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With Labour blocking Andy Burnham from returning as an MP, the so-called “king of the north” came out wearing a simple black V-neck jumper with dark denim jeans. The Greater Manchester mayor, appearing at the launch of a Class Ceiling report at the city’s Whitworth gallery on Monday, looked quietly, subtly, the outsider.
It might not sound like much. But that is the point of Burnham’s largely unnoteworthy look, which tends to involve Left Bank intellectual-adjacent black-on-black. In direct contrast to his tie-wearing colleagues in parliament, Burnham’s style feels particularly symbolic.
Ever since his move away from Westminster politics, Burnham has been dressing differently, eschewing the uniform of his former suited-and-booted colleagues. Largely ditching the suit and tie, he prefers black bomber jackets, black jumpers with no shirt underneath, black blazers and black T-shirts, with the odd workwear jacket thrown in. Last week he wore a white T-shirt and aptly workwear-esque navy jacket to unveil a “concrete plan to reindustrialise the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution”.
Andrew Groves, a professor of fashion design and director of the Westminster Menswear Archive, says Burnham’s “all-black workwear look is as calculated as any Westminster suit, just aimed at a different audience”. Its casualness is loaded. As Groves puts it: “It rejects parliamentary polish and signals Mancunian proximity: practical, ordinary, and deliberately outside London political dress codes.”
According to Jonathan Tonge, a professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, Burnham’s fashion statements match his politics: mildly “left of centre, moderately radical, nonconformist”. While he will, he says, “wear a formal suit when needs must … for day-to-day business, what he’s saying is, ‘I’m Andy Burnham, I’m different from Westminster, and my fashions are different from Westminster’.”
His style is also a byproduct of his unique position. The first “metro mayor“ of Greater Manchester, he could, says Tonge, “chisel out the job as he wanted it and part of that was to set the fashion rules and say, actually, the old conventions don’t apply to this, I’m going to be smart-casual in my own way”.
The way he dresses represents “the Manchester way” he talks about. It feels more inspired by his Mancunian musical heroes than any political ones. Tonge describes his look as “the Smiths meets Britpop”.
It also sits uncomfortably but aptly close to the style of the man he arguably hopes one day to topple. Keir Starmer also wears dark shirts – he defended his national executive committee vote against Burnham this week wearing a navy shirt under a black suit jacket – and Britpop-adjacent styles such as Stone Island and Harrington jackets. As Tonge says: “Starmer, when he arrives in Liverpool for the annual party conference or whatever, he’ll turn up in an open neck shirt, sometimes trainers on.” But it is not, he says, “at a Burnham level in terms of non-conformity”.
A former parliamentary politician who is now a thorn (from a Lancastrian red rose) in the side of the Labour government in Westminster, Burnham has not always avoided suits – there was controversy when, in 2015, two years before his move up the M1, he admitted to buying Armani suits, albeit in Boxing Day sales.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2022, he said of his Westminster suit and tie era: “I remember, when I left, slowly realising: ‘I don’t have to do this any more … it was an evolution and I’m not going back.” If he does make it back to Westminster, it will be interesting to see whether his style returns south too.
