Anyone who lives in Los Angeles recognizes it: the off-set block-serif logo of the LA Dodgers or the italicized Bodoni font used for the Lakers. So perhaps it was a bit of a surprise for some locals to see them used in service of Spencer Pratt, the reality star who’s running for mayor of Los Angeles.
Pratt, who first came to fame some 20 years ago as a villainous character in the MTV show The Hills, is now a sudden insurgent force in the city’s heated mayoral race, galvanized to action when his Pacific Palisades home burned to the ground during last year’s fires.
He has made inroads in a Trumpian fashion, by whipping the simmering rage of a frustrated populace into a frenzied campaign, despite relatively inchoate policy proposals. Like the sitting president, he’s leveraged reality TV fame into a growing movement, despite a lack of political experience. In the process, however, he’s savvily been leveraging the rich iconography of the city and state: wearing Southern California shoe favorite Vans with his boxy suits—as he did in a sit-down interview with Elex Michaelson on CNN—or brimmed caps emblazoned with “Pratt” across the front, the “A” replaced by that recognizable Dodgers logo and another in the Lakers’s stylized script.
“Fashion has always been political,” says Maria Cabrera Arus, a sociologist and faculty member at NYU Gallatin who studies the politics of fashion and material culture, with a forthcoming book on the subject. “It signals power, status, class, and gender. And, as material culture and fashion studies have shown, appearances don’t just reflect politics; they construct it.”
With his clothing choices, Pratt conveys two things: his desire to be seen as a political outsider, and also as an avatar of California—and, specifically, Los Angeles.
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The current primary is scheduled for June 2. If no candidate wins 50% of the vote, it goes to a run-off in November. Pratt’s two biggest opponents are Karen Bass, the current Democratic mayor, who came under fire when she was out of the country as the catastrophic wildfires broke out, and Nithya Raman, a Democratic Socialist who serves on the city council. A sign that, despite his thin record, Pratt is striking a nerve is that he is currently outpacing them both in terms of fundraising.
Arus notes that, historically, political fashion was used mostly in two ways: to project authority, status, and unity (think all those men in their homogenous suits) and as branding (à la Trump’s blazing red MAGA hats). “What makes the Pratt case interesting,” she says, “is that his choices seem to be doing something hybrid. On the one hand, the suits and formal wear read as an attempt to close the distance between himself and the political establishment he is trying to win. Coming from reality television, dressing up conveys belonging.” She mentions the way New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist outsider, dressed up his revolutionary messaging in innocuous tailoring to project a visual connection to familiar City Hall leaders.
