The Official Uniforms of World Leaders

this video is brought to you by native hello friends my name is JJ so imagine if somebody was hosting the biggest fanciest party in the world and all of the leaders of all of the different countries were the guests I don't know what the occasion would be maybe someone was being crowned emperor of Earth or some alien had landed and wanted to meet the top representatives of all of the nations of our planet but in any case in a situation like that all of the world leaders would surely want to wear their nicest fanciest most ceremonial outfits possible and it turns out that a lot of world leaders do indeed have a special outfit for just such occasions and that is what we will be talking about today the exciting world of ceremonial clothes for government people I often feel like these days we are getting closer and closer to a world in which all of our politicians just wear normal casual clothes all of the time certainly when you see politicians out and about mingling with the public they tend to be dressed increasingly informally presumably this is because this is what the public wants politicians who are just like us buy back in the Victorian age when a lot of our political traditions were being dreamt up the dominant thinking was that politicians should not be just like us at all politicians the thinking went were rulers and rulers should carry themselves in a way that is far more impressive than the common rabble politics was something gentlemanly and sophisticated and therefore politicians should be fashionable people who followed dress codes and other traditions relating to style and clothing and it was during this time that a lot of rules regarding what political leaders should wear and various official contexts we're all standardised and a lot of these rules are still more or less in place today even if they are now only ever obeyed on the most ceremonial of occasions so in the United States of America for a long time this was considered the most formal official thing a politician could wear if you've ever seen the movie Spaceballs this is what the president character wears in that it is sometimes called mourning dress or a morning suit it consists of a special sort of jacket that's very long in the back a light vest a shirt with an abnormally narrow collar striped pants and this very particular sort of silk necktie known as an ascot cravat which is really more like a scarf that's been pinned in place and of course a top hat at one time this is what most American politicians would wear on any sort of official occasion bashing the champagne bottle on the side of the boat or handing out the Blue Ribbon for the best cherry pie at the county fair it is from this outfits association with these sorts of rituals that we get the cartoon cliché of the mayor who is wearing very outlandish and old-fashioned clothes in the old days the stereotype was that mayor's didn't really have any purpose beyond doing these sort of dopey ceremonies beginning in the mid 19th century every single president of the United States wore a morning suit when he was sworn into office right up until John F Kennedy top hat and all but Kennedy's successor as President Lyndon Baines Johnson did not wear the morning suit at his inauguration and neither has any president since well except for Ronald Reagan good conservative that he is he brought back the morning suit for his first inauguration in 1981 when Donald Trump was elected I thought he might maybe bring it back because of his well-known love of razzle dazzle but he did not but this doesn't mean that the morning suit is completely absent from American politics in some of the older states the governor still wears it to his inauguration like in Virginia and well actually I think Virginia might be the only one that still does it though I know that Missouri used to do it up until relatively recently as well lawyers representing the US federal government used to have to wear the morning suit when they were arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court as you can see in this scene from the movie bridge of spies where Tom Hanks is playing a lawyer for the CIA but then Obama got rid of this tradition in 2009 one of his ostensible reasons for doing so was that he had just appointed the first ever female Solicitor General of the United States a woman named Elena Kagan who you might have heard of and the problem was that there was no real female equivalent to this sort of outfit I mean I guess since the morning suit is based on Victorian formal wear the female equivalent would be like a full-length ballgown and this actually gets at one of the big reasons why it is so hard to maintain these clothing traditions in modern times all of our ceremonial outfits tend to have been exclusively designed with men in mind official outfits are almost always men's clothes because of course back in the day no one could conceptualize the possibility that some day a woman would hold such an important government job but then women did and so the new dilemma became should we force women to wear men's clothes or should we invent some sort of new anachronistic outfit just for women or should we just ditch these traditions altogether and in most cases we just ditched the traditions altogether another good example of this would be the speaker of the British House of Commons we used to always wear one of those wigs until 1994 in which a woman was elected speaker and she went wig less and so have all of the speakers since outside of America the morning dress tradition survives in some other countries in Japan for instance there politicians are still very into upholding all of the Victorian traditions that they inherited during their mid 19th century phase of westernization their Prime Minister and Emperor still wears a morning suit on all sorts of official occasions like when new cabinet ministers are sworn in or when the Emperor gives his yearly speech to the Parliament or sometimes for ceremonies involving the military did you see how he was still holding his top hat there the final big realm where you still sometimes see this outfit is for certain traditions involving diplomats or ambassadors in fact you may have even heard the expression striped pants diplomacy before which refers to this idea of diplomats being too uptight and formal so there is this very ancient tradition that says that the very first thing an ambassador should do when he arrives in a foreign country is meet the ruler of that country and give him a letter from his country's king or president or whatever given how many countries there are these days I have often felt like world leaders must waste an awful lot of time on this tradition but they all still do it and in some countries there is this whole other added layer of tradition that says that when the Ambassador meets the ruler he should wear some sort of ceremonial costume that is native to his country so for example here we see the German president meeting the Ambassador from Lesotho but since a lot of countries don't really have a distinct ceremonial costume in their culture they often just default to the morning suit so here we see the American ambassador giving his letter to Queen Elizabeth and here is the Dutch ambassador after he's given his letter to the governor of the Bahamas I like this photo of the full Afghan diplomatic delegation to Japan on the day that they were meeting with the Emperor and speaking of royalty the other SuperDuper formal ceremonial dress up the event in the life of a political leader is of course the state dinner this is when one head of state hosts a lavish dinner party for another which is considered one of the most intimate and important gestures a friendship between nations they only happen rarely and usually within a rather tight group of allied countries and because they are such a big deal state dinners also have their own unique weird dress code that you don't really see anywhere else these days white tie white tie refers to a special sort of tuxedo that is extremely rare and basically only ever worn by super elite political leaders super elite political ceremonies you can see president Trump wearing a white tie tuxedo here at his 2019 state dinner with the Queen in London but what is the most interesting part of the white tie dress code is that world leaders are also supposed to wear their official decorations and this is where things really start to get glitzy but before we get to that let us just talk quickly about today's video sponsor native now when you are going to some fancy state dinner for some king or something the last thing you want to do is smell bad right well that is why you need native brand deodorant now when the native people first reached out to me I was like I don't know deodorant really but then my friend was like dude jay-j native is a really highly rated brand and indeed they are for example you can see them here on this esquire list of all of the 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tight tuxedos you've probably noticed that they tend to accessorize with a colored sash and a lot of metals these are what they call decorations and it is not just oil people that have them for example here is the Italian president at a state dinner for the queen of Sweden here is the president of Slovenia meeting the king of Norway here is President Zuma of South Africa with Queen Elizabeth again so the way it works is that most countries have some sort of grand national award usually referred to as the nation's highest honor and usually the President or King or whatever is in charge of deciding who gets it and he usually gets a special version of it for himself as well in most countries the physical version of the award consists of a colored sash and a brooch but it can sometimes be a metal or a chain or something you wear around your neck as well here in Canada for example the governor-general is in charge of something called the border of Canada and at white tie events he always wears his Order of Canada thing a rubies neck the president of France meanwhile is the head of the Legion of Honor which has all of these accessories associated with it the Portuguese president gets to wear this try colored sash and this three-headed medal in acknowledgment of the fact that he is head of the three different orders of Portuguese chivalry one of which is called the order of Christ could you imagine if the American president was head of something called the order of Christ this whole tradition by the way is why so many stereotypical depictions of vampires always have a medal or a sash since the original Dracula was supposed to be count of Transylvania while ways ran aroond wearing a white tie tuxedo it logically follows that he would be wearing decorations to signify that he was head of the Transylvanian Order of blood suckers or whatever what makes this tradition a bit more complicated however is that there is this whole other tradition of world leaders giving decorations to each other and then wearing those decorations when they meet it is sort of like how you will ostentatiously wear the sweater that grandma gave you for Christmas the next time you see her so for example here we see the French President Nicolas Sarkozy hosting a state dinner for the king of Spain and the king is wearing his French decorations while Sarkozy is wearing his Spanish ones here is a rare photo of an American president doing this this is President Eisenhower wearing the British Order of Merit that he won after World War two at a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth at the White House in 1957 I don't think any American president has done this since then just because I think that in American culture it would be considered kind of weirdly militaristic for the president to be wearing medals in public although and here is a weird story the former dictator of the Philippines Fernan Marcos once commissioned this big garish portrait of Ronald Reagan wearing the Filipino Medal of Valor as far as I know Reagan never actually did this in real life okay so in most cases I would consider either white tie or a morning suit to be the closest thing that most world leaders have to an official uniform but for some heads of state they literally have an official uniform obviously over the years there have been a lot of world leaders who were army officers who used the power of the military to take control of the government and put themselves in charge and such people as a general rule justified seizing power on the grounds that military people are just inherently better than civilians so they would accordingly wear their military uniforms all the time while doing government stuff and then on more ceremonial occasions military rulers would wear these absurdly over-the-top uniforms with a truly preposterous number of medals I remember reading once that the infamous military dictator of Uganda edia men had to put a sheet of wood in his jacket because otherwise the weight of all the medals would tear it but these days I think this whole business of world leaders wearing military uniforms strikes most people is a little bit fascistic so it's not really done anymore the military leader of Egypt for instance president Sisi has basically never worn his military uniform since taking power kings and queens still do however most royal people are expected to do some military service as part of their upbringing and for some reason they then proceed to wear those uniforms in public for the rest of their lives especially at formal events like weddings or being on a balcony but in some countries there is also something known as the civil uniform which is a ceremonial uniform for non-military people this is a very common tradition in Asian countries I notice in Thailand for instance the president and her cabinet all have these nice white uniforms they wear on official occasions same with the Prime Minister of Malaysia and the leader of Indonesia the in donation guy seems to have a lot of fun looks in fact there was a time in which everybody high up in the government of China weren't the famous Mao jacket which was once supposed to be basically the civil uniform for everyone in the country but these days the Chinese leadership just wears normal western-style business suits and they only wear the mao-a Katan special ceremonial occasions so you can see President Xi wearing his mouch acket at this dinner with the king of Spain but would you believe that there is an official uniform for the Prime Minister of Canada it's true and it looks like this this is what they used to call the winds are uniform and during the Victorian age it was the standard ceremonial uniform for high-ranking people in the British Empire including colonial governors and prime ministers as far as I know the last Canadian Prime Minister to actually wear it was William Lyon Mackenzie King who was Prime Minister for aboot a quarter of the 20th century and the subject of a very good video I made that you should really watch when you have a chance anyway you can see him wearing the uniform here as he visits the White House to meet with President Roosevelt but then Prime Minister's just stopped wearing it and instead they would wear a morning suit at ceremonial events like the speech from the throne but then Stephen Harper put an end to that tradition when he became prime minister in 2006 I feel like he was not the sort of guy that had much time for fanciness the Windsor uniform is still worn however by some of the lieutenant governors of Canada these are extremely obscure officers of the provincial governments who basically only exist to do ceremonial junk so this whole business of ceremonial clothes for politicians ended up being a far deeper rabbit hole than I expected I mean I didn't even have time to get to the flag sashes the president's wear in South America or some of the fun ceremonial clothes they have in Africa if you have some good examples of ceremonial clothes let me know in the thing below don't forget about the deal from native and I will see you all next week [Music]

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 563,032

Rating: 4.7592731 out of 5

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Id: 3Nq7HPrCfxM

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 11 2020

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[u/EthanBrant]

JJ always delivers with good content