Fake It till You Make It? Or the Story of George Santos’s Sweater
Have you ever looked at somebody’s headshot and thought, something just doesn’t look right? The styling is good, the lighting is flattering, and the sitter knows their angles, but something seems off.
More likely than not, what you are picking up on is the subject’s fake smile.
In scientific parlance, authentic smiles that express true joy are known as Duchenne smiles; these engage many facial muscles, particularly those around the eyes. Non-Duchenne smiles, in contrast, engage one set of facial muscles and are centered around the mouth. Non-Duchenne smiles often seem empty, false, or distant and can convey feelings of discomfort rather than joy. Scholars of social psychology, neurology, organizational behavior, and more have spent decades studying the differential effects of each type of smile on perceptions, interactions, and behavioral outcomes, but most of us know this intuitively (my grandfather once told me that, though I always looked pretty in photos, he could tell when I was faking a smile).
Another way to think about this distinction is that Duchenne smiles are authentic representations of inner states, conveying consistency and trustworthiness to others. (Regular readers may remember my discussion of moral authenticity, or how true something is to its own projected self, from an earlier essay.) Non-Duchenne smiles telegraph inauthenticity, which makes us wary — people who try to mask or fake their emotional states can be understood instinctually as inherently unreliable interaction partners.
(NB: these judgments are generally made subconsciously, in a split second, and are not generally persistent, particularly when assessing somebody we already know. Don’t worry — everybody fakes a smile once in a while!)
It makes sense that we are able to tell the difference between genuine and false emotional states — but can we tell the difference between genuine and false stories conveyed by clothing? I have argued before that our clothing is part of a story we tell about ourselves. The persona we construct, of which clothing is merely one component, allows us to make sense of ourselves and our place in the world. For most of us, clothing is an outward manifestation of that persona, hopefully, contrived with intention; it represents the picture of ourselves that we want the world to see, guiding others as they try to understand us and place us within the social order.
This brings me to George Santos. By now we are all familiar with the many avenues through which Santos has tried to fool us all, from his fake resume to his fake Jewish heritage to his fake charity to his fake names to his mother’s fake death. Another way Santos faked his story was through his clothing.
The New York Times’s Vanessa Friedman published a fantastic essay about the costuming of George Santos. She compares Santos to Tom Ripley, the protagonist of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, who transforms himself into a facsimile of a socialite by donning a friend’s Princeton jacket. She then, quite convincingly, draws a straight line from Santos to Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes, other famous fraudsters whose sartorial style was a centerpiece of their adopted personae. Friedman makes the case that Santos adopted a dress style (sometimes stealing roommates’ clothes) that matched his (fake) resume: the quarter-zips and fleece vests that Goldman Sachs types wear, or the khakis with layers of white button-down, crew neck, and jacket that are the uniform of the rich preppy boy with more money than style. “Yes, it’s a cliché,” she writes, “That doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Clothes are the camouflage that gets you in the door.”
I cannot disagree with Friedman’s take (I almost never disagree with her takes, actually). Yet I also think she missed an important point: Santos’s wardrobe, in Congress at least, did not come off as authentic at all. In fact, I think it marked him as a fake just as clearly as a non-Duchenne smile.
During the week of chaos surrounding the opening of the 2023 Congressional session, Santos stood out like a sore thumb. As Kevin McCarthey scrambled to find a path to the Speakership, even the sartorial risk takers like famously jacketless Jim Jordan and flashy-shoe-wearing Matt Gaetz seemed to play by the rules of the House, blending in with the rest of the masses on the floor in relatively sedate suits and colorful ties.
Santos, by contrast, wore a sweater under his jacket, which was often a sportscoat rather than a suit jacket. That might seem like a minor thing, just an expression of personal style, but it reveals a lack of familiarity with the rules of the game that — to me at least — demonstrated just how fake his whole persona is. It was precisely the wrong look at precisely the wrong moment. By mistaking “generically preppy old money” for “congressman chic,” Santos gave us a tell, and the story it told the world was “I don’t know who I am supposed to be here.”
You might give this novice Congressperson some grace: many people don’t quite get it right in Congress (Lauren Boebert, here sitting next to Santos, also regularly misfires — pun intended). I would argue that many get it wrong because they are not paying attention, because clothes are not their priority, or because they do not understand the symbolic significance of their wardrobe.
Santos is exactly the opposite, which makes this miscalibration so telling. The effect of his mismatch is exacerbated by the fact that Santos’s wardrobe is authentic to neither his life history nor his current position. This is not an area where Santos seems able to fake it till he makes it.
George Santos may have donned those sweaters to pull the wool over our eyes. I think the astute observer can spot a counterfeit wardrobe — and a counterfeit congressman — from a mile away.
