We are midway through the Sean Combs trial for racketeering, conspiracy and sex trafficking. The prosecution could rest its case as early as next week, at which point the defense will take over. But the team has already previewed one aspect of its case. As the defense lawyer Teny Geragos said in her opening statement, it’s not about what the prosecution is “trying to make my client out to be.”
All anyone in the courtroom has to do is glance at the defendant to know what she means.
The Sean Combs sitting at the defendant’s table does not look anything like the Sean Combs whose behavior is on trial; the Sean Combs of most people’s memories. His hair and goatee have gone almost white, thanks to prison rules that forbid hair dye. He wears black framed reading glasses. And he is always dressed in a white collared shirt and a neutral toned crew-neck sweater: blue sweaters, gray sweaters, beige sweaters.
The contrast with the image that Mr. Combs built as a mogul — the one memorialized on the cover of Vogue, and in a perfume billboard featuring Mr. Combs in white tie with the tagline “I am King” — is so great, it became one of the trial’s earliest talking points. Even though the trial itself is not televised, it has been mentioned by almost every outlet covering the case.
Mr. Combs was “unrecognizable,” wrote the correspondent for The Independent. “Unrecognizable,” agreed Hot97. Not “like his Met Gala self,” decreed a TikTok commentator, referring to his last appearance at that party, in 2023, when Mr. Combs wore a custom-designed camellia-festooned cape and motorcycle tux with 600 Swarovski crystals and black pearls.
There is a courtroom strategy known as “the nerd defense,” a term coined by the lawyer Harvey Slovis, who once represented Mr. Combs during his trial on charges of gun possession in 1999. Now in broad use, “the nerd defense” refers to the theory that dressing a client in glasses — accessories associated with intelligence and a lack of physical strength — has a subliminal effect on a jury, predisposing them to assume a lack of guilt. The point is, in a trial, every detail of a defendant’s appearance matters.
Mr. Combs’s transformation takes it one step further. Someday, it may even be known as “the sweater defense.”
The Science of Courtroom Attire
It is part of human nature to make snap judgments about other peopel, their identities and aspirations, based on how they look. In that sense, the courtroom is a petri dish.
“Jurors notice everything,” said Mark Geragos, a criminal defense lawyer who has represented Winona Ryder, Chris Brown and, most recently, Lyle and Erik Menendez, and who is the managing partner of Geragos & Geragos. (He is also the father of Mr. Combs’s lawyer, Ms. Geragos, and has previously worked with Mr. Combs, though he is not involved in this specific case.) This is especially true in a long trial.
Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, a jury consultant who worked on the O.J. Simpson trial, agreed. “They are looking for any clue available to get a better sense of who the defendant is,” she said.
The Supreme Court acknowledged as much in the 1975 case Estelle v. Williams, in which the justices ruled that defendants in custody (like Mr. Combs) would be allowed to wear civilian clothes in court if requested, since seeing an individual in prison garb could suggest guilt to jurors and prejudice their decision-making. Numerous academic studies have found that the more attractive the defendant, the lighter his or her sentence. (This is known as “The Halo Effect.”) And that glasses suggest intelligence to jurors — which leads to more acquittals.
Lawyers for the defense can petition the marshal, or, in Mr. Combs’s case, the court, with their desired outfits. Generally, shoes with laces are forbidden for safety reasons and, in some cases, belts, but otherwise it is up to counsel and client. Which means the choices they are making are deliberate and considered. Body language and dress are evidence unto themselves, and as with any witness, you want to control as much of the messaging as possible. Whatever side of a case you are on.
(This is as true for lawyers and witnesses as it is for clients.)
The result can be “a very powerful part of the narrative,” said Debra Katz, a civil rights and whistle-blower attorney who represented Christine Blasey Ford.
The idea is to tap “into the collective unconscious of the jury,” Mr. Geragos said. To play on the stereotypes long-buried there.
A Brief History of Sweaters in Court
That is why the default court attire is often a suit or a jacket and tie. Harvey Weinstein, whose 2020 conviction for rape and sexual assault was reheard in a courtroom not far from Mr. Combs’s, wore a suit and tie for his defense. ASAP Rocky wore Saint Laurent suits during his firearms trial earlier this year. Former Senator Robert Menendez wore a suit and tie to court during his bribery trial last year. R. Kelly wore a suit and tie during his sexual abuse trials in both Brooklyn and Chicago.
Suits are traditionally the uniform of the establishment: They speak to respectability, the assumption of responsibility and credibility — though to a certain extent, dress and its associations are always a guessing game. If someone is clearly not a suit wearer in his daily life, putting him in a suit for the courtroom can read as costume, and as inauthentic.
Which is where sweaters come in. Knitwear has its own semiology — both in culture and in the courtroom. It is associated with grandfathers, school uniforms and the countryside; with reading by a fire — or being read to. Sweaters are, literally, soft, cuddly, swaddling. Mister Rogers wore sweaters. (Admittedly, they were cardigans.)
The first trial in which sweaters really captured public attention was that of the Menendez brothers, in 1993 — which also happened to be one of the first televised trials. Their lawyer, Leslie Abramson, dressed them in pastel knits, a choice widely interpreted as an effort to make them seem younger and more innocent. The sweaters became such a part of the narrative of the case that they made an appearance during a spoof on “Saturday Night Live.” In the recent Netflix series that revisited the trial, “Monsters, the Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” Lyle says to a friend: “Buy me a yellow sweater. Ever see a violent man wearing a yellow sweater?”
That trial “defined the idea that style means a lot,” Mr. Geragos said.
Recently, Luigi Mangione also appeared in a sweater — a burgundy crew neck — when he arrived in court to plead not guilty in the murder of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson. Along with his khaki pants, this created the effect of “the boy next door,” Ms. Dimitrius said. (For anyone wondering who was paying attention: The sweater, which appeared to be from Nordstrom, sold out afterward.)
P. Granddaddy
Still, Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty, is one of the more high-profile adult defendants not to wear a suit or blazer in court. Instead, in response to a request from his lawyers, the judge approved “five button-down shirts, up to five pairs of pants, up to five sweaters, up to five pairs of socks and up to two pairs of shoes without laces to wear to court” in the court order relating to his clothes.
As to why, his team did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The result, said Ms. Dimitrius, is to play down Mr. Combs’s identity as a businessman — or the sort of man who might be in charge of a criminal enterprise — and to make him look more like a retiree. Certainly, it normalizes him, it underscores the idea that, as Ms. Geragos said in her opening statement, whatever his public profile, “standing in this courtroom, at 55 years old, in the same place he was born and raised, he’s going by the same name he was born with, Sean Combs.”
In other words, this is the real him. It’s especially striking in contrast to some of the photographic and video evidence being shown to the jury, the graphic visuals of Mr. Combs’s more extreme sexual tastes, the surveillance video of an assault and the images of Mr. Combs in his flashy heyday.
And the sweaters are most likely not going away anytime soon. Not just because the actual defense is about to start, or because, despite the fact that the temperatures outside are rising, the courtroom itself is very air-conditioned. (At one point, the judge said he was “freezing.”)
But because, in the trial of a man who built his empire partly on understanding just how much of a role dress played in crafting identity, where a stylist has been called as a witness, and where the defendant’s interest in controlling the image of those around him has been raised multiple times on the stand, the sweaters offer their own kind of testimony.
Julia Jacobs contributed reporting.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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