Bill Clinton's Fop Culture

Pulitzer Prize-winning Wash Post fashion culture vulture Robin Givhan:  When former president Bill Clinton arrived in Pyongyang on his mission to bring home the two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had been detained by the North Korean government for nearly five months, he posed for an official photograph with the country's reclusive leader, Kim Jong Il. The photograph is, to be blunt, weird. Disconcerting. Creepy.

In the group portrait, each person stands in his -- or her -- own discretely separate place. Shoulders do not brush; no one leans toward anyone else. Everyone just stares straight ahead, not like deer caught in the headlights, but like sedated deer that don't even notice the blinding lights bearing down on them with deadly speed. No one is smiling or glaring or telegraphing any sort of clear emotion. The people in the photograph don't even look real. They're as flat and stiff as cardboard cutouts, mere facsimiles of actual human beings.

The most startling character in the photo is Clinton himself. He and Kim are seated in the front row. Clinton wears a dark suit, a white shirt with French cuffs and a blue tie. It's a uniform that he often wears and one that has always been especially flattering to him. The suit gives him a sturdy shoulder line. The tie compliments his ruddy complexion. In the room, with its backdrop of roiling waves, Clinton's pleasantly blue striped four-in-hand is the most colorful blip coming from a person rather than the decor. It's the only indication of warmth and personality in the photograph, but rather than enlivening the image, it looks out of place, almost inappropriately chipper.

At least he was not wearing a safari shirt, which was always the costume of choice for Jesse Jackson -- the rogue, empathetic diplomat -- who'd head off to foreign lands to negotiate the release of this person or that. Jackson comes to mind because he was on television offering up his perspective on the reporters' release as they stepped from Clinton's jet. For the role of MSNBC morning pundit, he was dressed in a dark, short-sleeve shirt that was only a couple of flap pockets away from his traditional rescue mission garb, which saw him through stops in places such as Cuba and Syria.