There’s a special anniversary coming up on August 28: It’ll be 12 years since Barack Obama wore a tan suit to a press conference at the White House, creating a sartorial stir that has since become an ongoing joke about what generated controversy back then vs. the chaos of today.

What’s a mystery is just what happened to the suit. The Chicago Sun-Times and its former Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet are launching “Pursuit of the Suit,” an effort to track down just what happened to the outfit.

The suit has been even more in the spotlight lately with the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center, as some attendees paid homage by wearing their own, and Stephen Colbert, in one of his final shows, queried the former president on whether it was in the museum. It is not.

More recently, Obama and Larry David spoofed the 2014 suit controversy in a skit for the HBO series Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, but a replica of the tan outfit was created.

Sweet, now special correspondent, wrote in a column published on Monday, “This is more than hunting for a needle in a haystack. I don’t even know where the haystack is.

“I wasn’t sure at first how to proceed. It’s not like the suit was taxpayer-funded traceable public property or an official gift that had to be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration upon leaving office.”

What Sweet did find is that the suit was made by Martin Greenfield, who was a prisoner at Auschwitz who first sewed when he was there, repairing the torn shirt of an SS soldier. Greenfield, who died in 2024, became a famous tailor in New York.

Sweet covered Obama’s rise, from the Senate to the campaign to the White House and afterward, including the long development of the new presidential center. She spotted Obama wearing the color before, in 2006, but didn’t think to write about it. Valerie Jarrett, the CEO of the Obama Foundation, told her that Obama “gave it away when he was cleaning out his closet.” So it’s a bit vague as to what happened to it.

There is a replica that was made for the Larry David series by designer Christina Mongini, Sweet reported.

But right now there are few clues as to where the suit is, and the Sun-Times is taking tips at tansuit@suntimes.com. In the meantime, Sweet plans to update in print, digital and video, as well as to also shed light on what the “uproar over the suit means in 2026.”

In the recent Larry David skit, Obama is convinced to wear the tan suit to a press conference. David, who recommended it, predicts, glowingly, “People are going to be talking about this for a long, long time.”