It’s hard not to notice Robert Mueller if you have an eye for clothing. In a town full of bad suits and ugly ties, Mueller is one of the only people in Washington who knows how to wear a coat-and-tie. His look is quintessentially American. Soft shouldered suits with naturally rounded sleeveheads, worn over white button-down collars and tastefully selected foulard ties. All the details are middle-of-the-road, but they’re so perfectly executed that they come together in a classic American way you rarely see anymore.
In his book on US counterterrorism, Robert Kessler reveals that Mueller gets his clothes from Brooks Brothers:
At 8:45 on the morning of September 11, Robert Mueller was planning a brown bag lunch with reporters when his secretary told him to turn on the TV. Wearing his usual dark blue Brooks Brothers suit, a white shirt, and a red tie, he had been sworn in as FBI director just seven days earlier.
Garrett Graff, author of the book The Threat Matrix, confirmed the same with me over email. Graff has spent hundreds of hours talking about the former FBI Director with those who know him best, and he says he vaguely remembers Mueller buying all his clothes off-the-rack at Brooks. “Bob Mueller’s greatest attribute is he’s entirely what-you-see-is-what-you-get,” Graff says. “He’s as strait-laced in his dress as he is in work.” Stylistically, Mueller stands on the other end of the spectrum from Trump’s oversized Brioni suits and shiny satin ties. Or Roger Stone, who writes about classic American style, but looks like a cartoon caricature of the real thing.
Part of that is probably due to the fact that Robert Mueller is the real deal. He learned his sense of dress through his privileged WASP upbringing, not style blogs such as this one. Mueller was brought up in Princeton, New Jersey, before his family moved to the wealthy Philadelphia suburb of Main Line. His father was a former naval officer and lifelong DuPont executive; his mother a scion of a railroad tycoon family. Mueller’s parents sent him to St. Paul’s, an elite boarding school where students had to wear sport coats and ties. There, he became captain of the school’s hockey and lacrosse teams, where he played with John Kerry (both men circled in red at the end of this post).
Upon graduating from St. Paul’s, Mueller went on to study politics at Princeton, then joined the Marines. He said his military service was inspired by the combat death of a Princeton lacrosse player he knew, David Hackett, who joined the military a year ahead of him. Hackett’s death made Mueller think military service was a duty, so he went on to serve in Vietnam. He was later awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for his service, and then returned to the US to pursue a career in the FBI. Former CIA Director George Tenet once described Mueller as a “high Protestant with a locked jaw, blue blazer, khaki pants, penny loafers, maybe a little Vitalis and Old Spice to boot.”
One of the interesting things about Mueller is that he has a distinct uniform – always a dark suit, always a white shirt, and always a red or blue foulard tie. In his 2008 Washingtonian profile on Mueller, Graff noted this preference extended to his subordinates. Apparently there are famous stories of FBI agents, who had to brief Mueller in the morning, scurrying out the night before to get the right clothes:
At work, Mueller expects his staff to match his unofficial FBI uniform—dark suits, dark ties, and white shirts. His 7 and 9am daily staff meetings look like a throwback to the G-men era of J. Edgar Hoover. Colored shirts are worn at one’s own peril. The head of the bureau’s public-affairs division, John Miller—a former ABC investigative reporter who interviewed Osama bin Laden in the 1990s—tries to sneak in a colored shirt on occasion, but Mueller will look down the table at the 9am staff meeting and ask, “John, what exactly are you wearing?”
Graff also says the most philosophical answer he ever got from Mueller was about his clothing choices. An excerpt from his Politico piece:
He had a deep appreciation as director for the bureau’s traditions and its esprit de corps. He famously, almost religiously, wore white shirts and dark suits as director—the picture of a stereotypical Hoover-era G-man—and would even gently mock aides and agents who dared to show up in his office wearing, horror of horrors, pink or even blue shirts. I long attributed his habit to his personal style and strait-laced nature, but, after he finished as director, I once asked him: Why the cult of the white shirt? He answered more philosophically than I’d ever seen him speak before—explaining that he knew he was leading the FBI through a period of wrenching change, converting it to a global intelligence agency focused around counterterrorism, and that he felt it important to keep recognizable totems of the past in place—like the tradition of the white shirt—to help agents understand it was still the same FBI they’d signed up to join.
Mueller does have some personal style quirks. For one, all his shirts look to be heavily starched, such that his collar occasionally bulges in unusual ways (Eric Twardzik recently wrote about this at Ivy Style). Mueller also favors dressier pinpoint oxfords, rather than the heavier, more textured variety. And lastly, he’s almost never pictured without a chunky Casio watch on his left wrist (always with the watch facing in). It looks to be some variation of the DW-290, a classic pre-G Shock model, which Tom Cruise wore in 1996 action spy film Mission Impossible.
Greg from No Man Walks Alone, who used to work on Wall Street, tells me he used to see watches like this all the time when he was in finance. They’re a way for certain people to downplay their wealth and power, a deliberate style choice that first became popular in 2008. “When people blamed the economic crisis on the financial services sector, people on Wall Street swapped out their Pateks and Rolexes for Casios,” says Greg. “It’s also a lifestyle thing. Powerful men at that age create status around athletic achievements. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve heard between senior bankers about the new road bike they bought or how many miles they ran that morning.”
I could do without the chunky Casio, but for the soft-shouldered, button-down look Mueller champions, that’s one change I’d like to see in Washington. Mueller looks so perfectly tailored in some photos that he’d be a better advert for Brooks Brothers than what the company puts out now (or frankly, even lower-end brands such as J. Crew). Just see below.
