Playing football. Playing in the sand. Dancing on a stage with Alicia Keys and the entire New York Knicks roster. Swimming in a swimming pool. Swimming in the ocean.
Traditionally, a suit and tie would be considered inappropriate attire for each of these activities. Yet over the past year Zohran Mamdani has seemingly been on a one-man crusade to prove otherwise: to convince people that a formal suit is, actually, suitable for all activities.
That’s because the New York mayor hardly ever wears anything but a suit: frequently purchased from Suit Supply, almost always in a dark colour and worn with a formal tie, mostly paired with smart black boots. He’s hardly the first male politician to embrace the suit – it’s the de facto uniform, after all, of those seeking to project seriousness and solemnity – but few, if any, have been quite as wedded to the formal blazer and matching trousers.
Cheering on the Knicks at Madison Square Garden in May, Mamdani stood out for his decision to wear a dark suit and tie. After the Knicks won, he took the unusual decision to wear the team’s jersey over his shirt and tie, but under his suit jacket. In June, he wore a navy suit, white shirt, and blue striped tie for a press opportunity with children at the beach.
Those aren’t even the most unusual examples.
On New Year’s Day 2025, while running for mayor, he wore a suit to take part in the Polar Bear Club plunge, a New York tradition whereby people go swimming in the frigid Atlantic. “I’m freezing … your rent as the next mayor of New York City,” Mamdani said in an accompanying TikTok video, a message that was rather on the nose, but won him lots of press coverage.
Water proved again to be no obstacle when Mamdani leaped, fully suited, into a swimming pool in Harlem last month, to announce the opening of the city’s pools for summer. (Mamdani “broke the rules in the process”, the rightwing New York Post reported, “which requires all swimmers to wear bathing suits in the water”.)
The mayor is trapped, it seems, in a wool or possibly wool-blend prison of his own making. But why?
Mamdani’s most recent predecessors weren’t as tied to the suit. Bill De Blasio was keen on shorts – although, in a furore that won’t have gone unnoticed by Mamdani, the former mayor was mercilessly ridiculed for wearing the cargo variety – while Eric Adams was partial to a polo shirt, and sometimes a woolly cardigan.
“I think Mamdani wants to double down on appearing as a working mayor, as someone who is always on the job and on the clock,” said Ella Devi, a fashion commentator and, like Mamdani, Democratic Socialists of America member whose (typically negative) assessments of Republicans’ style have made her a target for conservatives.
“I think that he kind of wants to convey that he is committed to the job, through his sartorial choices. I think that is reflected in his attachment to the suiting.”
Devi added: “It’s also that he’s a young, Muslim, socialist.”
It seems likely that Mamdani, the repeated focus of rightwing media, is held to a higher bar than white centrist politicians. It’s an issue Hasan Piker, the Turkish American leftwing streamer, brought up recently, when he said conservatives are “more receptive to what I have to say” when he dresses smartly.
“I used to wear T-shirts all the time,” he told Dazed. “But then I figured I should start wearing a suit and a tie because there are a lot of adults watching on Fox News [the rightwing channel frequently airs clips of Piker speaking] – if they see me saying something in the clips, they’ll be more receptive to what I have to say if I’m in a more appealing format.”
The mayor’s office declined to comment on Mamdani’s wardrobe, but he addressed his penchant for suit-wearing in a recent interview with CNN.
Asked about his decision to jump into a swimming pool wearing a suit, the mayor said: “I think I misunderstood the term swimsuit. I do also have to say thank you, though, to Goodwill [a charity known for its shops that sell used clothing], because I got that suit for 30 bucks, because you can’t go ruining the other suits that you have. But I’m clearly learning that there might be a different way to dress when it’s 100-degree weather.”
Leftists have not always been known for formal dresswear. That remains true in some cases – the disgraced Maine senatorial candidate Graham Platner wore sweaters and T-shirts during his campaign; John Fetterman, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, has a passionate commitment to wearing basketball shorts – but that might be changing.
“If there’s a visual language that connotes credibility and authority, why not take advantage of it?” Nathan Robinson, the editor of the leftwing Current Affairs magazine wrote this month.
“You might see someone in a suit as serious, professional, ready to do business. You might think they belong in the Senate or a boardroom. That’s certainly what Mamdani is trying to convey with his suits. He understands that socialists face a challenge: we’re considered fringe. People think we don’t belong among those making important decisions. The suits are a subtle way of asserting the legitimacy and authority of socialist ideas.”
Mamdani has taken the concept further than most. A keen football player, he wore a black suit with a grey tie while doing keep-ups with a football in July, and when he played in a game that same month, Mamdani simply threw a football shirt over his suit – although he did ditch the jacket.
It was not always thus. A source who played for the same team as Mamdani before his election said that he did not play in a suit and tie, although they added: “He always showed up in a suit, or at least suit pants, and his famous boots, and would change on the pitch because he was also always running late.”
The source, who asked not to be named, but who now plays for a football team with the author of this article, continued, “But he never missed a tackle” – remark which was possibly aimed at this writer.
The source said Mamdani used to play in “black shorts”. Asked if a suit would be appropriate attire for a football match, they said it would not. They explained: “Limited stretch in the materials, restricted range of motion, you get sweaty and probably don’t want to have to dry-clean a suit as often for cost and longevity purposes, likelihood of it getting grass stains or torn up during play, excessive wear from friction which would also compromise longevity of a likely costly piece of clothing less easily replaced, too hot to play in (comfortably).”
Having become so intertwined with the suit, the question might be: can Mamdani ever wear anything else? Can the mayor ditch the formalwear?
“I think that now he’s kind of trapped in the suit, and he knows that he’s trapped in the suit, because he’s made it his thing to always wear the suit,” Devi said.
“He has to stick with the bit, the suit bit. If he wears jeans, then the New York Post is just going to write about that for the next three weeks.”
With temperatures in New York recently hitting 38C (100F), Mamdani might be wishing he could wear something else – although Devi had a suggestion should the heat become too unbearable.
“He would never go for this, because it would not be seen as very socialist, but Thom Browne does some very good suit shorts for the future heatwaves. So that’s my advice to Mayor Mamdani,” she said.
It’s a fine idea, except according to Thom Browne’s website, those shorts retail at about $1,300, which might raise questions over Mamdani’s socialist credentials. It seems that, at least for now, Mamdani is stuck in the suit.
