Obama's Fashion Statement: Theater Casual

NEW YORK -- For New Yorkers old enough to remember when the Phantom was in the comic strips and not at the Opera, it was the most shocking presidential photo since...well...Richard Nixon walked along the beach in wingtips. There was Barack Obama -- a president so beloved in Manhattan that he won 85 percent of the vote -- heading off with Michelle to the theater Saturday night dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and (just typing these words could bring on a coronary) no tie. Not Hermes silk, not street-vendor synthetic, not even a New Mexican tourist bolo -- nothing at his neck besides skin.

Mercifully my mother, a loyal Democrat, was not alive to see it. Because growing up (warning: embarrassing revelation ahead) in the Connecticut suburbs, there were stone-tablet rules that had been handed down since the time of Moses to Jewish mothers in the maternity ward at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Right up there with the stern commandments to always ask at a department store, "When will this be on sale?" and to never allow mayonnaise in the same Zip Code as pastrami was the sartorial dictum: Boys and men must wear jackets and ties to the theater. At a baseball game or even the movies that top collar button could be liberated, but even if you are in the second balcony and Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison have long left the cast of My Fair Lady, the male neck must be draped.

Back in the days before Times Square was transformed into a replica of a suburban Phoenix shopping mall (turn left at the Olive Garden), the Broadway theater embodied elegance. Black-tie opening nights, witty repartee, minks, ivory cigarette holders, camel-hair coats – all the images evoked by a Gershwin medley or a picture of Cole Porter at the piano. A terrific 1939 New York Times photograph of rollicking theater-goers watching the slapstick pastiche musical Hellzapoppin' reveals that the underdressed men were those in suits and ties without vests. Nothing better conjures up this bygone world of floor-length gowns and hand-sewn dinner jackets than the 1950 it's-going-to-be-a-bumpy-night epic of raging back-stage ambition, All About Eve. Watch every frame of this Bette Davis classic, and I will bet that you will not see a single male member of a theater audience dressed as casually as the current president of the United States.

The legend is, of course, that John Kennedy single-handedly destroyed the American dress hat industry by delivering his 1961 Inaugural Address bare-headed. The cause-and-effect was not nearly that simple, as Neil Steinberg points out in his 2004 book about JFK and the fading fedora, Hatless Jack, since presidents had ditched inaugural headgear as long ago as Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. Dress codes and everything else were changing in the 1960s (talk about an understatement) and even if Kennedy had worn a Davy Crockett coonskin cap as he declared, "Ask not what you can do for your country..." it probably would not have made a long-term difference. But as an impressionable 13-year-old who watched JFK on a flickering black-and-white TV set, I can testify that I absorbed the fashion message that hats were history along the New Frontier and that only I-like-Ike bores wore Borsalinos.

Even without an assist from Obama, men's ties have long been following the silk road to obsolescence. A late 2007 Gallup Poll found that only 9 percent of men still wear ties to work "most days." And amid the economic downturn, those men whose office address is now the second table on the right at Starbucks are even less likely to follow the dictates of dress-for-success 1970s fashion.

No surprise, these days the Broadway dress code is little more than "no shirt, no shoes, no service."
Unlike the audience at musicals (especially those based on movies or feature falling chandeliers), there is still a glimmer of civility to the fashion parade at plays like Joe Turner's Come and Gone, which the Obamas saw, since the audiences tend to be older and less likely to choose tourist spots like the Hard Rock Cafe as their favored pre-theater watering hole. As reluctant to part with the old ways as I am (a mother's lessons linger), I will confess to sometimes playing the game of "Count the Ties" at intermission on Broadway and rarely hitting the two-dozen mark.

Still, I wish Obama had remembered the president's bully pulpit of a neck line and worn a tie. Some of it is simple compassion for those men (voters all) who need as much help from their tailors as they can get – and Obama aside, most men look better wearing ties with their dress suits. Some of it is that there is nothing wrong with reminding young Americans that there are dress codes for certain occasions, which is why presidents do not address Congress wearing shorts and flip-flops. During the 2000 campaign, I remember Al Gore speaking at a northern New Jersey high school wearing a clingy polo shirt in earth tones and no sports jacket, while the principal and all the male members of the student council had all gone to the trouble to dress in suits and ties.

Perhaps it is my love of beleaguered industries, perhaps it is my contrarian nature, but three days after the Obamas went to the theater, I went tie shopping. At a nearly deserted Hermes shop on Madison Avenue, I encountered old-fashioned automobile sticker shock when I discovered that the going price for a bit of French-made decorative silk to drape around my neck is now $170. The whole experience felt a bit retro as I carefully fingered a red-and-blue tie that featured tiny bulls running across rising stock-market charts.

A block away at Barney's, I bought a cheerful red Ferragamo tie, adorned with miniature circus animals, on sale (a concept foreign to Hermes) for $99. I asked the salesman whether he minded that Obama had gone to the theater missing a once-vital fashion accessory. "It's his option," the salesman said in a long-suffering tone that suggested he probably saw the men's shoe department as his next stop in career development. Yes, of course, it was Obama's option. I just wish he had not tied-one-off on Saturday night.