If you came of age in the mid-Noughties, there’s a high chance that your musical icons dressed like they’d put the entire contents of Burton on an overly aggressive spin-cycle. Indie bands wore shrunken suits, paired with ties so thin as to almost appear two-dimensional. The overall effect conspired to make them look like sixth formers who’d grown out of the formal gear bought by their mums. It was, surely we can all agree, a dark time, sartorially speaking. So riddle me this: why is our prime minister trying to single-handedly bring back this cursed trend?
When Rishi Sunak burst onto our collective radar in 2020 in his capacity as the chancellor tasked with overseeing the Covid pandemic, his tailoring was pretty widely praised. After all, it was a major departure from the shambolic, “dressed in the dark” aesthetic pioneered by then-prime minister Boris Johnson, a man whose home was swathed in gold wallpaper but apparently lacked a single full-length mirror. “Forget the budget – who is Rishi Sunak’s tailor?” gushed The Spectator. “Not since the days of Winston Churchill and latterly Michael Heseltine has a Conservative politician looked so good on the job,” posited GQ (upon reading that sentence, Michael Portillo presumably wiped away a tear, before getting back to the serious business of cataloguing his many rainbow-hued suits).
