In some ways, it’s a classic New York story: someone who works in gilded rooms and waits on the city’s ultrawealthy, and then takes the subway home to a cramped apartment.
By day, Eon Huntley works as a sales associate at Bergdorf Goodman for the Row, the brand started by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, helping customers decide between $1,500 cashmere sweaters and $500 T-shirts, a job he’s had for the last six years.
Also by day (and occasionally by night) he runs a Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed campaign for the New York State Assembly, knocking on doors in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where he lives in a three-bedroom apartment with his two daughters and his wife, Rebecca, a teacher.
Some would find it difficult to bridge these categories. As self-avowed democratic socialists have burst into the spotlight, critics have been quick to slap the “champagne socialist” label on anyone who dabbles in luxury goods. And opinions abound about what those aligned with left-wing causes should look like: Some expect a Karl Marx T-shirt or a workman’s jacket and have slammed Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont for his $700 Burton coat or Rama Duwaji, the first lady of New York, for her borrowed $600 boots.
What would the naysayers make of a state legislator wearing the Row head to toe?
Well, for starters, he’s never dressed in a full look from the brand. (The Row does give him a stipend — between $5,000 and $10,000 per season — to spend on the product he sells.)
But he likes to express his personal style through a wardrobe of vintage jeans, loafers and, yes, some designer duds.
On a recent morning, riding the C train into Midtown Manhattan after dropping off his youngest daughter, Collette, 10, at a Y.M.C.A. summer camp, he was wearing a beige mesh shirt and black pleated shorts.
“When people talk about housing that’s accessible and affordable — truly affordable, not like what we have right now but built for people to grow in — that’s also like thinking about the kind of clothes that I appreciate,” Huntley, 41, said. (His first name is pronounced like “Ian.”) “High quality, durable.”
He was describing what he sees as the through line between his love of finely made clothes and his political platform, which won him the Democratic primary in June against Stefani Zinerman. She had held the seat in District 56, which includes Bed-Stuy as well as Crown Heights, since 2021.
The race brought out many of the tensions that have been playing out lately between leftist candidates and establishment Democrats: Zinerman said Huntley — who ran against her two years ago and lost — lacked experience, and some local Democrats worried about D.S.A. expanding its influence in their neighborhood. This time, Huntley beat Zinerman, who emphasized her years serving the district, by a few thousand votes.
He ran on universal child care and a $30/hour state minimum wage. (He currently earns $25/hour and 5 percent commission on sales at Bergdorf.)
He has also embraced the wider “tax the rich” movement and said he supported “voting for a free Palestine.”
People have long been “dissatisfied with capitalism,” he added, “but they haven’t been given a viable concept that they could believe in as an alternative.”
Huntley was born in East New York and raised mostly by his mother, who worked for Nynex, the telephone company. He remembered picketing alongside her when Nynex workers went on strike in 1989. She and his father, a nurse from Guyana, separated when he was a child.
He attended the High School of Arts and Design and then went to Parsons School of Design at the New School, dreaming of becoming a fashion designer. His first job in the industry was as an assistant designer at Liz Claiborne in 2006. From there, he bounced around: He designed women’s woven tops and men’s dress shirts at Armani Exchange, and was briefly the design director of women’s clothes at Ellen DeGeneres’s short-lived line, ED.
He left in 2016 for Barneys, where he first began selling clothes from the Row. When that department store closed — R.I.P. — he started at Bergdorf Goodman in 2020, working as a sales associate on the brand’s women’s floor.
With no Republican challenger to face off against in November, it’s likely that come January, when elected officials are sworn in, he’ll have to quit Bergdorf. He’ll miss it. “It’s the company I’ve had the longest relationship with, and that’s not even including my admiration from the outside during my time as a designer,” he said. (Bergdorf declined to comment for this article.)
Inspired by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Huntley joined the D.S.A. in 2018, and got involved in community organizing. This eventually led him to a state assemblywoman who encouraged him to run for office. His first bid was unsuccessful, but as he saw his neighbors struggling he decided to run again.
He began his campaign in October, covering storefronts in Bed-Stuy with posters of himself smiling in a checked suit and tie, with a nose ring and a tightly cropped Afro. In another poster, he wears a chambray button-down.
“I’m part of a lineage that actually very much cared about the presentation and understood the power of a message that also includes clothing,” Huntley said, mentioning Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party. “I mean those are some of the flyest brothers that clearly have influenced me.”
On the day of his primary in June, he wore a work-wear jacket and denim jeans. He wanted to channel the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was arrested in 1963 in solidarity with laborers.
“He got dressed in denim deliberately,” Huntley said, “understanding that this was symbolic of work wear and symbolic of this identity that he wanted to put forward.”
He added: “I think that there’s a history of this that maybe people have just walked away from, just because of this idea that fashion and aesthetics are frivolous. They are not.”
Jabari Brisport, a D.S.A.-endorsed state senator who campaigned alongside Huntley, described him as “very stylish.”
The look translates to the campaign trail, Brisport said: “He presents himself as a man of the people who is willing to travel anywhere, talk to anyone, does not put up any walls or barriers and is open to all.”
Huntley’s longtime client at Bergdorf Goodman, Lisa Ford, had a similar read.
“I met Eon and right away, we hit it off,” said Ford, a photographer and philanthropist who also donated to Huntley’s campaign. “It is not an easy job. People come in, they try a bunch of stuff on, they leave a mess in the dressing room.”
“He likes people,” she added.
While many in Huntley’s orbit agree he needs little guidance on how to dress, he says Mayor Zohran Mamdani gave him a fashion tip that may have changed the course of his campaign.
During Huntley’s losing bid in 2024, he wore a suit jacket in his campaign posters but no tie, he said. Mamdani suggested he start wearing one.
“‘You got all the cool people; you need the aunties and the grannies,’” Huntley recalled Mamdani telling him. (Mamdani did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
“He understood the power of clothes,” Huntley said.
