Thalapathy Vijay’s tailored black suit at his swearing-in as Tamil Nadu’s fourteenth chief minister signals a sharp break from the state’s veshti-angavastram political dress code. Drawing on Periyar’s black-shirt symbolism and his own cinematic persona, Vijay uses fashion to project protest, modernity and a promise to turn his on-screen crusader image into real-world governance.
Much is being said about Thalapathy Vijay's black suit at his oath-taking ceremony on Sunday. What's in a suit, you ask? A lot, actually. This is especially true when the wearer is in politics. After all, in a field where even a flick of your hand or the flowers sitting at the back of your room is analysed and psychoanalysed down to the last atom, the smallest change in the suit you wear can conjure up a geopolitical storm.
You might remember the fiasco around Trump’s fashion faux pas at Pope Francis’ funeral last year. As world leaders gathered at St. Peter’s Basilica to bid farewell to the previous head of the Christian world, Trump wore a bright sapphire blue suit and tie with an American flag lapel pin, to an event that has long enforced a strictly all-black dress code. He wasn’t the only one in blue, though: Prince William and Joe Biden were present in navy, too. But Trump’s look, in particular, was widely criticised: the bright, eye-catching suit was seen as a moment of high-handedness on the American President, an attempt on his part to bring his all-too-familiar American supremacy rhetoric to an event that had nothing to do with him in the first place.
Dial back a decade, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi made headlines in 2015 for wearing a navy pinstripe suit for a meeting with then-US President Barack Obama. This time, though, controversy erupted not over the suit's colour, but over the saffron pinstripes on the jacket- which weren’t pinstripes at all. Closer inspection revealed that the custom-made jacket was embroidered throughout with the Prime Minister’s full name, all in gold threads. An obscene display of wealth, critics argued, for a man who had come to power on the might of his rags-to-riches story and “chaiwala” image.
Obama’s own fashion faux pas came in 2014, when a tan suit he wore to a media conference about ISIS in Syria was deemed so casual for the occasion that it has it’s own Wikipedia page.
All this talk brings us to the latest case of suit dissection. C. Joseph Vijay, actor-turned politician and leader of the political party Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (transl. Victory Party of Tamilakam), took his oath as the fourteenth chief minister of Tamil Nadu, in a victory that is now the talk of the country. Breaking away from decades of political dressing norms of the state (which dictate that the leader should always wear a traditional veshti-angavastram combo when formally attending to matters of the state), Vijay wore a tailored black suit and white shirt to his swearing-in ceremony.
Now, there's a lot to talk about when you talk about the new Tamil Nadu chief minister. You could start with how the actor’s two-year-old party took on the likes of the DMK, which has been around for seven decades now, and produced leaders like M. Karunanidhi and his son, M.K. Stalin. You could talk about his infamous extramarital affair with actress Trisha Krishnan, all while the divorce proceedings with his wife are still in full swing. You could talk about how, in a moment of political fervour, he went off-script while taking his oath and had to be reigned in by the governor to follow protocol. Nothing about Thalapathy Vijay followed the long-held script, and his fashion just followed suit.
Beyond being a deviation from tradition, you could also see the pin black suit as a nod to Periyarism, the movement started by ‘Periyar’ E V Ramasamy that focuses on regional autonomy, atheism and socialist values like abolition of the caste system and untouchability, values which are not too dissimilar from the TVK’s own guiding principles. Periyar chose black shirts as a symbol of protest against caste sentiments, as a fashion substitute for black flags, which were banned from protests in Tamil Nadu in the early 20th century.
But Vijay is a man of cinema. He was introduced into the film business in the 90s by his father, veteran filmmaker S A Chandrashekhar, with the title ‘Ilya Thalapathy’ (‘young commander’). His song with Trisha Krishnan, Appadi Podu, is one of the best-known Tamil songs in the country from the early 2000s. Over the course of twenty years, Vijay transformed from the chocolate boy in Gilli to the messiah of the people, building his image as the hero who fights problems plaguing the common Tamil man, one film after another. His 2014 film Kaththi addressed the agrarian crisis. Mersal criticised the private healthcare system. Sarkar was about political corruption. And so, by the time he joined politics on February 2, 2024, Thalapathy Vijay was already well-loved as the larger-than-life hero who changed society for the better on screen. Now, he is set to turn movies into reality.
The biggest expectation on Vijay right now is to turn the miracles on screen into actual, on-ground results for the fans who have voted him in. The black suit, inspired by his character's uniform in the move Beast, is a symbol of that silver-screen charisma brought into real life. It’s a symbol of the Periyar movement that inspired him, the fantasy that he promises to realise, and most of all, the change from everything that defined the norm in Tamil Nadu politics in the past decades.