategist. It was designed by a manufacturer to be sold as merchandise. But it became one of the most recognisable political symbols of the 21st century, a piece of clothing that functioned like a flag, identifying its wearer’s allegiances from across a parking lot. The power of that hat was that it was cheap and accessible, which meant it could be worn by anyone, and in being worn by everyone it created the visual impression of a mass movement wherever it appeared. Fashion as political infrastructure. A $25 piece of red polyester doing the work that a thousand speeches could not.
This is the machinery. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Now look at the African continent, and look carefully.
Across Africa, traditional dress has become one of the most frequently deployed tools of political manipulation on the continent. A politician photographed in an agbada, a dashiki, a kente, a kanzu or an ndebele blanket communicates cultural loyalty, pride, rootedness in the people. The image travels. It is shared. It becomes the face of a campaign. Julius Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters built an entire visual identity around red berets and khaki worker’s uniforms, the aesthetic of revolution and labour dressed up for a parliamentary chamber. Nelson Mandela, one of the most sophisticated political communicators of the 20th century, understood the power of switching between a sharp Western suit and traditional Xhosa clothing depending on the room he was entering and the message he needed to land.
There is nothing dishonest in itself about a politician choosing to represent their cultural heritage through their clothing. The dishonesty enters when the clothing bears no relationship to the reality of what is being done with the power it has helped secure. Nigeria’s former Kano State governor Abdullahi Ganduje was recorded on video receiving what appeared to be cash stuffed into the folds of his babariga, the wide-sleeved traditional garment whose enormous hidden pockets became so associated with the concealment of corrupt proceeds that the garment earned its own dark reputation in Nigerian political commentary. He was nicknamed “Gandollar.” The traditional dress was not the vehicle of cultural pride in that moment. It was the vehicle of corruption, and the two things were occupying exactly the same fabric at exactly the same time.
This is the version nobody addresses directly. Leaders across the continent who arrive at African Union summits in immaculate traditional attire while their governments oversee the extraction of their countries’ natural resources for the benefit of foreign corporations and personal bank accounts. Leaders who wear the kente and then sign the deal. Who wear the agbada and then rig the election. Who present themselves on the international stage as custodians of African heritage and return home to govern in ways that treat that heritage as a photo opportunity. The clothes say one thing. The governance record says another. And for people who have not been given the tools to read the gap between the two, the image is often all they see.
What makes this manipulation effective is that it works on a level that bypasses rational analysis. When you see a leader dressed in the clothes of your grandmother, your grandfather, your community, something in you responds before your critical faculties have a chance to catch up. That response is being exploited. It has been exploited on every continent, by leaders of every political stripe, for as long as cameras have existed to capture the image and media systems have existed to distribute it.
The world is full of children right now who are going to bed hungry in countries led by men in beautiful traditional dress who flew to the capital in private planes. There are young people in active war zones whose governments are represented internationally by leaders in crisp, culturally resonant clothing who have allocated a fraction of the military budget they spent on their enemies to the hospitals their own people cannot access. There are communities whose cultural heritage is displayed on a politician’s body at a summit while that same politician signs legislation that dismantles the economic foundations of the community that heritage belongs to. The clothes communicate solidarity. The power communicates something else entirely.
This is not confined to Africa. It is the global condition of political fashion. Trump’s red cap. Zelensky’s military green. Melania’s message jackets. The Indian Prime Minister’s precisely chosen kurtas for different diplomatic encounters. The British royal family’s careful deployment of Commonwealth designers during tours of former colonies. Every piece of clothing worn in public by anyone with political power is a communication strategy before it is a wardrobe choice.
So what do you do with this information?
You start looking at what is underneath the clothes. You ask what the person wearing the agbada has actually done for the community whose textile tradition they are borrowing for the photograph. You ask what the military green actually cost the people it was meant to represent. You ask what the red cap was selling beyond itself. You learn to read the gap between the image and the record, between the symbol and the substance, between what the clothes are saying and what the power is doing.
Because the most dangerous thing about political fashion is not that it lies. It is that it tells a very specific truth, one that is designed to distract you from every other truth happening at the same time. The suit is the headline. The policy is the story. And as long as the world keeps talking about the suit, the story gets to keep running without scrutiny.
Obama wore a tan suit to a press conference in August 2014 and the room spent three days discussing the colour of his clothing while the question of American strategy in Syria went largely unexamined. A decade later, Zelensky changed a jacket and a diplomatic relationship shifted. Melania Trump wore a printed phrase on her back and an entire news cycle forgot what it had been covering the day before.
They know exactly what they are doing. The question is whether you are watching the clothes or watching the power.
Watch the power.
