Breitbart fashion critic John Binder is a Slidell native who’s an ultraconservative outlier in the fashion world, according to a new profile of the 25-year-old by The New York Times.
“Binder has been following his twin passions, fashion and politics, since his student days at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond,” reads the feature.
His professors were all too predictably liberal, Binder tells the newspaper.
“The university turned me into a total right-winger,” he says.
Binder says growing up as the youngest of eight children in a family of moderate means has also shaped his worldview.
“I don’t live this grand fabulous lifestyle,” he says. “I don’t come from a place of growing up in a grand apartment in the West Village, from a place of having the same opinion as everyone else.”
As an outsider, Binder has a bone to pick with his fellow fashion chroniclers.
“Mostly their attitude is you can be with us, but you have to believe all the things that we believe,” he says. “If you don’t, you’re just not chic enough for us.”
As such, you won’t find Binder in the front row of the season’s hottest shows, gushing over the sometimes kinky collections of star brands including Alexander Wang or Marc Jacobs. Nor is he likely to get much love from the left-leaning fashion establishment.
Rather, he routinely heaps accolades on the high-profile personalities that style-world insiders, at least privately, tend to scorn. Chief among them is the first lady, whom Binder exalts as a role model for ordinary American women.
