It doesn’t take Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan terribly long to get dressed in the morning. He doesn’t stand in front of a deep closet, worrying about variety or taste. The mayor knows what he likes, and he likes it every single day. Among the tumult of a chaotic world, he seeks out a constant: a fairly hideous blue sport coat.
Like a haggard detective digging through mounds of evidence late one night at the precinct, I plumbed the tomes of Google search for pictures of mayor-turned-gubernatorial candidate. Photo after photo harassed my sensibilities, assaulted my sartorial taste. That hideous blue sport coat. My God, it’s everywhere. Is this the only jacket the man owns? How deep does it all go?
How do we describe this coat? It’s part used-car salesman, part T-Mobile regional manager, part club owner on a Tuesday morning. It’s a perplexing cocktail. Tacky, yet confident. It boggles the mind.
This daily workhorse is a blue jacket adorned with a faint mid-size check. I haven’t had the chance to take a look at the tag, but these jackets are usually partly synthetic. More saran wrap, less tweed. They are a failing attempt to be everything all at once. Formal, but not too formal; professional, but not traditional. They fail, of course, and end up being nothing more than an eyesore.
Gazing at the voluminous photos of Duggan’s bravest solider, the fabric appears smooth like you might expect on a suit. But it’s not a suit jacket, so the texture feels wrong. The check is also odd. It isn’t a traditional Prince of Wales check. It’s a kind of sleek half-measure that tries to trick you into thinking it’s something it’s not.
These jackets are cowardly. Too wimpy and scared to be the powerful Glen Urquhart check. Too loud to be called simple or classic like an unostentatious navy blazer. Too afraid of tradition to really be anything at all.
They are terrible to work with when building an outfit. The check’s noncommittal yet also busy and distracting pattern makes pairing with a tie very difficult—unless you want to look like a clown, of course. In that case, put on a tie, the red nose and let ‘er rip. This kind of sport coat will be right at home in the dorm at clown school. Bozo aesthetics ascendant.
This is the general thrust of these wretched garments, of which there are sadly far too many. And the truth is Duggan isn’t alone.
An addiction to these car-salesman-core jackets plagues our society. Sportscasters are some of the most notorious offenders as they stack ties, pocket squares, and even tie bars on top. Way, way too much. Tasteless. And, to be fair, at least Duggan doesn’t do that.
If you or a loved one is suffering from cheap sport coat addiction, seek help soon. Style experts are waiting to assist.
After clinical inspection, using the most advanced technology we have available, I can report with great certainty that the mayor actually does, in fact, own multiple jackets. You can forgive yourself for not realizing this. Nearly every jacket looks exactly the same. The finer details of these monstrous creations elude the common eye. It’s only when carefully studying these garments, like a virologist studying deadly diseases, do the finer details emerge.
That the mayor owns multiple iterations of this garment somehow makes the entire situation worse. If he only had one awful jacket it could be considered a one-off. One terrible purchase threw him down this dark path, and he doesn’t know how to find his way back. He’s got a fleet of them at the ready.
For the sake of our eyeballs, for the sake of our country, for the sake of our wretched aesthetic landscape. Mike Duggan’s hideous sport coat must go.
O.W. Root is a writer based in Northern Michigan, with a focus on nature, food, style, and culture. Follow him on X @NecktieSalvage.
