What is it about a man in uniform?
For decades, even centuries, the allure has been a romantic cliché. But swooning heroines are not the only ones who love the look. So do autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un — and so, apparently, does President Trump, who has fantasized about a military parade since his first term, when he was publicly taken by the spectacle of the Bastille Day parade in Paris featuring soldiers in all their spit-shined glory marching down the Champs-Élysées.
Well, on Saturday he will get his wish, just in time for his 79th birthday, which happens to coincide with the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army. Not to mention Flag Day.
That’s when 6,600 soldiers, resplendent in uniforms representing conflicts from the Revolutionary War to today, as well as hundreds in full contemporary battle dress, will march in formation down Constitution Avenue and across the National Mall, medals gleaming, hardware flashing, like nothing so much as soldier supermodels in mid-strut.
If you think that comparison is a reach, consider that Mr. Trump himself offered it up during his West Point commencement speech in late May, saying of the cadets: “These are good-looking people, I’ll tell you. General, what’s going on over here? Looks like all a bunch of male models.”
Of course, there are women at West Point, though they are a minority, and they will be in the parade.
In any case, the parade corps will have their own potent accessories: 28 M1 Abrams tanks, 28 M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and four Paladin howitzers, eight CH-47 Chinook helicopters, 16 AH-64 Apache helicopters, 16 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters — as well as assorted marching bands providing the soundtrack. What a present.
Not just because it fulfills one of Mr. Trump’s heart’s desires, but because it will create a made-for-television (and Truth Social) moment that will allow him, the commander in chief saluting from the viewing stand, to lay claim to the same set of values that animate the spectacle — even though he himself has never served.
“The uniformed body crystallizes all these associations we have,” said Paul Achter, an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Richmond, who has written on “military chic.” “It makes your chest look broader, your posture straighter, your shoulders stronger. It becomes shorthand for words like manly, strong, brave, dominant.”
Not to mention, said Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, an associate professor of fashion at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, “rank, discipline, order, authority and normative masculinity.”
This is true particularly when the uniformed body is part of a mass — denatured and subsumed into a whole — and particularly when the parade in question does not signify the end of an actual conflict, as it did in the United States after World War I and II or after the Gulf War.
Instead of honoring the sacrifice of individuals, thus, it becomes a moment of sheer pageantry dedicated to the glory of the state or the head of state. One in which uniforms become costumes, and the visual narrative about the potency implied by controlling such a force. Even if the soldiers themselves are in battle dress, not ceremonial dress — even if they are in camouflage rather than, say, the beribboned and bemedaled and epauleted outfits associated with victory, class and heroism — the camouflage has been stripped of its grime. The reality, and pain, of war erased.
“We are conditioned to see all that and think, ‘Wow, that is power,’” said Eliot A. Cohen, a political scientist and former State Department official under Condoleezza Rice. Especially, he continued, when there is heavy artillery like tanks and rocket launchers involved.
Since military parades have become such a rarity in the United States — John Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 was the last to feature a military force; the Desert Storm parade in 1991, the last connected to an actual war — that conditioning comes primarily via pop culture and history.
It is no accident that Mr. Trump’s go-to comparison for his favored military personnel is Tom Cruise, who has made a career out of portraying heroic soldiers, be it in “Top Gun,” “Taps” or “A Few Good Men,” as if that role were the model of a soldier against which all others were measured. The president brought the actor up during his first term and, more recently, during a speech in Florida in February, when he described the pilots on Air Force One as looking “like Tom Cruise, but better, stronger, tougher.”
“And I like Tom Cruise,” he said, “but these are better.”
Indeed, when it comes to the military, Mr. Trump has a very specific point of view: “These guys are all central casting. Better than anybody that you could get in Hollywood, too. Because they’re a little, little not so good in Hollywood. You know, they don’t look quite as tough.”
That Mr. Trump’s reference point is the land of make-believe — the one that built him into a successful businessman — simply underscores the theatrical purpose of the parade. And, perhaps, it’s why so many pundits are calling the event a “dress rehearsal” for what they say may be a more serious use, or abuse, of power and the military.
Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be the 2016 film “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” with its depiction of an Army unit that served in the Iraq war being feted during a Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day game, a satire in which the horror of conflict is airbrushed into marketing material. Or propaganda.
As Dr. Achter of the University of Richmond said of the parade, “It’s difficult to see this and not see Leni Riefenstahl,” referring to that filmmaker’s 1935 masterpiece, “Triumph of the Will,” documenting the Nuremberg rally, with its thousands of uniformed troops marching beneath the eye of Hitler.
The Riefenstahl film was conceived to memorialize Hitler’s glory for posterity by offering the “display of excess of authority, masculinity and order” that Dr. Ferrero-Regis of Queensland said characterized the military parade. The message is not so much for the people at the event (or, in the case of the Trump parade, for the lawmakers who are staying away) but for those who will catch sight of it from afar.
And yet, all of that masculinity can also verge on carnival, or even drag, Dr. Ferrero-Regis suggested, which is why, she said, “military uniforms are a much-used disguise in fancy dress parties.” For an example, see Sacha Baron Cohen in “The Dictator” riding a camel through the streets of New York City in full commander in chief get-up: dress whites, complete with golden epaulets, sash and knee-high leather boots. At the time, the juxtaposition was so ridiculous it seemed like a joke.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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