It feels like every time we see former President Barack Obama, he loses another button.
On Tuesday, he was speaking at the Global Food Innovation Summit in Milan, Italy, where he defended the Paris climate accord, but viewers noticed something else … his deeply unbuttoned shirt.
Since leaving office, Obama has dressed more casually in public than he usually did as president.
Here he is back in January on his last day in office, wearing a tie.
Two weeks ago, here he is at his first public event since leaving office, looking cool and casual in a suit jacket and open-collared shirt, sans tie.
And again last week, showing off the proposed Obama Presidential Center.
Then here he was Tuesday unbuttoned in a striped shirt …
It’s difficult to say definitively from photos, but it looks as if he might have gone three-buttons deep.
Meet post-presidency Obama, cool, calm, and deeeeply casual.
But fear not, he hasn’t forgotten how to dress up. On Sunday, he accepted the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in black tie.
The ties our male politicians wear or don’t wear can signal the image they’re trying to publicly portray. They’re also falling out of fashion in our workplaces, according to a 2007 Gallup poll, so for a former president as young as 55-year-old Obama to ditch wearing them isn’t that surprising, but how many buttons he had undone was.