Luigi Mangione is Wearing A New Suit and The meaning is....
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| Mr. Mangione alongside his attorney, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, during an evidentiary hearing on Dec. 12.William Farrington/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
The author has covered the use of image in the courtroom in the cases of such figures as Depp v. Heard, Elizabeth Holmes and Sean Combs.
New York Times
The pretrial hearings of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, have finally come to an end. The judge will most likely issue his rulings later, possibly even in January, when Mr. Mangione will be back in a different court for the scheduling of his federal trial. But this hearing has been, in some ways, a dress rehearsal.
Literally.
Witness the defendant’s about-face from crew-neck sweaters to suits. Given the way Mr. Mangione’s looks have become a central part of his narrative in the year since his arrest, the significance of such choices is lost on no one — least of all his legal team.
From the beginning, everything he has worn has become a detail in the myth his supporters tell of a lone social bandit driven to extremes by the monolithic, exploitative American health care system. (Mr. Mangione has pleaded not guilty in both state and federal cases.)
Supporters of Mr. Mangione, wearing green in allegiance, have gathered outside Manhattan Criminal Court when he has appeared for pre-trial hearings this month.Credit...Mike Segar/Reuters
He has been called the “hot assassin.” He has developed a fan base that dresses in green to demonstrate its allegiance (after the trademark color of Luigi from Super Mario Bros.) and posts odes to what they see as his allure. And he sparked a run on burgundy crew necks at Nordstrom when he chose one for his December 2024 arraignment. Little wonder that what appeared to be an A.I. likeness of Mr. Mangione was used to model a shirt for sale on Shein.
That is why, beyond the legal issues involved, what Mr. Mangione wears to these hearings matters. Each one is an opportunity for the defense team to try out different costumes — to market-test them, essentially. Even though there is no jury involved, enough of the world outside the courtroom is paying attention that the responses are themselves data points. Especially because every day in state court, where cameras are allowed, Mr. Mangione is caught on film in stills that go out around the world.
“A jury is essentially a very small demographic focus group,” said Mark Geragos, a criminal defense lawyer who has represented Winona Ryder and Lyle and Erik Menendez. “In the lead-up to the trial, his lawyers would be assessing everything for clues about how a jury might react to, or interpret, how he appears.”
Part of any defense strategy, especially when a jury is involved, is anticipating the potential subconscious prejudices and associations that appearance can spark — playing on them or avoiding them, but either way, acknowledging them. That’s why the Supreme Court ruled in Estelle v. Williams in 1976 that defendants had to be allowed to wear civilian clothes in court if requested. (Being seen in prison garb could influence a jury to presume they belonged in prison.)
This is particularly important in this case, given that competing images of Mr. Mangione doing the perp walk in an orange jumpsuit, and being shackled in a bulletproof vest, have already been disseminated. Dressing Mr. Mangione in regular clothes effectively allows the defense to begin to offer a rebuttal without saying a word.
That is most likely why Mr. Mangione’s team gave themselves an assortment of choices when it came to their client’s courtroom attire. After a defense request, a federal judge, allowed Mr. Mangione: “2 suits; 3 shirts; 3 sweaters; 3 pairs of pants; 5 pairs of socks; and 1 pair of shoes (without laces).”
(Ties are sometimes not permitted for defendants in criminal cases, Mr. Geragos said, as they are seen as potential security risks, though it is unclear if that was the reasoning here.)
If the crew neck sweaters and khakis Mr. Mangione wore at his arraignment and at a hearing earlier this year offered a portrait of Luigi 2.0 — the version the jury consultant Jo-Ellan Dimitrius called “the boy next door” — this was the debut of Luigi 3.0.
At earlier court appearances, Mr. Mangione wore crew-neck sweaters, which, along with khakis, created the effect of “the boy next door,” said the jury consultant Jo-Ellan Dimitrius.Credit...Eduardo Munoz/Reuters, Pool photo by Steven Hirsch
Despite the request for sweaters for the hearing, which has already lasted two weeks, Mr. Mangione wore only the suits — one gray and one dark blue. He wore the gray suit with a burgundy tattersall check shirt, a blue striped shirt and a white shirt. He wore the navy with a lilac tattersall check.
This Luigi might seem to observers to be dressing even more for the seriousness of his situation and to demonstrate respect for the court, from his clothes to his clean-shaven chin and still-manicured eyebrows. (Mr. Mangione clearly understands the power of grooming, as the hearing demonstrated: One of the notes in his backpack at the time of his arrest read “pluck eyebrows.”) He might seem like someone they recognize, someone they might know, who might dress like they would.
Indeed, Mr. Geragos said, the fact that Mr. Mangione was wearing a suit without a tie helped make him seem like a kid on his way to his first job in, say, private equity, with all the dream and aspiration that implies. Especially when paired with a tattersall check shirt, a preppy staple that the men’s wear critic Derek Guy described as “once belonging to country dress” — or, more pointedly, country club dress. Worn with the top two buttons undone, the shirts conveyed both respectability and an attitude of openness and vulnerability, Mr. Geragos said, as if the defendant had nothing to hide.
In any case, the choices have not gone unnoticed.
The journalist Vicky Ward, who is writing a book on the case, summed up the effect in her Substack. “Sitting there, dressed in expensive suits and shirts, his face pale but serious, he looks almost young enough to have stepped straight out of a classroom at a fancy New England prep school,” she wrote of Mr. Mangione.
His appearance makes him seem, she wrote, “surreally out of place in the courtroom.”
Which is, of course, the point: to suggest that, while the defendant understands the gravity of his situation, he doesn’t belong in the dock. Relying on age-old stereotypes that equate tailoring with morality, and preppiness with sincerity, is not a new technique and has been disproved time and again. (See George Santos). But judging by the reactions of Mr. Mangione’s fans and close observers, including one account that detailed his undone buttons and “tease of the chest,” it is still effective.
Whether his team decides it will work equally well on the jury remains to be seen.
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