What a designer dud.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing heat for putting too much focus on his threads — rather than New York City’s response to brutal Winter Storm Fern.
Hizzoner reportedly wanted to make sure he had the perfect outfit to brief New Yorkers ahead of the January storm that dumped a foot of snow on the Big Apple and brought a brutal chill that killed more than a dozen people.
The New York Times reported Monday — when the outdoor deaths tied to the extreme cold rose to 16 — how the mayor, while needing to coordinate a citywide response to the storm, also “wanted to find a new coat.
“One that was unassuming and modest, but still able to distinguish him while he addressed New Yorkers during the storm,” the Style section article detailed.
The fresh-faced mayor’s mad dash for new duds marked just one of several instances where the Democratic socialist leader has made cultivating his image and appearance a top priority, critics said.
“If he used a fraction of the energy spent on his propaganda videos and prop jackets towards running the city, we wouldn’t have people literally dying from the cold, piles of garbage and mountains of snow,” one Democratic operative told The Post.
Mamdani, 34, ended up wearing the custom Carhartt jacket in front of the cameras for a briefing as mounds of flakes fell Jan. 25, and also during a snow shovel photo op in Brooklyn later that day.
His artist wife, Rama Duwaji, helped guide the mayor toward the quilted jacket, the Times noted.
“The first lady is his No. 1 trusted adviser for creative input,” said Noah Neary, one of Duwaji’s senior advisers, adding that Duwaji was “pleased” with the end result.
The $159 jacket was purchased from Dave’s New York in Manhattan and then taken to be customized at a Brooklyn shop, Arena Embroidery, which has been tapped by the likes of rapper Bad Bunny for items.
They also added a special stitching inside the collar with the phrase, “No problem too big. No task too small,” from the speech he gave after his stunning Democratic mayoral primary victory.
The jacket soon went viral, with write-ups in the likes of GQ, Harper’s Bazaar and Complex, culminating in the fawning Times story describing the painstaking details that went into picking out the outerwear.
But outrage began to grow as the death toll from the cold snap rose this week and the city’s response to the storm came under scrutiny — with mountains of trash piling up on the still-snow-covered streets.
“What I didn’t expect was over a dozen dead as a direct result of Mamdani’s leadership, roads clogged with snow, and garbage piling up. But, hey, at least Mamdani got a customized Carhartt for his propaganda videos,” one X user griped.
Past mayors have had their own embroidered fleece or windbreaker, but they weren’t bought from a hipster retail brand before being shipped off to a self-described “embellishment lab” for a quick turnaround.
“Bill de Blasio furnished Gracie Mansion with furniture from West Elm,” political consultant Ken Frydman told The Post, adding, “Mamdani is sending the same ‘man of the working people’ optics with a Carhartt jacket.”
“He and his wife should pay more attention to New Yorkers freezing to death than to customized clothing.”
Lee Miringoff, head of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, cautioned the new mayor against focusing too much on looks, rather than issues important to New Yorkers, such as the storm response.
“His biggest problem is the city is still a mess,” Miringoff said. “It could be a growing blemish if the homeless problem and deaths continue.
“The issue is magnified because he’s young and lacks the material or governing experience of prior mayors,” he said about the former state Assembly member.
The jacket episode was one of many examples of the mayor putting focus on strategic PR moves to inflate his public profile.
Mamdani has taken an outsized, hands-on approach to crafting his image, according to reports. In a profile published Monday, Politico reported the mayor holds three communications meetings a week — and personally rewrote some official statements from City Hall’s press shop during his first month in office.
Mamdani’s socialist hero, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has stressed to the mayor that he needs to be visible, putting out a simple public message, according to the Times.
The Mamdani admin’s strategy to do so has apparently led the mayor’s office to plan on holding a public event for each of his first 100 days in office.
But some of the events have seemed out of tune with the goings-on of the city.
While New Yorkers still struggled to navigate the ice-mound-riddled streets Friday, Mamdani was announcing a settlement with food delivery apps for underpayment of workers — part of a case brought by his predecessor Eric Adams’ administration.
On Monday, his press conference — held on the roof of the David Dinkins building in sub-zero temps — was about opening the historic Lower Manhattan municipal site to public tours.
It was during that event that the mayor also announced the outdoor death toll had risen by three, to 16, with 13 New Yorkers perishing from hypothermia and three overdoses.
“He literally has his head in the clouds,” quipped political strategist O’Brien Murray, referring to the bizarre presser from the 40-story building’s observation deck.
“He has his head in the clouds while people are literally dying on the streets.”
The mayor provided a couple more updates on snow recovery efforts Tuesday — also during an unrelated event, this time promoting free tax prep services.
The public events mirrored those of his first few weeks in office, when Mamdani gathered reporters for such groundbreaking news as his move into Gracie Mansion, rolling out half-baked plans to combat junk fees and continuously raging against the high prices of the World Cup.
“He’s going to have a very short honeymoon if he thinks the only thing that matters is image,” said another veteran Dem political operative.
“Anybody advising him of that is a fool.”
