WHO is Jeremy Corbyn’s stylist? He must have someone advising him on his wardrobe. For while the shifty suits remain at least one inch too large for his wiry frame, Corbyn’s certainly turned a corner in the long old road to chic. As one Twitter user commented after his confident performance on BBC1’s Question Time on Friday evening, it is a very skilled individual who has “turned the Corbyn look from a freight train-jumping hobo into a vaguely credible-looking adult”.



The employment of a stylist is not something Corbyn is likely to admit to, of course. “[Politics] is not a fashion parade, it's not a gentleman's club, it's not a banker's institute, it's a place where the people are represented,” he said crossly during an interview with Newsnight in 1984, given after he was criticised by a Tory MP for being “Labour scruff”. In said interview he is wearing a jumper knitted by his mum, and possibly one of his trademark £1.50 vests underneath, purchased from B & H Quality Underwear & Socks in Nag’s Head Market, north London. Savile Row suiting – or Amanda Wakeley leather trousers – this is not.



But like every politician thrust into the fishbowl, Corbyn has had to learn to use his garms to speak to voters. His insistence on an anti-fashion look – unruly hair and beard, gnomic beige shirts, mismatched suits without a tie – has been carefully eroded, and he has been coaxed into donning navy suits, smart white shirts and even a trusty red tie in an effort to appear statesmanlike. (He’s refused to lose the beard. Perhaps being the seven-time winner of Parliamentary Beard of the Year is a point of pride.)



Crucially, however, he’s not jettisoned his “Eighties casual” habits. Corbyn is cognizant of our subtly shifting attitudes towards “men in suits” since Brexit. You will not catch him in one of the £3,500 Richard James suits favoured by David Cameron, or even a similarly priced Gieves & Hawkes suit that Gordon Brown was said to wear. Corbyn knows that the backlash against “experts” and the “establishment” means we’re also distrustful of anyone in a suit that fits (Donald Trump won an election on the same principle, though he now seems determined to reverse the result). The shoes are a little scuffed, too.



In his down time, Corbyn still enjoys sporting Eighties shell suits and Harrington jackets. It hasn’t escaped the attention of the Vogue office that such predilections are “very Vetements autumn/winter 2017". Here, Vogue charts the foundations of Corbyn’s anti-fashion image.



Related reading: Why Jeremy Corbyn is the only party leader with true personal style on GQ