Costumes. Uniforms. They’ve always played a big role in everything from government, military and religion to performances, social gatherings and espionage. Paradoxically speaking, costumes have been used to establish identities and to hide them. Some have made use of costumes to maximize their fame and others to conceal it. But rarely has anyone become famous for nothing but his costume, and in this case not much of a costume either.
Enter Mr. Kenneth “Ken” Bone, a man who became the most famous person in the world for a costume he hadn’t intended to wear. All it took was timing, plus a white shirt, a white tie, a red sweater and a mustache.
It happened in St. Louis in early October, during the second debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The debate was done town-hall style, meaning that a select group of undecided voters chosen at random would get the opportunity to appear on stage with the candidates and ask questions. Bone, one of the lucky winners selected to ask a question, captured the world’s imagination. People saw a certain charming innocence in his choice of wardrobe as he addressed the two most disliked candidates in the history of polling.
Now, four months, hundreds of interviews and a quarter of a million Twitter followers later (he had just seven followers on Twitter before that seminal moment, including two accounts that belonged to his grandmother), Bone finds himself in what seems like the twilight of his 15 proverbial minutes. And all because of a red sweater that he hadn’t intended on wearing in the first place.
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