the role of the monarchy today

Can Tim Walz’s wardrobe win the White House?

 

 Can Tim Walz’s wardrobe win the White House?

 

The vice-president nominee’s workwear is a central conversation on the election trail. It’s not the first time fashion has become political

 

Ellie Violet Bramley

Thu 29 Aug 2024 12.00 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/article/2024/aug/29/can-a-wardrobe-win-the-white-house

 

Let’s play the word association game. What do you think of when you read the following? Plaid. Workwear. Camo. If it isn’t words such as practical, hardwearing, hunting or fishing then you’ve been drinking from fashion’s well for too long. Because while in recent years luxury labels have turned all of the above into catwalk fodder, these are the clothes equivalents of agriculture, land, the great outdoors.

 

They also just happen to be the cornerstones of vice-president nominee Tim Walz’s style. He wore an LL Bean barn jacket while on a farm last November, and was spotted in a camouflage cap after he got the call from Kamala Harris asking him to be her running buddy. His wardrobe is all Carhartt, fleeces, jeans, Red Wing boots and worn-in T-shirts.

 

Because, offstage and off-duty, away from the national stage and at home in Minnesota, Tim Walz is “a regular guy”. Or, a regular Nebraska-born former high school football coach with a gun licence, a penchant for ice fishing and 24 years in the National Guard under his well-worn leather belt, an extra hole teased into it with a Swiss army knife.

 

Commentators have been quick to define his style as possessing “a kind of down-home lack of fuss” and his vibe as “a white guy who exudes midwestern dad energy”. He can wear the kind of quote unquote normal clothes that many voters wear and not look like he is trying to cosplay as a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy. He wears patinated Carhartt with the ease of someone who has been wearing it for years. He wears clothes to actually do the thing they were intended for, not to weaponise whatever said thing is symbolic of – hunting clothes to hunt, for instance, as opposed to hunting clothes on the campaign trail in a bid to harness the optics of hunting. “Democrats want to foreground that he wears these clothes not to appeal to a middle-class voter from middle America; he wears them because he is a middle-class voter from middle America,” wrote Washington Post fashion writer Rachel Tashjian in a recent column.

 

But most of all, commentators – and the Democrats keen to translate workwear jackets into “blue wall” votes – have been keen to flag the authenticity of his plaid and boots. “You can tell those flannel shirts he wears don’t come from some political consultant,” said former president Barack Obama recently. “They come from his closet – and they have been through some stuff.” This kind of rural sartorial “authenticity” isn’t the kind of thing you can buy. It just is. And, realistically, sartorial authenticity to many male politicians is navy blue suits and ties and not the hard hats and big boots they favour for site visits and more masculine-coded events.

 

Others have succeeded in signalling their own brand of authenticity – whatever that looks like in their case – long before Walz was mentioned as a prospective ticket mate. Bernie Sanders, for one. As Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland said back in 2020 of the Vermont scruffbag-millionaire: “A politician who does not appear to have been styled by advisers … immediately conveys through their dress that they are different – that they are their own person, that they listen to their conscience rather than to spin doctors and handlers, that they are people of principle and conviction and that, perhaps, they care too deeply about serious issues to be bothered with such trivia as their personal appearance.”

 

Many politicians before have tried to style or spend their way out of appearing elitist or out-of-touch. On that side of the Atlantic, there was Florida governor Ron DeSantis who looked like an alligator out of water in fishing shirts on the campaign trail or Texas governor Rick Perry wearing a too-stiff barn jacket. On this side, any excuse to bring up William Hague on a log flume in a baseball cap with “HAGUE” on it. And Rishi Sunak, who could no more hide that he is a quarter-zip sweater kind of guy with a fortune of £650m than he could make anyone believe that he had owned the enormous Timberland boots he wore to speak to Border Force crews “for ages”. In truth, he couldn’t win: he was also lambasted for wearing Prada loafers to a building site, which were far more authentically him. It isn’t just a pitfall for rightwing politicians: see former barrister Keir Starmer in military fatigues for one example.

 

There is very much a double standard here. As Tashjian writes: “It’s funny to imagine a political party foregrounding a woman’s down-to-earth wardrobe: we just love the senator for wearing those Lululemon leggings. To be taken more seriously, at this level of politics, a man dresses down and a woman dresses up.” It’s a good point – in fact, maybe it is why Kamala Harris’s Converse seem to have been taking a back seat.

 

There is another layer to all of this, because how much any of Walz’s authentic workwear will actually translate into rural votes is yet to be seen. But it certainly feels like a stronger sartorial bid than most and one that may well do the unthinkable, making politicians’ style something to aspire to rather than deride, something that causes a spike in Carhartt or peak in plaid as opposed to killing off a look, as Sunak did to Sambas. Are we about to see the Walz effect? Only time will tell.

The Heritage Post Trade Show No. 4

https://the-heritage-post-trade-show.de/en/4-the-heritage-post-trade-show/

IT WAS A FEAST FOR US

 

On May 25 and 26, 2024, the 4th The Heritage Post Trade Show took place at the Areal Böhler in Düsseldorf – again with a great response! Many thanks to all exhibitors and visitors who took part.

 

If you weren’t able to join us this time, think of the show as a unique traveling department store: There are authentic clothes, good shoes, delicious drinks, fine suits, great dresses, natural cosmetics, accurate watches, unique jewelry, awesome bikes, unusual toys, sharp knives, exceptional decor, beautiful writing instruments, high-quality accessories, equipment for our four-legged friends, beguiling perfumes and much more.

 

Where else can you find such beautiful, diverse and passionately crafted products in one place? As in our magazine The Heritage Post, which we have been publishing for ten years now, the common denominator is quality and individuality.

The Bedale Hunt - An ARD Mediathek DE production

10 years ago: THE HUNT - Documentary / Fox Hunters in the U.K. Want Protected Status Under Discrimination Law

Fox Hunters in the U.K. Want Protected Status Under Discrimination Law

 

A lobbying group is preparing a bid to define hunting with animals as a protected belief. Many experts have questions.

 

Amelia Nierenberg

By Amelia Nierenberg

Reporting from London

Aug. 26, 2024

Updated 9:23 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/world/europe/uk-fox-hunting-ban-status.html

 

English fox hunters have tried, for years, to push back against a nearly 20-year-old ban on their beloved sport.

 

The centuries-old tradition of using packs of dogs to chase and kill foxes — or any wild mammals — became illegal in England in 2005, after a long parliamentary struggle driven by campaigners and lawmakers who opposed it on animal welfare grounds.

 

So far, the law has stood, and fox hunting remains hugely unpopular among the general public: 80 percent of people in Britain think it should remain illegal, according to YouGov, a polling company.

 

Now, a pro-hunting activist has a new plan of attack.

 

Ed Swales, the activist, founded Hunting Kind, a lobby group that aims to protect hunting with dogs and other forms of hunting, in early 2022. He wants to use Britain’s Equality Act — which protects people from discrimination because of their age, race, sexuality or religion, among other things — to classify a pro-hunting stance as a protected belief.

 

That would put it in the same legal category as atheism, pacifism, ethical veganism, and, ironically, a moral opposition to fox hunting.

 

“If he’s ‘anti-hunt,’ well, you can be ‘hunt,’” Mr. Swales said. “It’s just the same law.”

 

Mr. Swales, 55, said he was preparing to bring a series of anti-discrimination lawsuits in the hope of setting a legal precedent that could, eventually, help reverse the fox-hunting ban.

 

“We’ve been doing this for millennia,” he said. Hunting is “literally part of our cultural heritage.”

 

Hunting itself is not illegal in England. Shooting deer, rabbits, duck and some other animals is allowed during hunting seasons, with permission from the landowner and a gun license.

 

But the hunting community is bracing for an anticipated challenge by Britain’s new Labour government, which pledged to ban trail hunting — where dogs follow a deliberately laid scent trail, usually of fox urine, instead of a real fox — in its election platform.

 

The British Hound Sports Association, which promotes and governs hunting with dogs in the U.K., says that by simulating traditional fox hunting, trail hunting allows the community to continue “to support the sport they love” despite the ban.

 

But animal rights activists say trail hunting can be a smoke screen for illegal fox hunting, because trails frequently run through land where foxes live, and foxhounds cannot always tell the difference between a fox and an artificial scent.

 

Last year, Chief Superintendent Matt Longman, England’s police lead on fox hunting, said that illegal hunting was “still common practice,” with trail hunts frequently taking place in natural fox habitats.

 

“Foxes often end up getting caught and killed by the dogs regardless,” said Josh Milburn, a lecturer in political philosophy at Loughborough University who studies animal rights.

 

Late last month, Mr. Swales sent out a survey to fellow hunters to try to find potential discrimination cases. He said many shared instances of verbal abuse or intimidation during recent hunting excursions. And this year, two venues canceled events for trail hunting groups after campaigns from anti-hunting activists. “They got told, ‘We are canceling you because we got so much pressure from the anti-hunt brigade,’” Mr. Swales said.

 

Some experts said that the planned discrimination lawsuits were a distraction from the debate over animal rights, which hunters with dogs have already lost in the court of public opinion. “In making this argument that fox hunters are the persecuted group, they’re trying, I think, to shift the conversation from talking about foxes to talking about people,” Dr. Milburn said.

 

Others questioned the idea that those who hunt with dogs — a community that has traditionally included some of Britain’s wealthiest landowners — needed special protection.

 

“Here we have an argument being made that in fact some of the most privileged in our society should also be protected on the basis of their shared activity chasing and killing a terrified wild animal,” Edie Bowles, the executive director of the Animal Law Foundation, a legal research charity, wrote in an email.

 

Several lawyers and academics who study discrimination said Mr. Swales’s argument might have some success, but the bar would be high. Under Britain’s 2010 Equality Act, a protected characteristic must “be a belief and not an opinion or viewpoint” and it must “not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.”

 

“The test requires that the belief be genuinely held and that it be sufficiently cogent and weighty and coherent,” said Colm O’Cinneide, a professor of constitutional and human rights law at University College London. A mere political opinion would not pass muster, he said: “There needs to be some sort of belief structure or framework.”

 

Experts said that a protected belief could be easier to argue than trying to define hunters as a minority ethnic group — like Sikhs, Roma or Jews — which Mr. Swales has also proposed.

 

Speaking at a public event in late July, he claimed that his advisers had told him that “the qualifications of an ethnic group, there are five of them — we hit every one, straight in the bull’s-eye,” which he reiterated in interviews with The New York Times.

 

“The legal assessment is that we would qualify for both categories,” he said on Thursday.

 

But he has since backed off from the idea of starting with the minority group argument, saying his team would prepare protected belief arguments instead. “Pick the lowest hanging fruit first,” he said, paraphrasing his legal team.

 

Hunters have already tried, and failed, to argue that bans infringe upon their rights.

 

In 2007, a belief in fox hunting was explicitly denied protection in Scotland’s courts, where a judge found that “a person’s belief in his right to engage in an activity which he carries on for pleasure or recreation, however fervent or passionate,” did not compare to protected beliefs or religion, and therefore would not be covered under human rights law.

 

And in 2009, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled that the ban on fox hunting with dogs did not violate human rights.

 

“If hunting can be shown to be more than a recreational activity, perhaps as part of a belief system in human supremacy over animals or human dominion over the earth, then a protected belief system could work,” Dr. John Adenitire, who teaches animal rights law at Queen Mary, University of London, wrote in an email.

 

For Mr. Swales, it is now or never.

 

His push comes after years of stewing about restrictions on hunting — without, he says, enough of a fight back from the hunting community.

 

“All we do is sit here and talk about it and drink sherry and bemoan and bewail our situation,” he said. “And nobody actually does anything.”

 

Amelia Nierenberg is a breaking news reporter for The Times in London, covering international news More about Amelia Nierenberg

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

The Rebel's Wardrobe, by THOMAS STEGE BOJER and BRYAN SZABO

 

By Gestalten (Editor), Bryan Szabo (Editor), Thomas Stege Bojer (Editor)

Comprising THOMAS STEGE BOJER and BRYAN SZABO, Denimhunters is one of the internet's premier denim and heritage menswear authorities. It was founded in 2012 by Stege Bojer, who now serves as the editor-in-chief. Experienced writer and editor Szabo is a contributor to the site, and notably spearheads the writing and research for the Well Made Essentials rugged menswear buying guide.

 

Immersing readers in the world of men’s fashion, The Rebel's Wardrobe explores the surprising origins of our everyday staple items and how they became timeless classics.

From the plain white T-shirt developing into the everyday hero, to the leather jacket cementing its place as a global icon or the chino being originally produced for military purposes, this modern menswear lexicon uses fashion to look at pop culture over the last 100 years, making links between seemingly disparate groups from military to sports.

https://denimhunters.com/author/thomasbryan/