Some Presidents REALLY Cared About Looks — I Bet You Can Name One Of The Vainest

0Eighty pairs of pants, maybe 200. Chester A. Arthur owned so many trousers that his contemporaries lost count, and 140 years later, so have historians.Heritage Images / Getty ImagesThe figure floating through the newspapers of the 1880s ranged from 70 to 200, depending on who was doing the gawking. His tailor recalled the president ordering 20 pairs at a time.Heritage Images / Getty ImagesArthur was what his era called a “dude,” not the surfer-adjacent term it is now, but 1880s slang for a man who conspicuously cared about his clothes. Washington society treated his wardrobe as a running news item, the way a later century would report a celebrity’s airport outfit.Bettmann / Getty Images“President Arthur was absolutely what I would call a clotheshorse,” said Summer Anne Lee, a fashion historian and author of the forthcoming Presidential Fashion: An Illustrated History. And the trouser math, she notes, isn’t really the point, adding, “The exact number is probably less historically significant than the fact that so many people were talking about his clothes in the first place.”DEA / BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA / Getty ImagesThe vainest president in American history sounds like a fun thing to settle, but the question starts to buckle the moment you ask the people who study this for a living. Vanity, two historians offered, is a hollow word for something that runs deeper.Bildagentur-online / Getty ImagesThe Difference Between Vanity vs. Image ControlRelated: "30 Horrifying And Tragic Historical Photos You Probably Never Saw In Textbooks"

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

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