Wear black, stay away from loud patterns, stick with vertical stripes. There are dozens of tips and tricks to wearing clothes that will make you appear slimmer. Turns out, Donald Trump has his own: wear your tie long. Very long.

Trump recommends the fashion hint as “slenderizing”. Or so he told New Jersey’s former governor and White House wannabe Chris Christie, according to the latter’s forthcoming book.

In the new memoir Let Me Finish, Christie wrote of how Trump encouraged him to wear a long tie to make him look thinner during the 2016 presidential campaign.

For anyone who’s met or seen a picture of Trump, it’s clear the president consistently heeds his own advice. The end of Trump’s tie usually falls well below his waistline. Trump then adjusts them to make the front much longer than the back, and infamously resorts to criss-crossed sticky tape to affix the stub of the back end to back of the front end …

Donald Trump’s tie flaps in the wind, revealing sticky tape attached to the back, as he arrives at Orlando international airport on 3 March 2017. Photograph: ddp USA/Rex/Shutterstock

Fashion critics agree that a shorter necktie will rest inconveniently on a larger stomach, drawing attention to it, yet wearing the tie too long can just look … comical? “The tip of a man’s tie should fall right in the middle of his waistband or his belt — no longer,” according to GQ magazine.

But if the way he wears his ties indicates anything about Trump, whose last publicly recorded physical exam results indicated that he is 0.1 point away from obesity on the BMI scale, it is that he seems to prioritize the illusion of slenderness over other rules of sartorial etiquette. Trump purportedly told the obese Christie in 2005: “You gotta look better to be able to win.”