Vans Sneakers, Dodgers Logos: How Spencer Pratt Is Leveraging LA Iconography for His Mayoral Campaign
As a mayoral candidate, reality star Spencer Pratt is savvily using imagery from LA to build his campaign.
Reported by Vogue.
Spencer Pratt is running for mayor of Los Angeles, and before you dismiss it: he's currently out-fundraising both incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and city council member Nithya Raman. The former Hills villain, whose Pacific Palisades home burned down in last year's wildfires, has channeled that loss into a populist campaign heavy on anger and light on policy. But if you want to understand how he's made it this far, stop listening to what he's saying and start looking at what he's wearing.
Dressing Like a City, Not a Candidate
According to Vogue, Pratt has been showing up to CNN interviews in boxy suits paired with Vans — the quintessential Southern California skate shoe — and sporting caps that swap the "A" in "Pratt" for the Dodgers' iconic block-serif logo, with a Lakers-script version in rotation too. It reads less like campaign merch and more like a mood board for Los Angeles itself. NYU Gallatin sociologist Maria Cabrera Arus, who studies the politics of fashion and material culture, calls it a deliberate hybrid strategy: "The Lakers and Dodgers logos, the Vans, the caps come closer to Trump's playbook — lifestyle tokens that denote Los Angeles, street culture, the people's teams." But the suits, she argues, do something else entirely, signaling a bid for institutional legitimacy — the same move democratic socialist NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani made by wrapping radical politics in unremarkable tailoring.
LA-based image consultant and men's stylist Andrew Weitz puts it plainly: "He's not dressing like a traditional politician — he's dressing like Los Angeles." The Vans keep him tethered to skate and surf culture while the tailoring says he's serious. The hats function as lifestyle branding in an attention economy that rewards legibility over substance. It's a political costume with real cultural fluency — part off-duty dad, part beach bum, part insurgent. The precedent is long: Jimmy Carter's cardigans, Reagan's cowboy cosplay, Fetterman's schlubcore. Pratt's version is just more specifically zipped into a geography.
The execution, though, isn't flawless. Weitz notes the suits are often ill-fitting, with proportions that occasionally undercut the authority they're meant to project. And the Dodgers logo usage almost certainly constitutes trademark infringement. Then there's the rest of the record: reported ties to Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones, a pattern of unverifiable claims, and — as Jimmy Kimmel pointed out on his show — a side hustle selling healing crystals at PrattDaddy.com. The primary is June 2; if no candidate clears 50%, it heads to a November runoff. Los Angeles is genuinely in flux, and Pratt is genuinely polling in second place.
Fashion has always been a form of argument — and Pratt's argument is that he is Los Angeles, not its political class. Whether voters buy the look or see through it may determine whether the city's grief becomes his governing mandate.
Read the original at Vogue.
