Fashion
The Big Fat Windsor Knot Takes Washington
President Trump and his cabinet favor this style for their neck ties.
On Tuesday, as news piled up about the Trump administration’s use of a Signal group chat to discuss military strikes, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, found himself facing the Senate Committee on Intelligence. He looked like a prep schooler sitting in detention.
His striped tie was yanked off center, and the top button of his dress shirt was conspicuously unfastened, as if too constricting for his neck.
But by the standards of President Trump’s cabinet, there was nothing off about Mr. Patel’s Dorito-shaped tie. After all, the wide Windsor knot, a symmetrical loop about the size of a Labrador’s paw, has become the standard in the administration.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the central character in the group chat debacle, favors plump knots that lack a dimple, giving them the look of a tie drawn by a child. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the E.P.A. administrator Lee Zeldin similarly favor knots scaled somewhere between meatballs and dinner rolls.
For Mr. Trump’s congressional address in early March, when Elon Musk, the DOGE leader, finally traded his graphic T-shirts for a suit, his satiny blue tie was looped into a flat, broadsided knot. He may not officially be in Mr. Trump’s cabinet, but on that evening he knew the dress code.
