When a Dress and Suit Say More than a Thousand Words: Presidential Clothes as a New Form of Visual Culture and Cultural Analysis in American Press Discourse

Abstract

This thesis has studied how the sartorial choices of the Bush and Obama couple have functioned in press discourse, with a particular focus on gender roles and politics, in order to demonstrate that the American presidential pair’s wardrobe presents itself as a new and telling form of visual culture and visual language in political image making by the press. It has been found that presidential clothes, although usually marginalised in academic scholarship, in fact play an important role in journalistic cultural analysis and have farreaching implications for the political climate and the gender dichotomy of the First Lady and the President in American society. Depending on whether the administration under analysis is Republican or Democratic, and displays a conservative or a populist style towards the press, sartorial journalistic analysis can bring about sentiments of either traditional conservatism or democratic populism, polarisation or unification, political disharmony or harmony, masculism or feminism, and restraint or liberation. As such, this tensionous sociopolitical power of presidential clothes in press discussions defies a new and revolutionary turn in visual press culture that can divide as well as unite American society.