The plain black T-shirt, long the least remarkable item in any wardrobe, has quietly become one of the most powerful tools in modern political communication. For voters, that shift matters more than it might first appear, because the clothes politicians choose are part of how they signal who they serve and how they intend to govern.
The clearest example comes from the United States. Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democrat who this week became the first Muslim elected to the US Senate in history, made a tight black T-shirt his signature look across a year-long campaign. He paired it with jeans and friendship bracelets made by his children, and described his approach as “minimal look, maximal politics”. Asked why he wore it, El-Sayed said it was “the ideal shirt for somebody who has got to be in a bunch of different kinds of spaces and places all day, every day”.
For the public watching him, the effect was deliberate. Johnny Davis, the luxury director of Esquire magazine, notes that the garment radiates “authority, seriousness, a certain no-nonsense masculinity”. In contrast to the boxy suits associated with the Maga aesthetic, El-Sayed’s T-shirt softens the lines between politics and the public. It reads as anti-establishment without being alienating, a visual argument that the person wearing it is accessible rather than remote.
That contrast is, in Davis’s view, a defining one. Comparing El-Sayed’s style with Donald Trump’s, he says: “One represents an almost exaggerated version of traditional corporate power dressing; the other is trying to establish a completely different idea of authority. It’s a line in the sand.” For citizens weighing who understands their lives, that visual line can carry real weight.
Meanwhile, the T-shirt’s rise is part of a longer story about how leaders try to appear close to ordinary people. Politicians including Barack Obama once conveyed seriousness by removing their jackets and rolling up their shirtsleeves. In May, Keir Starmer appeared on stage without a jacket, cuffs deliberately folded back, during a make-or-break speech after dire election results, drawing comparisons to John Major. Davis sees the black T-shirt as the next evolution of that gesture, except that now “you don’t even need to roll the sleeves up”.
The same calculation has shaped politics elsewhere. In July, the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett swapped his usual smart shirts and suits for a black T-shirt and jeans as he attempted a political comeback, a wardrobe shift his campaign managers made deliberately, according to reports, to make him appear “younger, more accessible and energetic”. Andy Burnham has built part of his “man of the people” image around the garment, so much so that Kemi Badenoch once described the prime minister as “a pair of eyelashes and a black T-shirt”. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, has turned the black T-shirt into a symbol of patriotism and solidarity for Ukrainians living through war.
Why black rather than white? David Hellqvist, a men’s editor and the author of Blue-Collar Modernism, calls black the colour of “intent and purpose”. Davis adds that white carries too many James Dean and Marlon Brando associations: “It’s a bit 1950s sex symbol and too try-hard.” Repeating the same look also helped El-Sayed feel familiar to voters, whether they encountered him on a television screen or at a rally, a small but meaningful form of connection between a candidate and the people he asked to trust him.
Hellqvist reads El-Sayed’s choice of a form-fitting T-shirt, with its V-neck collar and tight cut that led the BBC to describe his physique as “jacked”, as a sign of confidence. “He is very comfortable in his own skin and showing off his body,” he says, adding that this mirrors the politician’s approach: “He doesn’t need to tell people he is going to roll up his sleeves and start fixing problems. They can already see he is doing it.”
Davis compares the strategy to Steve Jobs and his uniform of a black polo neck and jeans. “It’s personal branding disguised as not caring about clothes, which is quite a trick,” he says. “It suggests you’re too busy doing something important to waste time thinking about what to wear. Once you establish a signature look, you become instantly recognisable.” For voters, the message embedded in that simplicity is the point: a leader who claims to have no time for vanity, and only time for the work. Whether that promise holds once the sleeves stay down and the governing begins is the question every wardrobe choice now quietly asks.