{"id":216,"date":"2025-12-28T03:44:43","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T03:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/?p=216"},"modified":"2025-12-28T03:44:43","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T03:44:43","slug":"what-zohran-mamdanis-suit-tells-us-about-the-man-and-the-way-society-is-changing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/?p=216","title":{"rendered":"What Zohran Mamdani\u2019s suit tells us about the man and the way society is changing"},"content":{"rendered":"

G<\/span>rowing up in London in the 00s, I was surrounded by suits. On City boys darting around the Square Mile. In Hyde Park, where Arab dads in baggy suits kicked footballs with their children in honeyed light. At school, where cheap grey suits were our uniform. The suit has always been a costume of seriousness that signals powerfulness and performance; all the things I was apparently supposed to want if I ever intended to become a \u201cman\u201d. But until recently, my generation seemed to wear them less and less, and they had all but disappeared from my consciousness.<\/p>\n

Then came the newly elected New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who was sworn in at a private ceremony dressed in a sober black overcoat, crisp white shirt and an Eri silk tie <\/em>from New Delhi-based designer Kartik Kumra of Kartik Research \u2013 styled by US fashion editor, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. Buoyed up by an ingenious campaign, he caught the imagination of the world like no other New York mayoral candidate of recent times. But whether he was throwing his hands in the air at a hip-hop club or at a premiere party for the film Marty Supreme, one thing on his campaign trail rarely changed: he was almost always in a suit. Loosely tailored, modern with soft shoulders, yet conventional and ordinary, his is a typically middle-class millennial suit \u2013 well, as typical as it can be for a generation that rarely bothers to wear one.<\/p>\n

\"Zohran

<\/span>Mamdani at the Marty Supreme premiere afterparty with Odessa A\u2019zion, one of the film\u2019s stars, on 16 December 2025.<\/span> Photograph: John Nacion\/Variety\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe suit is in this weird position,\u201d says men\u2019s fashion writer Derek Guy (AKA Twitter\u2019s <\/strong>\u201cthe menswear guy\u201d) over the phone from California. \u201cIt\u2019s been dying a slow death since the end of the second world war,\u201d with the real dip arriving in the 1990s with \u201cthe rise of business casual\u201d.<\/p>\n

In many ways, a suit is just a subtle form of drag in that it performs masculinity<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/aside>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s basically only worn in the most formal locations: weddings, funerals, to some extent, court appearances,\u201d Guy says. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of like the kimono in Japan,\u201d in that it \u201cessentially represents a tradition that has long ceded from daily life.\u201d Many politicians \u201cwear a suit to say: \u2018I am a politician, you can trust me. You should vote for me. I have authority.\u2019\u201d But while the suit has historically signalled this, today it performs authority in the hope of winning public confidence. As Guy explains: \u201cSince we\u2019re also living in a liberal democracy, politicians want to seem relatable, because they\u2019re trying to get your votes.\u201d In many ways, a suit is just a subtle form of drag, in that it performs masculinity, authority and even proximity to power. Or at least how politicians are expected to look.<\/p>\n

Guy\u2019s words stayed with me. On the rare occasions I need a suit \u2013 a wedding or formal occasion \u2013 I dust off the one I bought from a Tokyo department store (from high-street brand Global Work, which is like Gap) several years ago. When I first picked it up off the rack, it made me feel sophisticated and expensive, but the slim cut now feels pass\u00e9. I imagine this will be only too familiar for many of us in the diaspora whose parents come from somewhere else, particularly global south countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Growing up in London in the 00s, I was surrounded by suits. On City boys darting around the Square Mile. In Hyde Park, where Arab dads in baggy suits kicked footballs with their children in honeyed light. At school, where cheap grey suits were our uniform. The suit has always been a costume of seriousness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":217,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Mens-fashion-qrgtr3q33wk.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[46,24,60,58,63,59],"class_list":["post-216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mens-fashion","tag-fashion","tag-life-and-style","tag-mens-fashion","tag-mens-suits","tag-us-news","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalola.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}