RFK Jr.’s Preppy Style Plays an Important Role in His 2024 Campaign

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., probably the most attention-getting unbiased candidate for president since Ross Perot, might not have the ballot numbers to finish up on the talk stage subsequent month. However he more and more has one thing else: a fame because the electoral “X factor.” Which implies it’s more and more unimaginable to disregard what could also be termed his “P issue.” And even “Okay issue.”

“P” being prep and “Okay” being Kennedy. In an election fought partly by the pictures that inundate social media and pit archetype towards archetype — Donald J. Trump, the Nineteen Eighties red-tie-wearing sultan of actuality TV, versus President Biden, the aviator-clad deal maker of D.C. — Mr. Kennedy affords a Rorschach check of a unique sort. A minimum of stylistically talking.

His look — skinny rep ties, button-downs, shrugged-on fits, shock of grey hair and weather-beaten tan — not solely units him aside. It additionally speaks on to associations with the early Nineteen Sixties, a golden age of promise that represents “vigor, wit, charisma, change,” stated Sean Wilentz, a professor of American historical past at Princeton College, and which might be buried deep within the American hive thoughts.

And that comes from what Lisa Birnbach, a co-author of “The Official Preppy Handbook,” calls “the fashion semiology of the O.G. Kennedy males”: John F. Kennedy, Mr. Kennedy’s uncle, and his father, the presidential candidate for whom he’s named, together with all of the Camelot-era mythology and hope they characterize. To not point out the basic New England fashion they assumed as their very own sort of camouflage, the higher to align their Irish Catholic clan with Boston Brahmin custom.

And by affiliation, Mr. Kennedy. Nice-tuning his picture to evoke his father and uncle, has the impact of creating folks suppose they know him and what he stands for. That picture in flip offers Mr. Kennedy’s extra outré positions an aura of credibility, even when his phrases don’t: He has claimed that chemicals in the water trigger kids to grow to be transgender and believes that Wi-Fi can result in chronic illness. There’s additionally his anti-vaccine stance.

Because of this, at the same time as members of Mr. Kennedy’s prolonged household have formally repudiated him as a candidate, throwing their support behind Mr. Biden, his image-making has labored as a counterargument with out his having to say a phrase.

“He’s cosplaying as a Kennedy,” stated Avery Trufelman, the producer of the podcast Articles of Curiosity, which included a seven-part series on the historical past of preppy, or Ivy, fashion — doubling down on a way of costume that’s, she stated, deeply related to the Kennedy identify, despite the fact that that affiliation itself got here from its personal type of WASP cosplay. At this level, it has grow to be, she stated, “a really highly effective instrument.”

Mr. Kennedy has lengthy been conscious of the ability of the basic Kennedy picture as expressed by clothes, and the way it may be used to his profit. Way back to 2006, he was the face of Gant, the ur-preppy sportswear model, posing together with his household in a $8.5 million marketing campaign partly to learn Waterkeeper Alliance, then his nonprofit. It was “the primary time in my reminiscence that anybody within the political enviornment has allied himself with any model within the vogue enviornment,” Marylou Luther, then editor of the Worldwide Vogue Syndicate, then advised The New York Instances.

Later, he and his household posed for a Gant catalog shoot entitled “Adorning the Kennedy Summer time Home,” wherein he wore khaki shorts and a navy polo whereas boating, fishing and barbecuing, with red-white-and-blue towels stacked close by.

On the time, Mr. Kennedy described his fashion as “denims and khakis” and “skinny ties.” His image-making is, Ms. Birnbach stated, all about “nostalgia.”

However nostalgia “refracted by a fun-house mirror,” Mr. Wilentz stated.

Largely, that’s as a result of the problems of the Kennedy-prep origin story have pale into historical past, leaving solely the legend behind: the Kennedys, in these garments, representing generational change, dressing to be the breath of recent air they promised to carry.

It’s an image of “the younger president rolling up his sleeves on a ship,” Ms. Trufelman stated.

It’s soccer on the garden. It’s Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, rolled up shirtsleeves, khakis and fits that will have been inherited from a father or a brother. It’s college crests and shirts with the highest button left undone. It’s a spinoff of New England prep-school uniforms redolent of wealth and legacy; of an easy ease and birthright that’s notably engaging when instances appear laborious.

Such sartorial elements compose a “set of symbols that represents one thing pleasant, competent, approachable,” Ms. Trufelman stated. And it’s a signature a part of nationwide fashion. Amid the rise of streetwear and the autumn of the go well with, preppy fashion nonetheless occupies its personal territory within the cloth of the American closet, woven into the romantic historical past of the nation and used as a reference level in motion pictures, advert campaigns and vogue reveals.

“That’s the a part of the legacy he’s attempting to copy,” Mr. Wilentz, the historian, stated.

If unsure, think about the February Super Bowl ad that immediately mimicked John F. Kennedy’s 1960 electoral advert and for which Mr. Kennedy later apologized after his household complained. He stated it had been created independently by a brilliant PAC and never by his marketing campaign, although the truth that most viewers assumed it was his advert displays the message intertwined together with his mere picture.

Contemplate the mimesis concerned: his look on VladTV, the hip-hop information website, in a button-down yellow shirt, sleeves rolled up, and a thin navy rep tie. Or the various movies of Mr. Kennedy shirtless and in denims doing push-ups, as if he had simply dropped to the bottom for some train throughout a recreation of seize the flag, that he posted on his Instagram web page final summer time, a not-so-hidden effort to distinction his boyish vitality (even at age 70; every thing is relative) with that of Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden.

(The Kennedy marketing campaign didn’t reply to requests for remark.)

Or, for that matter, the truth that his marketing campaign merch retailer options not solely the usual T-shirts and caps bearing slogans like “Make Earth Nice Once more” and “The Treatment Is Kennedy,” but additionally the “Resolute Collection,” a line of drugs that includes a sailboat emblem. The gathering, presumably, is a reference to the Resolute, the Nineteenth-century Arctic exploration ship given to the USA by Queen Victoria. The Resolute’s timbers later turned a part of a well-known Oval Workplace desk utilized by 5 presidents, together with John F. Kennedy. (A reproduction is housed within the Kennedy Library.)

The boat illustration, nonetheless, seems much less just like the multimasted warship than a contemporary sailboat, which makes it laborious to see with out as soon as once more tumbling down the rabbit gap that results in ideas of well-known footage of Kennedys crusing in Hyannisport.

It’s a hanging element but additionally a telling one, suggesting a calculated, button-pushing method to visible content material. One which has been there because the starting of Mr. Kennedy’s run.

To wit: When he declared his candidacy, he enlisted the assistance of Tom Soluri, a fancy dress designer in any other case identified for his work with “The Golden Bachelor” and on the movies “The Storied Lifetime of A.J. Fikry” and “West Aspect Story,” and who posted in regards to the job on his Instagram web page. Mr. Soluri dressed Mr. Kennedy in his trademark skinny tie, white button-down and darkish go well with.

“I had the privilege of working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his presidential announcement and run,” Mr. Soluri wrote, including the hashtag #americanstyle to his publish, underscoring the purpose of the look.

The one drawback? In accordance with the tags, Mr. Kennedy was carrying Zegna, the Italian model. Suggesting, as soon as once more, that the attract of this sort of WASP-prep royalty is within the eye, and creativeness, of the beholder.