Nate Gallant: A uniform can be useful – it can, in some cases, approach style, or actively refuse it. However at the end of the day, the uniform is iconographic. It signals to an arbitrary, particular identity. Yet, it never quite manages to stay out of its own way, entirely.
There is something of the uniform’s variety and limits visible on the televised soccer pitch. At first glance, there’s the iconography of the jersey. A team has an evolving uniform whose design is meant to be instantly recognizable to fans in the stands or on the screen, as well as their teammates on the pitch. Red for Liverpool. Blue for Everton. A darker red and blue in alternating stripes for Barcelona. Pink for Messi’s Miami. They all wear the same thing. And despite having a logo for a sketchy gambling company as the biggest symbol of their jerseys, the colorways and patterns still do the work of identification.
Soccer coaches, equally, often adopt a uniform that creates a sort of personal brand — they bear the imprint of global sport's potential for the personal accumulation of wealth and construction of empires. Jurgen Klopp, once patron saint of half of the city of Liverpool’s soccer fans, now something of an ambassador for Red Bull, stood by his “Reds” in a variety of outfits. He eventually settled on a baseball cap, chill tee or puffy, team-branded coat, and sporty glasses from which to snarl and fist-pump into the raucous, rainy Merseyside night. Perennial juggernaut Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola notably wears an infrequently repeating set of avant-garde knitwear apparently chosen by his wife, for which he is famous far beyond the televised spectacle of live sport and into the American mainstream on Ted Lasso.
Sometimes, these things are out of joint: I winced slightly last year when former Manchester City defender and then Burnley coach Vincent Kompany made some insignificant but not terribly flattering fashion choices. A graphic or plain white tee, under a somewhat untailored-looking blazer. The shape didn’t show off his build, though maybe he was tired of his body being on display as a retired professional athlete. But it also did not hide his musculature’s triangular silhouette in favor of artificially sharp, concentric upside-down triangles of traditional men’s suiting, as he usually wore the blazer open. Nor did it hang casually over his shoulders in the baggier, right-side-up triangle of loose fitting, vaguely runway-ish, deconstructed blazers. To top it off, he sported a very down-the-middle baseball cap with his team’s logo.
The story could have ended there. A mild shrug at a meh moment on a very famous person’s journey of evolving self-presentation. It did nothing for him, but not really much against him other than making him look just a little bit frumpy in a world of immaculately shredded abs and very expensive, clean-lined menswear — but maybe that’s what he wanted. Or he didn’t care. As a Belgian of African descent, he may have particular reason to not care–certainly fellow Belgian Romelu Lukaku is tired of what others perceive as his “physicality” being on display.
But then I noticed the coach of Ludogorets Razgrad, Igor Jovičević, who has led them to the top of Bulgaria’s First League and to participation in the second tier of the relatively prestigious European inter-league competition, the Europa league. As his team played the legendary Basque side, Athletic Bilbao, and scored their first ever goal in European competition, I saw he was sporting nearly the same outfit as Kompany, to similar effect, with the addition of very shiny letters on his branded cap. I still can’t make out the logo, but I assume is part of their team gear (it is not among their many branded hats, at least the ones available on the English language team shop).

I didn’t make too much more of the choice — other than that I was watching too much soccer and that this was a confusingly indiscernible logo for a hat, given that the primary audience was on television. Yet this particular journey ended, for reasons that still elude me, with the realization that this same outfit has also become some part of the alt-right tech-bro uniform. I won’t make you look at a picture of Elon Musk, but for the curious, a simple image search of his outfit at various Trump rallies will reveal something familiar: A graphic tee with a mildly ill-fitting dark blazer, plus a sort of shiny, nearly Soprano’s style font take on the MAGA logo on his hat.
“The right wing can only encourage people to make something famous that is already written with capital letters,” or so says the French film critic Thierry Jousse. This particular out-fitting felt quite the opposite, in fact, it felt odd. Like it was trying to make a choice not to be anything, refusing itself, until I saw it explicitly stamped with ideology. I wonder if what Kompany saw in the outfit was the same as Musk? Maybe it’s a pure coincidence. Or maybe stamping your message on a shiny, articulated logo on a hat is how you tow the line between adopting the overpriced business casual of Silicon Valley and attempting to rile up anti-establishment sentiment, linking the athleticism and leadership of the sports-coach uniform to the fired-up factionalism of the Trumpian crowd.
And what does this mean? Maybe nothing. But is there something which connects together the thoughtless uniformity of clothing, or even its thoughtless excess, to the quickening onrush of fascism? Does it, by similarly quickening degrees of symbolic degradation, emerge from the empty, untenable boundary of liberalism’s ideological insistence on the clean separation between public and private, between which the body and its adornments are asked to mediate? Possible. Self-expression through the uniform only serves a brand: It all reinforces Elon Musk, America’s new shadow-government industrialist. Uniforms tend to deny rather than express the individual self, a rule that applies equally to alt-right bros as it does to overly basic Uniqlo basics as it does to wearing Issey Miyake to show that you’re part of the fashion industry. What this particular uniform ultimately symbolizes is only an excess of capital, the infinite potential resources to fashion oneself, or iconography, the arbitrary relationship between form and some identity. There may yet be art in self-fashioning, in other kinds of excess. It’s hard to see it here, though.
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