Last month, when the Washington Post ran a dual profile of Donald
Trump and Robert Mueller, the paper took care to note Mueller’s daily wardrobe as the director of the F.B.I.: “a traditional J. Edgar Hoover-era G-man uniform: dark suit,
red or blue tie and white shirt—always white.” A consideration of
Mueller’s clothes has become a commonplace of both written narratives
and TV chitchat about him. In the absence of leaks from the special
counsel’s office, the public is left to listen to the clothes, which are
equally reticent, which is their elegance. Assembled from a narrow
palette of Establishment standards, Mueller’s regular outfit
communicates a moral outlook in its particulars, an unostentatious grace
in its polish. One of the pleasanter aberrations of the Trump Era is the
emergence of Robert Swan Mueller III, the owner of a modest rotation of
discreetly striped Brooks Brothers suits, as a fashion icon.
Last year, Derek Guy, of the menswear blog Die, Workwear!, wrote an
admiring post about Mueller, titled “The Trad in Washington.” Guy argued that the special counsel soberly propounds traditional values by way of “soft shouldered suits with naturally rounded sleeveheads.” “Mueller is one of the only people in Washington who knows how to wear a coat-and-tie,” Guy wrote. “All the details are middle-of-the-road, but
they’re so perfectly executed that they come together in a classic
American way you rarely see anymore.” Mueller’s strong tendency toward
foulard ties, with their navy or burgundy fields graced by suave
geometries of small patterns, demonstrates a refinement that is nicely
balanced by his wristwatch, with its horsey hexagonal chunk of a black
plastic case. Identified by amateur horologists as a Casio DW-290 sport watch, with a list price of fifty dollars, it is synched to project an incorruptible constancy.
Mueller and his Casio DW-290 gesticulate during a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing in June, 2013, on Capitol Hill.
Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite / AP
The Casio complements the shirts on a spiritual level. “He is so
straight, he always wears a white shirt,” Thomas B. Wilner, a longtime
friend of Mueller’s, told the Post. “He’s conscious that he’s a public
figure, and he doesn’t want anything to compromise his integrity. Even a
blue shirt.”
The white shirt is a symbol of purity, yes, but it also sends
security-blanket signals. Garrett M. Graff, the author of “The Threat
Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror,” is
the foremost scholar of Mueller’s taste in dress shirts. “I once asked
him: Why the cult of the white shirt?,” Graff wrote in Politico, last year. “He answered more philosophically than I’d ever seen him speak before.”
Mueller offered the rationale that, amid the Bureau’s shift toward
counterterrorism, “he felt it important to keep recognizable totems of
the past in place—like the tradition of the white shirt—to help
agents understand it was still the same FBI they'd signed up to join.” Elsewhere, Graff has relayed a vision of Mueller mocking subordinates in staff
meetings who deviated from his color scheme, reporting that “colored
shirts are worn at one's own peril.”
The button-down collars of Mueller’s shirts—so soft and nonchalant
when compared with the spread collars underlining the smirk of Jared
Kushner—are the mark of an unreconstructed preppy. A fellow needn’t
have developed his sartorial manners at fancy schools to earn
distinction as a prep dresser, but it happens that Mueller did,
graduating from St. Paul’s School, in 1962, and from Princeton, in
1966—during the heyday of the Ivy League Look. Under the ascent of this style, with its compromise of poise and ease,
all sorts of mid-century men educated themselves in the virtues of
flannel trousers, madras jackets, and cordovan penny loafers. Mueller
learned a way of looking smart without seeming excessively smooth.
Mueller during a news conference at the Justice Department in June, 2009, in Washington, D.C.
Photograph by Alex Wong / Getty
Within the community of men passionate about preppy clothing, there’s a
lively conversation around Mueller’s preference for starch in his oxford-cloth shirt, a choice evident in the unusual curvature of
the roll of his collar, which bulges where you’d expect it to arc
gently. It takes a certain sort of prep to starch his oxford cloth.
There is a school of thought that holds that this material looks
appealing when wrinkled and creased, and Mueller pointedly does not
attend it. In his emphasis on telegraphing rectitude, it is tempting to
see the influence of Mueller's tenure in the Marines. The military
influence on Mueller’s dress sense is further apparent in his habit of
wearing his hideous Casio turned so that the face is on the inside of
his wrist, the way an infantryman would, and perhaps even in his
inclination toward tailoring that is, by the boxy terms of Washington
cuts, relatively trim.
This is a costume for an allegory. On the one hand, you have Trump’s
onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who, according to Mueller’s
indictment, spent more than $1,300,000 on clothes in the course of about six years, including peak-lapel suits of baronial slickness. On the other hand, you have a government lawyer with an ideally understated public image. An understatement is a statement nonetheless, and Mueller’s sartorial rhetoric encodes heroic values. He is armored in the good, clean, honest look of an extremely civil servant, unaffected and, therefore, inimitable.
Sourse: newyorker.com
