Rest in Peace, Asshole

No dictator dressed like Muammar Gaddafi. You can dispute plenty about his legacy—well, you can’t really, the man was a blood-soaked authoritarian who kept Libya in permanent violent terror for four decades—but the wardrobe was a genuine achievement. Floor-length robes in colors that shouldn’t coexist. Military uniforms buried under medals of uncertain provenance. Ceremonial hats. Dark glasses. A personal bodyguard detail of women in camouflage fatigues, because of course—the man had a sense of theater that most people couldn’t sustain for a single afternoon, let alone forty years of state power.

Vanity Fair once called him a fashion genius of his era. Time ran a slideshow. The Huffington Post praised his creative instincts as something other world leaders should study. All of which is absurd and also sort of correct. There was a commitment to it—a full-throttle maximalism that looked like what you’d get if a Bond villain decided to make West African ceremonial dress his entire personality and then stopped accepting any outside input whatsoever.

He died this week, found in a drainage pipe outside Sirte, killed by the people he’d spent decades terrorizing. The world is not ambivalent. Neither am I.

But the clothes shouldn’t be forgotten. Some Z-list designer with nothing left to protect should walk a Gaddafi tribute line at the next available fashion week—the robes, the medals, the impossible quantities of embroidery and fringe. There’s a design philosophy buried inside all that megalomania, and it would be a waste to let it disappear entirely with the man.

Rest in peace, asshole.