Trump's suit vs. Musk's sweatshirt: What the clothes tell us about who's in charge in the White House
Surely the last cover of the magazine Time, with Elon Musk comfortably seated at the famous Resolute desk of the President of the United States, did some damage to the megalomania of Donald Trump, who rushed to call a press conference in the Oval Office, with a clear staging to leave no doubt (or generate more) about who is really in charge.
Donald Trump, silent, showed up clinging to his chair without leaving it for a moment. Elon Musk, on the other hand, was standing and in an informal attitude –with a son climbing up his anatomy–, which contrasted with the harshness of the policy of cuts in the administration that he was exposing. With the Trump government, no detail is left to chance, neither the words, nor the postures, nor the tweets, nor even the clothing. Both Trump and Musk, despite the great stylistic distance, represent two sides of the same coin in the aesthetic theatricalization of power.
Donald Trump often demonstrates his power through the classicism of the business suit, as an unequivocal symbol of white male power. A type of garment that, for two centuries, has embodied social elitism, conservative values and economic liberalism. But masculine dresses come in many types and shapes. Trump's is usually large in proportion and prominent in the shoulders. In fact, the prominence of the shoulders is an old resource for staging power, as clearly exemplified by the Images of Henry VIII in the 16th century, which, through them, alluded to physical strength, while allowing him to occupy more space and impose himself in society. But if in the case of Trump the aesthetic strategy is very clear, what are Musk's secrets when it comes to demonstrating power with his clothing?
Musk belongs to the aesthetic family of techno-entrepreneurs who, since the 80s, shaped the new businessman who abandons the classicism of the tailor and opts for youthful and sporty clothing, such as sweatshirts, sneakers and caps. A clear example is Steve Jobs, who always dressed the same way (and sometimes even went barefoot), like an echo of the hippie anti-system that he once was. A position totally akin to the marketing strategy of the first Apple Mackintosh personal computer of 1984, with a Ridley Scott ad which made history when it aired during that year's Superbowl.
Scott presented IBM as Orwellian Big Brother and Jobs' Mackintosh as a promise of freedom that would enable a social revolution in democracy, with a greater distribution of power. Certainly, personal computers, far from saving us from the state of control of Big Brother, have simply sophisticated their methods and increased their domination and efficiency by delegating to each of the users their own surveillance, as the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han would say. Similarly, the studied aesthetic informality of Jobs, which sought to distance himself from the values of the yuppies The 80s, which included a young Donald Trump, was simply a sleight of hand to take us, to the tune of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to a new, more aggressive stage of capitalism.
Caps, hoodies and sneakers are the new aesthetics of power, which, through tints of youth and playful sports airs, dress false allies of the common good and social equality. Clearly, the power of playfulness makes us lower our guard and calms the feeling of danger, especially because we are used to being put on guard only by aesthetics clearly linked to power, such as those of the men in grey. Trump would be better off not being overconfident when faced with Musk wearing sneakers, a cap and accompanied by his playful son, because, just as we have been led to believe in the rest of the world, this informality hides the danger that Trump, as was already warned in the press conference, will end up swallowed and drowned by his own mussels.
