Visual Rhetoric of President Biden’s Aviators
Aviator sunglasses are having a moment in 2022, fueled by President Joe Biden and actor Tom Cruise. Both men have been around for awhile, as Biden first ran for president in 1988 and Cruise’s breakthough role was in 1983 in Risky Business. Both use the sunglasses as visual rhetoric to proclaim success.
However, the President’s sunglasses were absent for awhile. They weren’t present at the G7 outdoors family photo, or the White House Easter Egg Roll.
However, the aviators are back. The New York Times proclaimed, “President Biden is back after Covid, vacation and legislative victories, and so are his shades.” They have been notably president since
…he proclaimed his negative status in a Rose Garden speech, on his trip with the first lady to eastern Kentucky to survey the flood damage, during his vacation in South Carolina. Symbolic, once again, of a president who, as John Harwood wrote for CNN, “suddenly looks different.”
The president has been having a streak of good days, largely due to the Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the midterm elections.
The President likely doesn’t mind any comparison of his sunglasses to Cruise’s, especially after the wildly successful performance of Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel to the 1986 Top Gun, earlier this year.
Public figures such as Biden and Cruise often use special clothing or objects as visual rhetoric to signal a particular argument, to make a statement without having to say a word. In the case of the aviator sunglasses, both men seem to be proclaiming that they are winners. After all, GQ declared, aviator sunglasses are “ageless and eternal.”