Loyal to the look: why Zohran Mamdani wears a suit in all seasons

Zohran Mamdani with his wife, Rama Duwaji, during the ticker-tape parade for the NBA champion New York Knicks in June. Photograph: Angelina Katsanis/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenZohran Mamdani with his wife, Rama Duwaji, during the ticker-tape parade for the NBA champion New York Knicks in June. Photograph: Angelina Katsanis/Getty ImagesLoyal to the look: why Zohran Mamdani wears a suit in all seasonsAround town, on the pitch and even in the pool, the New York mayor keeps his suit on – what do his sartorial choices tell us?

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.What Zohran Mamdani’s suit tells us about the man and the way society is changingRead moreThat’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.View image in fullscreenMamdani in his suit on the football field. Photograph: Ira L Black/Fifa/Getty ImagesOn 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.”

View image in fullscreenZohran Mamdani with Barack Obama at an educational event in the Bronx in April. Photograph: Getty ImagesIt 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 mi