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Excerpt from a great post by Rob Walker:
"...What are the semiotics of this particular garment? Demetri Martin once joked that life vests protect you from drowning, bulletproof vests protect you from gunfire — and sweater vests protect you from pretty girls. The popular reading of Santorum’s vest, however, seems to be that it makes him identifiable: a regular guy, down to earth, approachable, a man of the people. The candidate himself offers a talismanic explanation for the style, noting that it was while wearing a sweater vest at an Iowa campaign event that he felt his electoral fortunes beginning to change.
Possibly all of that can be rolled into a reading of the sweater vest as signalling geeky charm, dulling Santorum’s extremely hard-edged rhetoric. As anyone who’s been watching the debates knows, he deploys sharp elbows to underscore his uncompromising views on a variety of social and political issues. And if he was known for much to the general public prior to this election, it was mostly for inflaming ideological opponents. To be blunt, he largely comes across as angry, and sort of a jerk. Given that his more liberal enemies paint him as narrow-minded hate monger, maybe a sweater vest de-fangs that image a bit, at least visually. How threatening, after all, can a man in a sweater vest really be?..."
read the full post here:
http://observersroom.designobserver.com/robwalker/post/santorums-tragic-sweat...
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