On Tuesday, Americans go to the polls in the much-ballyhooed game-changing midterm elections, and by Wednesday, things in Washington could look a lot different – not just metaphorically, but literally, too. If the results are, as pollsters and pundits keep predicting, out with a lot of the old and in with some new, there’s bound to be related fallout on the fashion front.
I’m not talking here, you understand, about the tendency of the odd Tea Party member to dress up like Abraham Lincoln, a weird costume development that will probably be on display in Stephen Colbert’s March to Keep Fear Alive in Washington, DC (the counterpart of Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity also taking place on Saturday in DC). And I’m not talking about a bump in Halloween sales of Sarah Palin costumes. I’m talking about the fact that increasingly, politicians are becoming sartorial role models. When they change position, so do the winds of trend.
Before you roll your eyes and cry, as Barney’s window dresser Simon Doonan did recently in Slate: “A successful politician must appear to be Prada-oblivious” (translation: they shouldn’t look as if they spend taxpayer time or money thinking about fashion), consider the following study. Conducted by Professor David Yermack of the Stern School at New York University, and featured in the Harvard Business Review, the report looked at Michelle Obama’s public appearances from 2008 to 2009, and concluded that she had “created $2.7bn in cumulative abnormal returns – value over and above normal market variations – for fashion and retail companies associated with the clothes she wore.”