Suit-Shaming: Washington’s New Favorite Diss

By Ashley Fetters Maloy / The Washington Post

14:50 JST, March 12, 2025

In the Western world, some garments are meant to be seen only in the singular, to set their wearer apart from the rest of a crowd. An umpire’s uniform, for example. A wedding gown. A bishop’s miter, or a judge’s robe.

Suits, though, have historically done the opposite. Where there’s one, there are more. In cities, whole neighborhoods are defined by the besuited businesspeople who bustle through them during the daytime hours. The phrase “suits,” on its own, is sometimes used to invoke a phalanx of faceless and interchangeable corporate types, in their slacks and ties, endlessly entering and exiting elevators.

Suits, in other words, have long been a powerful visual symbol of belonging to a particular class. And although workplace trends and the coronavirus pandemic have made suits a slightly rarer sight in many American offices in recent years, their status as an in-group signifier has found a new flock of defenders: the Trump administration.

The Suit Wars of 2025 are upon us. Multiple dustups during the nascent months of President Donald Trump’s second term, involving the attire of Elon Musk and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, have resulted from men asserting superiority over one another by questioning each other’s suits, or lack thereof.

In late February, Trump welcomed Zelensky to the White House with a remark about his clothes right off the bat: “You’re all dressed up today. … He’s all dressed up today,” Trump said sarcastically, turning to photographers as he shook hands with Zelensky. Zelensky has explained that he wears tactical, military-style dress to show solidarity with Ukrainian armed forces, and will do so until Ukraine’s war with Russia is over.

Later that day, reporter Brian Glenn – a staffer at the right-wing cable channel Real America’s Voice, as well as the boyfriend of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) – asked Zelensky during a meeting with Trump why he hadn’t worn a suit to the White House.

The meeting had already turned from calm to confrontational when Trump and Vice President JD Vance accused Zelensky of being insufficiently grateful for U.S. support in the war against Russia, and Zelensky urged them to understand that Russian President Vladimir Putin was untrustworthy in matters of diplomacy.

“Why don’t you wear a suit? You’re at the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit. … Do you own a suit?” Glenn abruptly asked Zelensky. “A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the dignity of this office.”

“I will wear costume after this war will finish,” Zelensky responded, though some have interpreted this as him using a Ukrainian word for “suit”: “kostyum.” Then, looking at Glenn, he added, “Maybe something like yours, yes. Maybe something better. I don’t know. We will see. Maybe something cheaper.”

Glenn’s pointed question drew attention to Zelensky’s distinctly less formal outfit just as the Trump team needed a way to demonstrate its authority. Do you not know how to dress correctly? Or are you just too poor? And with his retort about his plans to wear a better and cheaper suit than Glenn’s, Zelensky made an unspoken assertion of his own: Money can’t buy taste. (Like much of Zelensky’s military-style apparel over the past few years, his long-sleeve shirt that day featured the Ukrainian trident emblem and was made by the Ukrainian menswear label Damirli, whose designer, Elvira Gasanova, has also dressed Zelensky’s wife for her duties as first lady.)

Musk, too, has lately been a target of suit-related criticism. Amid growing concern that the tech mogul is wielding an unprecedented and dangerous amount of power at the U.S. DOGE Service (he has been jeeringly labeled the “co-president”), Trump took a jab at his habit of showing up at the White House in T-shirts and baseball caps in a joint interview on Fox in February.

“He’s got some very brilliant young people working for him that dress much worse than him, actually,” Trump said of Musk’s work at DOGE. “They dress in just T-shirts. You wouldn’t know they have a 180 IQ.”

Musk responded congenially, chuckling that he was merely “tech support.” But two weeks later (and shortly after the Zelensky debacle), Musk showed up to Trump’s March 4 address to Congress wearing a dark tailored suit with a crisp white shirt and blue tie.

That Saturday, Colin Jost joked on “Saturday Night Live,” “It’s a refreshing reminder that bullying still works.”

Trump has derided Musk’s sloppy style in the past: As Michael Wolff reported in his book “All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America,” Trump expressed bewilderment after Musk joined him onstage at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania wearing a MAGA hat and an untucked T-shirt that exposed his bare midriff. “What the f— is wrong with this guy? And why doesn’t his shirt fit?”

And the president has also ridiculed other political opponents for their less-than-polished dress. In 2022, he put the notoriously relaxed hoodie-and-shorts uniform of then-Lt. Gov. John Fetterman on blast at a rally in Pennsylvania, where Fetterman was running for Senate against longtime Trump ally Mehmet Oz.

“This guy is a disaster. He comes in with a sweatsuit on – I’ve never seen him wear a suit! A dirty, dirty, dirty sweatsuit. It’s really disgusting,” Trump said, as he compared Fetterman’s dress to “a teenager getting high in his parents’ basement.”

Trump is a famously formal dresser; even his sparingly seen casual looks still tend to include a business-casual khaki. At the Easter Egg Roll in 2017 – an event to which Barack Obama had worn jeans the year prior – Trump wore his usual uniform of a dark suit and red tie. For much of his long career in the public eye, Trump has been known to favor suits made by Brioni, an Italian label heralded for its meticulous tailoring and high-quality fabrics.

The people in Trump’s orbit tend to dress formally by extension. His three sons are frequently seen in suits and ties. The women in his family and workplace tend to dress to the nines, too, in sky-high stiletto heels and formfitting dresses.

So perhaps it’s no wonder that Trump has a history of targeting the underdressed. In this administration, underdressing might be an act of defiance.