Soviet head honcho Yuri Andropov was a real square, but man did he ever have a snazzy-looking necktie. Anyone know where I can get one like it? (I’m guessing the answer is “no”.)
While y’all are scouring your local yard sales for me, I thought we might have a discussion on what other decidedly unhip historical personages happened to be blessed with a genuinely cool sense of fashion. Anyone want to get the ball rolling? (Please don’t let anyone say Muammar Gaddafi.)
Harry Truman would rock the wide-lapel double-breasted suits, often with a bow tie, and liked his hats well into the 60’s after men had long abandon them for daily wear. Of course, he owned a haberdashery before he got into politics.
You might find this interesting, it is Every US President’s Style, Ranked.
On a sidenote and something I’ve wondered about those Soviet era pictures, is that a photo so heavily retouched it looks like a drawing, or an actual drawing?
I’m pretty sure it’s a photo. A Google Images search brings up other photos from the same shoot, such as this one. It looks much less retouched—and look, there’s that swanky tie again!
Thanks for this! With the exception of Clinton, I can’t say I disagree much with their rankings.
Soviet retouching was usually to disappear someone who had fallen out of favor.
Ah yes, thank you 
That’s not just a swanky tie, but impeccably knotted as well. Looks like a full Windsor.
Or to make some official appear much younger and handsomer. Stalin, f’rinstance, had a pockmarked face that was never seen in photographs. He and others like Brezhnev and Chernenko never aged much in any of their official photos, either.
If you look at photos from publications like Pravda, a lot of them are obviously composites cobbled together to make, e.g., a rally look more impressive. Some, like Yuri Gagarin being mobbed on Red Square, are downright hilarious.
The same is true of Chinese propaganda photos under Mao, often even more so.
And yes, there’s a Wikipedia page for that. The Nikolai Yezhov image is arguably the most famous of these.
A good book on the topic: Amazon.com
Well, with Chernenko they just re-used the same embalming process they’d perfected for Lenin. He entered office mostly dead anyway.
Anyway, yeah, that first photo of Andropov is pretty uncanny. It’s the Cold War-era version of an overly-airbrushed supermodel portrait.
The practice seems to have largely died out with Stalin. After that, as Derleth notes, the most egregious examples involve “beautifying” leaders for their official portraits. This isn’t any different from the western press’s routine and longstanding practice of airbrushing magazine-cover models.
In addition to the airbrushed Andropov of my OP, we can also find plenty of airbrushed Brezhnevs, Chernenkos, and Gorbachevs in exactly the same style.
There’s not much aging you can do in 11 months.
He was a member of the government much longer than he was head of the Party.
One of my Pol Sci professors in grad school had a whole slew of official portraits on the walls of his office. Not one of the *Sovki *had aged a day in the previous thirty years.
Actually, I believe he was cremated.
I meant while he was in office.
It was a joke.
The first episode of Spitting Image had a pretty good take on this: Chernenko’s first speech. (This was the first of many sketches involving the Soviet government. I love it how, in their universe, almost every single Party functionary is a Brezhnev clone.)
Good one. Now I don’t feel so bad for being the genesis of a land of confusion in this thread.
