Janice Combs is dressing for the courtroom drama

Washington Post

6 hours ago

Janice Combs, the 84-year-old mother of accused sex trafficker and music producer Sean Combs, has always dressed decadently.
She loves white furs and platinum wigs. She wears tight metallic cocktail dresses and sparkling jewelry. Her handbags are Louis Vuitton and Chanel. Her lavish style — an obvious sort of maximal, diamonds-and-furs glamour, the kind that ignores rules about taking something off before you leave the house — has been the perfect plug for her son, suggesting that his mania for excess, like those now infamous white parties with their dress code baked right into the name, is something he comes by honestly. (Sean has denied the charges against him.) When Sean was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2008, his mother wore a white suit jacket and shirt to match his. They posed together on their knees behind the star, arms around each other, Sean offering her a kiss on the cheek.
In the courthouse, where family members of the accused are typically encouraged by their attorneys to dress demurely or forgettable, her wardrobe has wavered little. Attending the New York trial on and off since it began in early May, she has appeared in ensembles more befitting of a mob wife than the concerned mother of a man accused of abusing girlfriends and employees. Her wigs change almost daily, from a platinum mop of curls to a sleek bob. She wears dark colors — black blazers, silk blouses — but they are studded with rhinestones, spliced into leather fringes, or printed with lacy leopard spots. She often tops off her looks with an embellished fedora, and a designer bag. She hides her eyes behind sunglasses — understandably, given the throng of paparazzi outside the courthouse each day — but they are outrageous, enormous aviators that Greta Garbo would consider overkill, with decorative side shields. Her appearances are a reminder that sometimes covering yourself draws more attention than being out in the open.
Her looks are a grotesquely tragic contrast to her son's. An order signed by the judge in late April ruled that Sean is allowed to change out of his prison uniform for the trial — a courtesy frequently granted, as repeated research shows that defendants appearing in a prison uniform are judged more harshly by the jury. The order states that the former Sean John designer can have a restricted wardrobe: five shirts, five sweaters, five pairs of pants and two sets of shoes without laces. For a man who idolizes his own appearance, and who built a music and fashion empire, that may feel less like a reprieve than an added sentence.
Janice may be dressing to capture the freedom that her son can't but that defined his demeanor as a celebrity: outlandish, unchecked, flouting decorum, even common sense. She appears more appropriately dressed for a sensationalized courtroom drama than a legal battle.
While Combs's outfits may underscore her continued presence in court, it runs the risk of distraction, attorney Gloria Allred offered. 'She may be hoping that if she wears certain outfits, it will remind the jury that she is there to support her son, but they will see her there every day that she is there, and they don't need to be reminded of that by changing hairstyles, wig colors or very expensive outfits (that most jurors would never be able to afford),' Allred wrote in an email. 'She may have good intentions, but someone needs to advise her that the audience is the jury, and it would be more appropriate to dress in a more low key manner for this trial. She should want the jury to consider the charges, the evidence and the defense seriously, and not be distracted by what she is wearing.'
Janice has been a vocal defender of Sean. She called the trial a 'public lynching' and said in a statement last year that Sean is 'not the monster they have painted him to be.' She underscored her age: 'I can only pray that I am alive to see him speak his truth and be vindicated,' playing up in words a feebleness that her ego does not allow her to reflect in dress. The connection between mother and son is not merely aesthetic. In 'Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,' a Peacock documentary released in January, Janice is described as having parties that sound like disturbing antecedents to the freak-offs her son would later host: 'He was around all type of alcohol; he was around reefer smoke. He was around drug addicts … pimps, pushers. That was just who was in our house,' a childhood friend who at one time lived with the Combs family said. 'This is what we were fed. That was just Saturday night.' (Sean is suing NBC, the company behind the documentary, for $100 million for defamation.)
And there are real stakes for her, which makes her clothing choices all the more curious. While she is not named in this particular case, she is named as a co-defendant in a lawsuit for allegedly pressuring an accuser to accept hush money from her son. She is also accused in a separate civil suit of unlawfully taking control of a Bad Boy Entertainment co-founder's 25 percent stake in the label.
Janice Combs's lawyer Natlie Figgers emphasized that 'this is not a fashion show,' when asked about Combs's court appearances. 'This is a federal criminal trial involving serious charges concerning her son,' she wrote in an email. 'Her unwavering presence in court is a testament to her support and love for him. She is not here to make a statement about style. She is here to stand by her son. That is all that matters to her, and it is all that matters to us.'
It is as if she can't resist playing the role she feels she deserves: the extravagant victim. As long as she looks the way she wants to look, she's won.
The judicial system is seen to be a sacred space, in which cultural biases or assumptions are meant to be put aside and hard evidence is treated as godly. More and more, though, it feels like a movie set.
In May, Kim Kardashian testified at a Paris court in the trial of her 2016 robbery, in which she was bound and gagged in her hotel room bathtub as thieves made off with millions of dollars in jewelry. Kardashian has always had her own sense of decorum; after the robbery, she told Ellen DeGeneres that she had given up on luxury. But her style has mostly been restored to a new state of gleeful excess, as her ensemble showed: a wasp-waisted black vintage John Galliano skirt suit and piles of diamonds. Jewelry brands, including Samer Halimeh and Repossi, sent out press releases touting that she'd chosen their goods (the Samer Halimeh necklace, the press blast said, was worth $3 million) for her neck and ears. Whether she was attempting to show defiance to the men who robbed her or using high-end fashion and jewelry as armor — either way, it was as tightly scripted as her 'reality' TV series.
Then there was her mother. Kris Jenner arrived with her daughter, loitering in the frame of paparazzi photos in her typical momager stance, wearing an oversize plaid blazer and tie. Oversize tailoring always looks cartoonish, unserious; a parody of the men's suit it is designed to coolly rise above. But rather than the doting sidekick, Kris became the star: the pop culture news cycle has been dominated not by conversations around Kardashian's testimony, but by her mother's facelift.
We may be entering an era in which the court of public opinion is equally as important as the rulings in the court itself. Cameras may not be allowed in front of the jury, but for some, that is not the judgment that really matters.