The former White House chief strategist appeared on 60 Minutes on Sunday in his favourite look – two shirts on top of each other, plus a blazer for added warmth

Steve Bannon may have left the White House, but his wardrobe – much like his politics – continues to trouble us. Last night, appearing on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist appeared to be wearing a black shirt under another black shirt, teamed with a black blazer. A millefeuille of black clobber, if you will, without the fun – or the custard.

It sounds radical, not least for Bannon, the man described by Stephen Colbert as “the handsomest guy in the liquor store”. But, in truth, he has been doing it for years. Back in February, he wore two black shirts to the Conservative Political Action Conference. While hosting a radio show at satellite station SiriusXM, he wore two overshirts together. Around election time last year, he visited Trump’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey wearing two shirts, a jacket and a coat. The message was clear: who can destroy the state, take down the establishment, then wear all his clothes at once? Bannon can! (We have to assume here that it is unlikely Bannon is following the liberal global elites of the fashion industry, where “double layering” is a trend proper – the term was coined seriously back in 2015, where shirt-jackets were piled up at Balmain and Dries Van Noten. They did it for fun, and because it’s warm.)

Naturally, the world’s great e-psychologists of Twitter have been having a field day unpacking the style. Is Bannon too cheap to check in a bag so instead wears everything at once? Are the two shirts a reference to Freud’s depth psychology, which discusses the relationship between the subconscious and the conscious, represented here through fibrous “layers”? Or does the blood in Bannon’s veins run as icy cold as Lucifer’s in Dante’s ninth circle of hell, where he remains, condemned for all eternity to be trapped in a frozen pool for an act of treachery against God? We can’t rule anything out at this stage.

Nor can journalist Joshua Green, who literally wrote the book on Bannon. When asked about it, Green told Slate: “I’ve never been able to figure it out. I don’t have any idea. It’s the weirdest sartorial style I have ever encountered.”