A formal dinner hosted by his mum Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace Thursday night, a country weekend dance (including a performance by Rod Stewart) given by the duchess of Cornwall, Camilla, at his organic farm Highgrove on Friday shows that no (precious) stone will be left unturned to celebrate Prince Charles’s 60th this week on November 14.

As the homage pours forth, including the Financial Times this weekend hailing his “devotion to timeless tailoring,” Charles finds, and to a lesser extent his sons William and Harry also, that he is in the unlikely spot of being discovered — correction, make that rediscovered — as a style icon. (In the years leading up to his Diana debacle he held a certain sway.)

Since the Prince of Wales is still getting the major portion of his wardrobe from Turnbull and Asser, as he has done throughout his decades, nor has he become a Tom Ford mannequin (although Tom has said in interviews he’d like to get his sizable designing hands on Charles), what shifting fashion tide is bringing these accolades about?

The credit goes to Barack Obama, who has made a new formality in menswear cool and internationally buzz-worthy.

Happy birthday Prince Charles; suddenly the princely is looking presidential!

Not only in terms of substance, but also in terms of style, Obama’s election last week launched a sea change. (Donatella Versace presciently dedicated her spring/summer 2009 men’s collection to Obama when it was shown in Milan in June.) Everything from telling men to pull up the below-the-butt jeans and become gentlemen in an ungentle world, to his own choice of sharp, fitted Hartmarx suits instead of typical old Washington baggy bottoms and tops, Obama has revived interest in formal tailoring, something you find constitutional in the wardrobes of the current Prince of Wales and the Duke of Windsor before him.

With a new era, styles that only yesterday were the height of cool — the “I Won’t Grow Up” looks of hip-hop sweatshirts, oversized parkas, chains, the aforementioned jeans and, on the other side of fashion’s Peter Pan spectrum, the expensive above-the-ankle trousers and shrunken suit jackets of designers such as Thom Browne who initiated the style — now look passé. (Just as they were finally learning to spell ‘recessionista,’ what are all those dandies going to do to stay trendy? Doilies on their hems? Well, there’s a new economy business venture for you.)

Beyond the status of wearing big clothes that take up a lot of space, if there was any cultural intent beside novelty in these boyish looks, it was to be subversive and disruptive during the Karl Rove and George W. Bush years. The so-called style subversives have won, and fashion moves on and for now, at least during the nervous weeks of transition between administrations, everything old — a well-spoken and noble bespoke if you will — looks new again.

“Forget the free market,” Charlie Porter wrote in the Financial Times, “If ever there was a time to return to solid, formal institutions it is now, and this goes for clothes as well as corporations.”