Global leaders attending an economic summit meeting in Beijing on Tuesday wore their usual uniforms — dark suits, white shirts, subdued ties — for meetings and trade announcements, but the opening photos of the event that went around the world showed them in more unconventional garb: amethyst tunics with Mandarin collars.
As The New York Times’s Mark Landler wrote, the purple silk “looked more ‘Star Trek’ than Shanghai Tang.”
The practice of world leaders dressing in the traditional attire of the host country at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum is said to have started in 1993, when President Bill Clinton handed out bomber jackets for a group photograph. Last year, President Obama and company were treated to some pretty fancy batik shirts in Indonesia.
The resulting group pictures are eminently silly — this time Mr. Obama, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, President Xi Jinping of China and others looked a bit like an aging a cappella group about to break into the “Star Trek” theme song — and easy to mock and dismiss as pointless pageantry (see this post on Twitter). But I think such group embarrassment actually serves a useful political purpose: It is a bonding exercise.
Think about it: There they all are, in the exact same clothing, feeling the same level of awkwardness, with an immediate shared joke to discuss. It’s a pretty effective way to break some fairly thick ice. It also puts all the world leaders an equal footing, at least sartorially.
And it may explain why, although Mr. Obama tried to halt the tradition in 2011, when the summit meeting was held in Hawaii and he told his peers that they did not need to wear the aloha shirts they received, his fellow presidents and prime ministers have kept the tradition going.
Sometimes a shirt is only a shirt. But in this case, it may be a strategic tool.
An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of a New York Times reporter. He is Mark Landler, not Lander.