There were times during the past 12 months I confess, when all those gruelling blogosphere arguments about the barrel cuffs on Obama’s shirt sleeves and the hardware on his loafers lost me. No wonder the custodians of global morality got uppity about the trivialisation of public debate.

Yet while pondering whether the semi-spread collar really is the best shape for Obama’s face may well be a minority sport confined to the readers of Vogue Homme, nuance – in voice, tone, language, gesture and yes, image – is often all we have to go on. Since most of us don’t know these candidates personally, we use our visual senses to help us to evaluate their authenticity.

It would be a wanton abandonment of natural resources not to. Besides, this was always an election fought on symbolic issues as much as the minutiae of constitutional legislation.

We still don’t know how much Obama’s considerable sartorial impact on the lasting impressions of the 2008 presidential campaign – JFK meets Will Smith with a little bit of Malcolm X for those who seek it, is the general consensus, not a bad style legacy – is the culmination of expensive focus grouping and how much is innate flair.

'Change has come' - Obama wins in landslide

Sweeping victory for America's first black president is greeted by tumultuous scenes Watch our video

• Analysis: Barack Obama's victory is head-spinning stuff

• Full video and text: Barack Obama's victory speech

• Early US Election exit polls give hope to Barack Obama

Michelle Obama: a new type of First Lady

For Carla Bruni the game is finally up. In Michelle Obama she has truly met her match - a First Lady like none before

BACKGROUND

• Bush - 'We should all be proud of Obama'

• The challenge that greets Obama

• Full video and text: Obama's victory speech

• Voters honour Martin Luther King's dream

Multimedia

• Bonjour 'Barack'

Related Links

• Whatever you think of the style, there is substance behind it

Multimedia

• Pictures: First Lady of fashion Michelle Obama

What is acknowledged is that he has natural grace, slenderness and height (6ft 1½in), all marvellous attributes if you’re a model but rare qualities on the political stage – and that he knows how to wear a suit. Or rather he doesn’t know, since that would suggest an unseemly degree of cultivated narcissism; he instinctively does.

Perhaps it really is instinctive because clothes-wise he has rarely put a foot wrong. The crisp white shirts retain their pristine purity from morning press briefing to final postmortem examination in the early hours of the following day. The tie (pale blue perhaps, efficiently knotted and always contemporary looking) slips in and out of the picture depending on the company its wearer is keeping. The narrow, elegant suits are, daringly, black (dark grey is the more conventional choice of politicians).

Black, for those who care about these matters – and pollsters are coming round to the view that the under40s increasingly want their politicians to demonstrate a connection with popular culture, including an awareness of the basic rules of style – is Modern. It’s Fashion. It’s a little bit Helmut Lang (if Malcolm X doesn’t do it for you) meets Hedi Slimane. Then again, it’s also practical, serious, portentous. It’s the perfect hue for recessionary times. It is shades of Abe Lincoln (OK, the portraits are in black and white but the residual image is of a man who dressed with the monochromatic clarity of a born leader). There are five of these suits apparently, a pragmatic, hygienic, respectable – without being profligate – number. Since Mr Obama has avoided the Sarah Palin pitfall of naming his chosen designers, we don’t know whether he is an extravagant dresser or a savvy one. But we are grateful that in this matter at least, we have been left to make our own assumptions. What we have been told is that when his suits wear thin, they are sent to be repaired.

He’s not even a disaster when it comes to smart casual – that graveyard of so many middle-aged and late-youth men. Not for Mr Obama the skirmish between collar and neck that bedevils men pinioned to the hot-seat in a studio debate, the dreadful faux-chummy knitwear of Tony Blair nor (so far) the despised golfing togs of George Bush.

Admittedly the dark donkey jacket he wore to a recent rally in Chester looked more Prada than Plumber, but so what? Every president seeks the defining image that will endure long after the mud-slinging and the failed policies have become history. Truman had his macho bank manager double-breasted suits; George Washington his distinguished white wigs and celestial, snowy cravats, JFK the afterglow of all those desirable and desiring women.

So much breathless commentary has been expended on the effortless-ness of Mr Obama’s fashion moments that it’s impossible not to conclude that there’s a racial element to Obama style watching, one which no one has so far got to grips with. This is the assumption that holds that black men are inherently more stylish than white men.

With all these subtexts, how could an election that was, however you slice it, about the colour of one of the key protagonists’ skin, or if you prefer, emphatically Not About The Colour of His Skin, not also be, to an extent some resent, about appearance?

Times Recommends

• Experts baffled by vanishing sea lions
• CIA caught in a dirty and secretive war
• Double life of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab