Sharp-Dressed Man The Law & Liberty podcast

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Sharp-Dressed Man

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Driven in part by the revival of a classic knit sweater emblazoned with an American flag, “Ralph Lauren nationalism” has emerged as a trope among online talking-heads. Well-dressed political scientist Samuel Goldman is also known for his sharp takes on menswear. He joins host James Patterson to discuss his recent article for Compact magazine that tackled the concept. There may be something to the Ralph Lauren aesthetic that captures an essential quality of the American character, Goldman argues, but it’s not exactly what the highly-online chatterers think it is.

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. Our guest today is Dr. Samuel Goldman. He is the associate professor of political science at George Washington University, as well as the executive director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom and Democracy and director of the Politics and Values Program. He’s written God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America, and his second book was After Nationalism. He has a third book on higher education, right? Is that right?

Samuel Goldman (01:13):

That’s right. Conservative Critics of Higher Education.

James Patterson (01:16):

Yes, there he is. So I guess it’s too late for me to say this, but Dr. Goldman, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Samuel Goldman (01:22):

Thanks, James. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, but especially on a subject of such pressing national importance.

James Patterson (01:29):

Exactly. So it is summertime, or it’s about to be, and so we don’t always need to be very serious, although this is in a way very serious for certain enthusiasts. But we’ll be talking about Sam Goldman’s article, “The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism,” published on April 25, 2025, for Compact Magazine. And why don’t we start with the big picture here, which is why is it so funny or so interesting that so many people are adopting a Ralph Lauren aesthetic given what Ralph Lauren was doing when he was creating that aesthetic?

Samuel Goldman (02:10):

So the piece sort of takes us its point of departure genre of tweets or memes that can be found on Twitter and probably other places as well that are tagged “Ralph Lauren nationalism,” and they have these images of beautiful models wearing tartans and tweeds and riding horses in the desert or in other improbable scenarios. And the implication is that this is something that has been lost. I was going to say, you open up a magazine, but of course we don’t do that anymore. You open up your browser and you get this algorithm that pushes advertising on you, and it depends what you click on, but you don’t see beautiful people in this exotic, yet also vaguely American fantasy world. And this is presented as sort of a conservative or even reactionary statement that what we have now is slop. It’s ugly, it’s stupid, it’s not even cosmopolitan.

(03:24):

It’s sort of the lowest common denominator, globalized. We used to have this proud aesthetic vision. And there’s some truth to that. But it’s interesting as I go on to argue in the piece, because what Ralph Lauren was really doing in the second half of the twentieth century, and especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s, was recreating or imagining a whole vision of America that was not reality and was not derived from his own experience of vaguely old money, WASP-y life. It was something that a Jewish kid from the Bronx created from movies and books and watching people on the street. And I draw reader’s attention to this not just as a sort of pedantic corrective about what Ralph Lauren was really doing, but also to suggest that this is the sort of cultural nationalism or cultural patriotism that we need. It is optimistic, it embraces freedom as a core American value. It’s not “pluralist” in the hard multicultural sense, but it is flexible and welcoming and open-ended. That’s a lot of what I and others like and admire about this country. So Ralph Lauren nationalism, yes, but I don’t think it means quite what some of the people who are making these memes believe.

James Patterson (05:01):

Yeah, there’s a sort of a “RETVRN to Tradition,” and that return is always spelled with a V. And the tradition of Ralph Lauren is, as you point out, actually a kind of freewheeling repurposing of even older men’s wear traditions that at the time of his doing that were considered pretty subversive. And so it’s odd that something that’s subversive, not really in a political sense, but just sort of upending a lot of norms in menswear would be something that would ever become conservative. So what is it that Ralph Lauren did to menswear that made it a contemporary aesthetic people long for again?

Samuel Goldman (05:43):

Well, so Ralph Lauren emerges as a cultural figure in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and this is the moment of real collapse in traditional standards of dress and behavior. You look at movies or photographs from 1960 and basically every man is wearing a suit and often a hat, women are wearing dresses and gloves. Just ten years later, the world looks very, very different. And there’s a passage in Saul Bellow’s great novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet. I allude to Bellow in the piece, where he describes riding a New York City bus in the late ‘60s, and he says, you can see everything: cowboys, Indians, Siberian hunters, but no longer the traditional Western bourgeois uniform that had been pretty stable for about a century before that. So this is the moment when Ralph Lauren emerges, and what he does is make elements of traditional clothing: tweed coats and suits and ties and shined shoes. But he makes them novel and appealing, and, it’s a cliche, but sexy again by drawing on what he had seen in the movies as a kid growing up in the Bronx in the ‘40s and ‘50s, his interest in Western and Native American culture, this sort of safari fantasia that he derived, I think probably from books of H. Rider Haggard or something like that, all of which were made into films.

(07:44):

And he makes this traditional clothing that had become very staid and boring and unappealing, something that people wanted to wear again.

James Patterson (07:57):

And it was bound up in a kind of restoration of a memory for who the Anglo-Protestants WASP-y types were and points of leisure and work when the bourgeois uniform, as you put it, had essentially domesticated and worn out a sense of a type of life, right? Everyone in a gray flannel suit with a white pocket square and a TV fold, and the most that you might get is a clip with your favorite college football team on the tie. This sort of new aesthetic was exciting, but it was also very American, unlike say, the Siberian hunter of Saul Bellow’s imagination.

Samuel Goldman (08:44):

Right? Well, what’s American about it I think is the indifference to rules. So just looking at the core tailoring in Ralph Lauren’s imagination, the suits and ties shirts and sport coats, a lot of that was derived from British sartorial culture. But in Britain there were very strict rules about what you could wear in certain settings and at certain times, and there are all of these anecdotes of people who committed these terrible faux pas because they were wearing the wrong tie in the wrong place. And part of I think the rebellion against these more traditional modes of dress was a resistance to that kind of regimentation and status enforcement. What Ralph Lauren did basically was just to put it all together in any way that he wanted, whether it corresponded to the traditional expectations for setting and time or not. So I’ve been talking about Ralph Lauren mostly as a guy who sold suits, and he did. But the more interesting things in the Ralph Lauren aesthetic are the way that he combined what were regarded as casual or sports or workwear with traditional tailoring, which is something that people do all the time now. It seems intuitive, but in the early seventies when Ralph Lauren was wearing, say, jeans, cowboy boots, a denim work shirt and an English style hacking jacket, so a kind of sport coat that was designed for riding horses. That was not something that people did, and that reflected this freedom that he asserted to put together things that he liked and believed were beautiful without caring about the social conventions.

James Patterson (11:13):

It’s funny then, so if you were on that bus and you saw that person you just described in that outfit, he would actually fit in with the other unusually dressed people, but we don’t see it that way because of the great success Ralph Lauren had in developing this uniquely American aesthetic. Another element to this story, and you’ve already alluded to it, is another really sort of American feature here is that Ralph Lauren isn’t a WASP, he’s a Jewish kid from the Bronx.

Samuel Goldman (11:45):

Right? Yeah. I was discussing this with someone on Twitter when the piece came out and he said something like, well, Ralph Lauren was just producing for the mass market things that WASPs had been wearing in gentleman’s clubs and on polo fields and so on, and there’s an element of truth to that. But it’s important to remember that Ralph Lauren had no personal experience of those things. As you say, he was a Jewish kid who grew up in the Bronx. So rather than sort of developing organically from his own social experience, his aesthetic was a pastiche of things he saw. In those days, you could walk around midtown and see well-dressed people and imitate them. That’s less true these days. Of the movies he watched, of the books he read, of the magazines that he browsed. So once again, I think the way to see this is as an act of imagination, almost a kind of collage, rather than simply a mass market version of something that already

James Patterson (13:10):

Existed. Yeah, there’s a kind of comparison made to the attire of one billionaire by the name of Elon Musk here. It says that he attended a cabinet meeting in a t-shirt, peacoat and baseball cap. Why does this not work when it worked for Ralph Lauren’s pastiche?

Samuel Goldman (13:33):

Well, I think in part it’s because Musk, as far as I can tell, and whatever his other qualities seem to be, absolutely, this is a mixed metaphor I guess, but tone deaf or colorblind when it comes to aesthetics. You only have to look at the Cyber Truck to sort of wonder what he thinks is beautiful. And that I think is consistent with his background in the tech world where not just casual dressing, but a kind of defiant sloppiness became a way of distinguishing oneself and also expressing superiority to the finance guys and the lawyers who wore suits. So there’s an element of trolling in Musk that I don’t perceive in Ralph Lauren. He wasn’t trying to provoke anyone. He was trying to look good as he understood it. But also Musk just seems indifferent as so many rich and powerful people do to questions of beauty or really any distinction between public and private.

(14:57):

And maybe that’s a kind of deeper issue that we could get at. It used to be believed until very recently that certain forms of dress and conduct were appropriate when you were presenting yourselves to others, even if they were not what you might choose by yourself or among friends and family. And I think we’ve lost that sense of public responsibility, not only in dress, but also in speech and manner. And I myself have been talking about doing things on Twitter, so I’m as guilty of this as anyone else, but social media probably plays a role in that and Musk, at least in his current incarnation, is a creature of social media, and that seems to be reflected in his choice of attire.

James Patterson (15:53):

There’s this kind of Hegelian decelsionism mentioned here in fashion terms in your article, he says, “As the writer, Bruce Boyer has pointed out change in men’s clothing since the French Revolution has followed a predictable arc, garments begin as military gear or sports clothing and then are adapted for less regimented pursuits. After a period of familiarization, formerly casual items become acceptable as business dress. A few decades later, old fashioned working attire shifts to evening or ceremonial purposes. Finally, the ceremonial wardrobe is relegated to servants where it may survive in anachronistic glory for a very long time. This cycle is the reason doormen and fancy buildings as sartorial enthusiast Tom Wolfe absorbed, observed, in Radical Chic dressed like 1870 Austrian colonels.” That is a paragraph that had me actually laughing to myself to the point I actually had to explain the article to my wife, this sort of decline that follows from this sort of militaristic to sweatshirt aesthetic. What is going on here? You implied earlier that it might be actually a show of power or show of authority that you can defy existing standards. Is that what’s happening?

Samuel Goldman (17:19):

Well, I think that’s certainly following up on your last question. I think that’s certainly part of the point that Musk was trying to make. And if you look in the photos of the cabinet meetings, most of the people present are wearing traditional business attire. And of course, Musk is saying, “I’m truly important. I don’t have to wear a uniform like the rest of you drones.” And the ability to defy rules is almost always an assertion of power or superiority. So I talk in the piece a little bit about one of the great inspirations and precursors to Ralph Lauren, the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, who developed a lot of aspects of the modern male wardrobe. And in doing that, he was breaking many of the rules that he was subject to in Edwardian England. So all sorts of things that now seem quite formal, like the flannel suits you mentioned a few minutes ago, flannel was regarded in the nineteenth century basically as athleisure.

(18:39):

I mean it was what you wore to play tennis, it was sweatpants. So for the Prince of Wales, then the King, then the Duke of Windsor to adopt flannel as an everyday business or quasi business material was like wearing sweatpants or flees. And we sort of miss that. If we look at the pictures and say, oh, well, everyone’s wearing a suit. It’s all so formal. In a sense it is, but standards are always changing. And it’s true that there’s this pattern that Bruce Boyer, whose work not only on clothing but also on music and other aspects of American culture, I highly recommend to everyone. There’s a cycle that goes back really to the French Revolution, which is when the aristocratic court no longer set the standard for men’s dress. Before the French Revolution roughly, to be well dressed was to dress the way you would dress in the court of the King of France.

(19:48):

And for obvious reasons that became less tenable after 1789. And since then, for almost 250 years, almost every innovation in men’s clothing has come either from the military or from sports. That’s where new forms of clothing come from. And there’s this sort of cycle where they start as uniform gear or sportswear, and then men, especially men of the upper class, start wearing those things outside their intended purposes. And there’s a reason for that, which I think connects to what we were saying about Musk. It’s a way of saying you don’t have a job or you don’t have the kind of job where people tell you what to wear. If you can come to work or conduct your regular day dressed in extracted bits of uniform or in what you would wear to engage in sports, what you’re saying is, I don’t really need to be here.

(20:50):

So that’s a status move. That’s a power move. Then as more people lower in the social hierarchy, imitate these models, what had been slightly risque assertions of status are normalized as business dress. And that’s exactly what you see with something like the flannel suit, which when the Prince of Wales started wearing it in the twenties was not quite right, not something that you would wear to work in a bank or law office. But by the 1950s and 1960s, that has become the paragon of professional attire, especially in the United States. The Brits never quite reconciled themselves to flannel suits. But then there is a further rebellion where this business uniform is associated with what your dad wears to an office and job that he hates, and people who want to demonstrate their independence of that kind of life then appeal again to new sources in military or sportswear or after World War II.

(22:01):

The really novel development is work wear, looking not only to the top of the social hierarchy, but to the bottom. Wearing what a longshoreman or a cowboy would wear. And as that in turn is adopted by normies, what had been traditional business dress moves on to servants. And this it seems to me is what’s happening with the modern suit as it developed in the twentieth century. It had a good run for 75 years or more. It was the definitive uniform of wealth and power. Now, wealthy and powerful people, and again, Musk is a symbol of that, don’t dress that way. It’s something that their servants and followers wear. And what that probably means if the pattern holds, is that in, I don’t know, 20 or 30 years, only waiters or doormen or other people who are in directly servile positions will wear this remnant of the twentieth century.

James Patterson (23:19):

Yeah, you mean they’ll be wearing peacoats with t-shirts and baseball camps?

Samuel Goldman (23:24):

It may take to the end of the 20th century before we get there, but you’re right to bring that up because that is the pattern, because we all want more status and the signs of more wealth than we actually have.

James Patterson (23:39):

It seems as though the cycle has accelerated for a lot of men’s fashion, even though it doesn’t fall into menswear anymore. There was during the 2010s, I think what really put the final end to this was COVID, but it was something called “hype beast” culture, where it was all about small street wear sets of clothes that would drop in limited editions in different places. And that was the extent to which you would find people, men, especially interested in attire was primarily in having collectors items on their persons. And there would be interviews with people about how much they’d spent either in the original market or in the secondary market to acquire some of these. Is this really where menswear is going to end up?

Samuel Goldman (24:31):

Well, I think one thing that has really changed since Ralph Lauren’s era is that we no longer have a common mass culture in the way that we once did. And Lauren’s great success as a businessman was to take these things that previously you had to buy in special stores and you had to know what you were looking for and put them in the mall where everyone could buy them and make it a true mass phenomenon. And this is one of the other things that’s different when you look at just pictures of ordinary people before about 2000, I would say maybe a little bit later, everyone kind of looks the same, kind of looks coherent, and that’s a function of mass consumption because everyone is buying from the same stores that have the same basic items. So everything is consistent. What’s happened since then as a result of social media, individualized commerce, where you can get whatever you want from anywhere in the world very quickly and cheaply, is that you can really do your own thing in a way that was much more difficult and expensive in the past.

(26:07):

So people talk a lot about the casualization of dress, and of course that’s right. What’s even more striking in some ways is the growing incoherence of dress where it’s not just that different people dress in very different ways in the same settings, but also what they wear is a collection of incoherent items thrown together in a way that I think just looks terrible. And part of the reason I wrote this piece and I’m sort of sympathetic to people tweeting these Ralph Lauren nationalism memes is that we just look awful. America looks awful, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

James Patterson (26:57):

I’m very self-conscious because I’m in the midst of moving, so I’m dressed very awfully.

Samuel Goldman (27:04):

I know, but no one can see you.

James Patterson (27:05):

Oh, that’s true. That’s true.

Samuel Goldman (27:08):

On a podcast, no one knows

James Patterson (27:15):

One of the other pressures on the American public. It’s not just the casualization of the standards, but it’s also, as you point out later in the piece, the changing nature of production, the transition of Ralph Lauren from these kind of decontextualized repurposed British and American menswear trends was also the creation of the more casual Polo line that became one of the first street wear products that I was talking about earlier. There is a hilarious discussion of “Bury Me with the Lo On” by Thirstin Howell III–I will require anyone to go read that themselves because it was peak Sam Goldman to me. But what about the backend to production and financialization has also had such an effect on menswear and why we look so awful today?

Samuel Goldman (28:12):

Yeah, so I was very happy, first of all to have a pretext to quote the rapper Thirstin Howell III in this piece

James Patterson (28:21):

Just an outstanding name.

Samuel Goldman (28:24):

I don’t have many opportunities to do that. So that was a pleasure for me. And as you say, it is an interesting part of this story that in the late eighties and early nineties, a lot of the Ralph Lauren products and especially the Polo stuff, were adopted by rappers who just loved it, and they wore it in a very distinctive way. So instead of a tight fitting polo shirt that a tennis player might wear, they were loose and baggy and they preferred bright colors and a lot of contrast. But I mentioned that in the piece partly to dispel this idea that this aesthetic and these products were only appealing to WASPs or wannabe WASPs, they really captured the imagination of everyone. But I think that in pop culture, to the extent I can tell, just as in the rest of society, there is much less interest these days even in appropriating and repurposing and recombining traditional clothing and iconography.

(29:55):

When my wife forces me to watch the red carpet at some award show, a lot of the celebrities just look weird. And among the men anyway, it’s clear that they and the people who dress them just have no idea how things are supposed to fit. And I think that’s a feature in the increasing uglification of America. As we lose practice dressing intentionally and with some aesthetic purpose, we forget how to do it. And if you follow the menswear internet, as I’m ashamed to say that I do, there’s another genre of meme that shows male celebrities who wear suit jackets with the tag still sewn on. When you buy a jacket off the rack, there’s a little branded tag on the sleeve. They leave those on because they or whoever tells them what to wear doesn’t even know that that has to come off

James Patterson (31:05):

And they don’t open the vents.

Samuel Goldman (31:06):

Right? And the vents remain sewn. So unlike Ralph Lauren who knew how to make these elements of traditional clothing elegant and appealing today, the celebrities, the musicians, the sort of cultural figures, they are the worst advertisement because they look terrible.

James Patterson (31:32):

And one of the things that your answer made me think of immediately was that there’s a lot also of androgyny in male fashion, and maybe it’s because the people who do so much of the styling today are used to working with women and they know nothing about menswear, and so they’re just putting men in women’s clothing because that’s all they really know. And of course, the little secret to all of this is that there’s much less money than there used to be in a lot of this stuff. And so it may be also harder to find the people you need for doing publicity for films, considering the budgets for those get blown on marketing and post-production, and the publicists that used to run these things don’t know who even to go to. So maybe the whole reason for uglification might also be that the people we used to look to at reference points can no longer afford to get people to put them in the right clothes.

Samuel Goldman (32:32):

That is possible, but I still find that hard to believe. It is true that the cost of high quality menswear and especially a high quality tailoring has increased substantially beyond inflation even within my lifetime. And that’s largely due to a decreasing supply of labor. There are just not that many good tailors anymore.

James Patterson (33:05):

There is exactly one in Naples.

Samuel Goldman (33:08):

There are very few. And my alterations tailor here in Washington just closed his business. He’s probably in his seventies. He’s going to retire and he deserves it. But I’ve chatted with him about this and he said he couldn’t find anyone who wanted to take it over. So there are fewer people with the skills, and that inevitably drives up prices. That said, it’s not that expensive, at least for people who are presumably rich. And that’s why I’m so confused, not so much by Musk, who again, I think is making a point, but by people who are in business or in politics or other areas of public life and would almost certainly afford to look better than they do, but they either just don’t care or they don’t know how.

James Patterson (34:09):

I read a couple years ago, a book by Anthony Bradley, he’s at the Acton Institute, and it was actually a defense of fraternities, which is not something you hear people defend all that often. And one of the features of fraternities, I was in one as an undergraduate at the University of Houston, was that you actually had to wear formal attire to meetings, for at least my chapter. And if you were a pledge, if you were a person who was trying to join, you actually had a class in which we taught you how to do a forehand knot and explained how the front of the tie is supposed to be longer than the back. And a lot of the socialization into menswear has just sort of disappeared. And the fact that I’m having to do this when I’m 20 years old to these guys as pledges was something that was pretty funny to me in retrospect, because I guess this has been happening for a long time.

Samuel Goldman (35:11):

Maybe I should go into that business. I could be a traveling consultant and teach fraternity brothers how to tie their ties. But of course, you’re right, which is that we have lost or are rapidly losing the social institutions that pass on this knowledge. And that means that you have to kind of figure it out yourself, which you can do if it’s something that you are interested in. But that means also that it becomes a form of hobby.

(35:52):

And there are people who have this hobby. I am among them–and there are dozens of us, as they say on Arrested Development–but it seems to be disappearing as a normie phenomenon. And again, I think that’s important because our physical surroundings matter to us. What we see and what we hear and what we wear is relevant to the way that we conduct ourselves. And it’s a broader discussion maybe for another time, but that’s again, what I think has been lost. We no longer believe that public responsibilities even exist, let alone that they are relevant and worthy.

James Patterson (36:55):

Well, unfortunately, we’re going to have to leave it at that. We started with this optimism for a return to Ralph Lauren nationalism, but..

Samuel Goldman (37:05):

It’s good that you’re stopping me because I was going to start talking about gnosticism and romanticism, and nobody wants to hear that in the summer.

James Patterson (37:13):

It’s a summer podcast. We’re not doing narcissism. My goodness. Again, the essay is “The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism.” The author is Samuel Goldman. Dr. Goldman, thank you so much for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Samuel Goldman (37:28):

Always a pleasure, James.

James Patterson (37:28):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.

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