A Shabbily Dressed Man’s Praise of the Senate Dress Code

I don’t wear suits. In fact, I don’t even currently own one, at least none that would fit after a massive bout of Covid-era-induced weight loss. When formal events come up, I either make my excuses or find some way to skirt the dress code. I am not just casually informal in my dress, I am ideologically so; it’s a waste of money better spent on things of more functional worth, in my opinion. I simply don’t value it, because it serves no practical use to me. (My wife, as you might expect, feels quite differently — and yet she graciously tolerates me.) Business attire is a way of life that, once I was able to discard it, I will never embrace again unless I need to quickly grab a suit because I have been hailed into an emergency meeting with the secretary of defense to be told that the president has been kidnapped by ninjas, and asked whether I am a bad enough dude to rescue him.

So you might expect me to be more sympathetic than most others here at National Review to the Senate’s new relaxation of its formal dress code. And yet I am not. The changes were made primarily at the behest of Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman (nobody in the Democratic caucus feels like they owe Kyrsten Sinema any favors, after all). Fetterman was never known for his sartorial eloquence even when he was a small-town mayor or a statewide candidate — indeed, his dressing-down was a key part of his populist schtick — and is not about to start now, given that he suffered a catastrophic stroke midway through that 2022 Senate campaign and has apparently tied his psychological well-being during recovery to the ability to continue wearing hoodies and jeans whilst conducting official business in the chambers. (Fetterman, incidentally, seems to have made excellent and surprising progress in recovering from his stroke; this is cause for genuine cheer regardless of his politics, especially given how gloomy his prognosis seemed to be earlier this year.) Basically, the dress code for all has been relaxed specifically to accommodate the needs of one member of the chamber’s ruling caucus. Perhaps a Republican Senate in 2025 would revert it, but I doubt it; if Fetterman is still in there, it would naturally play as an attack on a recovering stroke survivor.

It’s not the end of the world. I vastly prefer John Fetterman wearing gym shorts to deliver a speech on the Senate floor to that guy with the Viking helmet on January 6 delivering a speech in the Senate floor, after all. But it’s also not ideal, and another guidepost — whether you approve or disapprove — of fundamental cultural changes afoot in American society.

To start, I genuinely believe that when you ask for a major position of civic trust, you owe it not even to your constituents but to the institution of government you are entering to pay heed to its traditions and formal rules — even if not always religiously. If you, as a politician, asked the people of your state for the job of representing them in the U.S. Senate, you owe it to both of them to show up looking and behaving professionally. John Fetterman is not physically prevented from dressing in a manner that befits the solemnity of his office, he merely doesn’t want to and feels he should be excused because of his private misfortune. (Or perhaps he perceives political gain in it.)

Those are insufficient reasons. I appreciated venerable Maine Republican Susan Collins musing sarcastically about whether she should wear a bikini the next time the chamber was in session. I suspect that neither she nor many other Senators will be taking much advantage of the new informality, at least not yet. But even more obnoxiously, the relaxation of the code applies only to the senators, not their pages, staffers, or to visitors. That is telling as to Majority Leader Schumer’s concern about maintaining some semblance of standards (he himself felt the need to stipulate in his announcement that he would continue to wear a suit, which is a shame; I think we’d all prefer to see what Schumer looks like in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals). But it’s more than a little hypocritical — to say nothing of off-brand — for Democrats to reserve the privilege of slothful comfort during a working day on the taxpayer’s dime exclusively to those of senatorial rank, an admission that this is a change they’d like not to see extended to anyone else they themselves have to work with. Subordinates can now know their proper place — with the business suit an ironic new badge of servitude within Schumer’s chambers.

But in a way, this actually gets it all backward. The dress-code change is a minor event in its own right, almost trivial when set against the scale of grander events in political news. But by the same token it is no coincidence that such rules changes are even possible in 2023, because of shifting cultural mores not just within the Democratic Party, but rather more obviously with society overall. This is nothing new. Once upon a time, Romans dressed a certain way in the Senate or Forum; over centuries, that dress code changed, so that by the end of the Republic the old styles and ensigns were regarded not only as archaic, but theorized incorrectly to even be foreign. Political dress style naturally changes with society’s culture; how can it not be so? What happened in the Senate the other day occurred in most workplaces long ago — and that’s if you’re even required to go into the office as a white-collar worker these days.

In that sense, I find myself less outraged about the Senate’s dress-code change — though I obviously disapprove — than sadly resigned to it and more interested in it as a symptom of the general direction of our modern culture, toward both greater informality and greater unseriousness about the work of government. If the Senate isn’t accomplishing anything these days — check Pew’s most recent numbers gauging American opinion about the state of U.S. politics as a whole to see how despairing Americans are — then it makes sense, in a way, to treat it as a more casual affair less worthy of outward respect from its members. In a world where politicians are capable of behaving more like reality-television-show personalities than statesmen and in fact rewarded handsomely for it, then what’s another pair of gym shorts on the fire by comparison? It is merely another signpost along a journey taken through our rapidly vulgarizing age.