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As the Biden administration draws to a close, the assessments have begun to roll in. There have been looks back to the pandemic, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the response to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the aborted second presidential campaign.
Rarely, however, does anyone mention style. It is not the first thing that comes to mind with this presidency, but it played a bigger role in building its narrative than may have been obvious at the time.
When President Biden took office in 2021, he did so promising a “return to norms” after the chaos of the Trump administration, a return to old-school diplomacy, civility, bipartisanship. How that might look was, in some ways, reflected in the … well, normal dress of the first family.
It began with the inauguration, held during Covid. There may not have been an inaugural ball or even a giant crowd because of pandemic protocols, but that did not mean the administration couldn’t use the pageantry to its own ends. The first and second families all wore American designers (not to mention masks that matched their suits).
And not just American designers but, in Mr. Biden’s case, Ralph Lauren, a man who built his entire identity on the American dream. For her part, Jill Biden chose labels designed by women, like Markarian and Gabriela Hearst in New York.
It made for a deliberate contrast with the cartoon costuming of the Jan. 6 rioters who had besieged the Capitol only weeks before, not to mention the gilded theater of the Trump administration, with a hierarchy of values expressed in part through a love for the luxury labels of Milan and Paris.
It was even a step back from the high-octane White House image making of the Obama administration, especially that of Michelle Obama, who rewrote expectations so thoroughly by using fashion as an expression of diversity and inclusion that she inspired a popular interest in political dressing that has yet to abate.
The Bidens simply turned that interest to their own ends, offering four years of carefully tailored single-breasted blue suits that were slim-cut but not fashion-narrow. Four years of striped shirts and variations on the blue tie. Four years of working-woman shirtdresses and ladylike floral frocks.
It’s not that they were boring. Mr. Biden routinely appeared on Washington’s best dressed lists and was lauded by the likes of Tom Ford. It’s that they were fancy in an accessible, archetypically Washington way. After all, they came into office with a wardrobe shaped by decades in the Washington establishment. Familiarity was part of their selling point, and their clothes helped make the case.
“Their brand was relatability and responsibility, and all of their political promise was encapsulated in how they dressed,” said Tammy Haddad, the chief executive of the consultancy Haddad Media.
Introducing Biden Blue
Indeed, when she opened the Costume Institute exhibition at the Met in 2022, Dr. Biden talked of how clothing is used to “reveal and conceal who we are with symbols and shapes, colors and cuts.” She was using the generic “we,” but she could have been referring to herself and the West Wing. (It was one of only two moments during the Biden presidency in which Dr. Biden directly addressed her relationship with fashion in public.)
She could, for example, have been talking about how they went back to the tradition of wearing American after the Trump years. Back to brands like Oscar de la Renta, which had dressed almost every first lady since Jacqueline Kennedy. And, occasionally, back to grumbling, a little, about the attention paid to their clothes (because, you know, they had more important things to talk about). Even as they played the dressing game with aplomb.
This was, after all, a commander in chief who became so synonymous with a certain accessory, the Ray-Ban 3025 aviator shades, that he not only used them as a stand-in for his first Instagram post but also handed them out as a gift to visiting heads of state and allowed them to become a visual shorthand splashed all over campaign merch. This was a first lady who appeared twice on the cover of Vogue, and a third time in its pages.
And this was a family that so consistently appeared in garments of a certain shade of blue that, as Katie Rogers wrote in her book “American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, From Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden,” it became known as “Biden blue.” Think of the shade of tie that Mr. Biden wore for his three State of the Union addresses and for his farewell speech to the nation, a color officially identified in the first White House Easter egg roll after the pandemic, which featured a “Biden blue egg,” as did every Biden Easter thereafter.
The Bidens even had a stylist. Admittedly, he wasn’t a full-time White House aide like Mrs. Obama’s stylist had been, but the Dr. Biden (and occasionally the president) worked with him on a regular basis. And, as one of his last acts in office, Mr. Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Mr. Lauren, making him the first fashion designer so honored, and on the Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
Repeat Performances
As Dr. Biden said when she donated her inaugural outfits to the Smithsonian, “I knew that my clothes could help me say something important.” They could be, she said, “a voice for me” on days when her job was the photo op.
Sometimes Dr. Biden used her clothes to communicate literally, as she did with the Zadig & Voltaire jacket with the word “love” picked out in studs on the back that she wore to a Group of 7 meeting in Britain (which was widely interpreted as a riposte to Melania Trump’s “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket). Or with the Christian Siriano dress with the word “vote” printed all over it, which she wore at a campaign event just after her husband’s notorious presidential debate in 2024.
Sometimes she used clothes figuratively, as with the matching ivory dress and coat from Gabriela Hearst, both adorned “with the flowers of every American state and territory,” as she noted when she presented the outfit to the Smithsonian. Her point, she said, was to indicate that she intended to be “a first lady for all Americans — doing my part to bring our country back together.” Just as the embroidered sunflower on the wrist of the blue silk Lapointe dress she wore to the State of the Union in 2022 was meant to demonstrate her support for the people of Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion.
And sometimes, perhaps most significantly, she simply used her clothes to amend expectations, rewearing looks at multiple moments of peak public exposure. She wore the same Brandon Maxwell polka-dot dress to the Group of 7 meeting (under that “love” jacket) and to the Tokyo Olympics. The same Reem Acra gown to a state dinner for the South Korean president and the wedding of Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan. The same Schiaparelli black suit to the funeral services for Queen Elizabeth II and Jimmy Carter. And the dress she wore for her wedding to Joe Biden in 1977 and again in 2024 to the White House July 4 celebrations.
For his part, Mr. Biden favored suits from Brooks Brothers and Jos. A. Bank, as well as Mr. Lauren, whose clothes he also wore to host the wedding of Naomi Biden, his granddaughter, on the south lawn of the White House. Even when he normalized ditching the tie for a business-casual open collar and blazer, it seemed as if it was its own form of occasion dressing. It’s just that the occasions were, say, a visit to the Texas border or deplaning during a foreign trip.
The result was a way of modeling a certain kind of behavior — normal, sustainable, economic, detail-oriented — that has fallen out of favor in the age of influence, much as the Biden brand of politics fell out of favor. And in the wake of Trump 2.0, it looks increasingly less like a reset than a relic from a different time.
In the end, and despite Mr. Biden’s affinity for Hoka Transports — maybe because of Mr. Biden’s affinity for Hoka Transports, which ultimately seemed not so much a reflection of his hipness as a reminder of his aging body — the Bidens’ style may have seemed out of step with the moment. But that in itself is part of the story.
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