The annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival—which wrapped its first of two weekends yesterday—is a reliable place to get a preview of what this summer’s festival-style moodboard has in store. Amid the many cowboy hats, ’90s jeans, and head-to-toe steampunk getups, however, one of the most stylish people on the grounds on Saturday night wasn’t on the bill or in the crowd. It was Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who opened Clairo’s set with an impromptu speech while dressed in a gold-buttoned blazer, dark trousers, and a blue oxford cloth button-down shirt. In addition to a call to action against the Trump administration’s ongoing chaos, the 83-year-old independent delivered another, subtler message about personal style that we’d all be wise to heed.
Sanders, somewhat famously, has little interest in fashion. He’ll shake his head at your $225 Nikes and attend the presidential inauguration wearing a pair of chunky homemade mittens, a surgical mask, and a Burton snowboarding jacket. Elsewhere, his regular uniform of a navy blazer, an OCBD, and a rotation of repp and micro-dot ties gives him all the hypebeast clout of a middle school vice principal. Which is exactly the point. Sanders’ style, whether he’s grilling RFK Jr. about his anti-vax merch or kicking back in the green room with Charli XCX, is as unmistakable and unchanging as his gravelly Brooklyn twang—give or take the occasional LA Dodgers cap, which he sported earlier on Saturday during his Los Angeles rally alongside congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani recently told GQ, “I gotta shout out Bernie. His style is very much his politics, and I love that consistency about him. He’s definitely a style icon.”