He came, he lost, but his rhetoric continues.

I am speaking, of course, of Senator Bernie Sanders, who may have ceded the Democratic primary in New York to Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, but who has made a very visible part of the city into the punching bag of the presidential campaign. Put simply: Bankers are having a tough time in the public discourse these days.

Mr. Sanders has built a platform on their villainy. Over the weekend, at a block party in Brooklyn, Mrs. Clinton called out “the greed and recklessness of Wall Street,” and declared, “I take a back seat to no one in taking them on.” Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican candidate who used a hefty loan from his wife’s former employer, Goldman Sachs, to finance his 2012 Senate race, has labeled the institution a hotbed of “crony capitalism.” And so on.

You would think it would be enough to have them — whomever this mythic “them” may be — don sackcloth and ashes and sneak around in the shadows so no one could identify them by the uniform of their profession. Which, if you accept the premise that we use our wardrobe to signal our allegiance to a group (personal, political or professional), raises the question: What does it mean to look like a banker in the age of Bernie?

After all, the last time the financial world was so loudly derided — during the recession of 2008 and 2009 — there was a knock-on effect in the men’s wear world, and certain obvious totems of Wall Street style (the broad, structured shoulders; the patterned ties; the Ferragamo shoes) fell out of favor. According to a banker at Goldman Sachs, the idea was to play down any signifiers of employment, lest they invite negative repercussions.

This was around the same time the luxury shopping site Net-a-Porter started offering deliveries in brown paper bags so those still able to indulge their consumer urges could not be identified. There was a sense that it was unseemly (and sometimes, in the Occupy Wall Street days, maybe dangerous) to represent the 1 percent.

Yet this time around, no such camouflage has seemed necessary.

That may be, however, less a gesture of defiance, or the result of the fact that Mr. Sanders and Mr. Cruz had pretty poor primary showings in New York (they are still preaching their bad-banker gospel, after all, and their competitors are being notably circumspect about their ties to the financial sector), than a reflection of a certain reality: The stereotype of the “banker” that is currently being kicked around no longer exists — or doesn’t exist in any overarching sense. It may make an easy target, but it’s a straw man.

The image was created in 1987 by the perfect storm of Tom Wolfe’s novel “Bonfire of the Vanities” and Oliver Stone’s film “Wall Street,” and proved astonishingly durable. And though it has been perpetrated to a certain extent in popular culture, it bears less and less resemblance to actual fact.

Indeed, in conversations with several financial professionals, the consistent reaction was “no one dresses that way anymore.” Rather, the adjectives most used to describe their clothing were “rumpled” and “understated.”

It’s no accident that in “The Big Short,” the Adam McKay film based on Michael Lewis’s book about the financial crisis, the bad bankers — the ones who created the problem in the first place — wear slick suits and ties, and the outsider traders and hedge fund managers — the ones who recognized that everything was teetering on a precipice and tried to call foul (and even fraud) — wear jeans, shorts, T-shirts and jackets (the exception being Ryan Gosling’s character, an outlier at Deutsche Bank). The first represent the before; the second, the after.

The stereotype style has been eroded by the global financial crisis, sure, but also casual Fridays; the rise of the entrepreneurial class, especially in technology; and the growth of a shadow banking sector — the venture capitalists and hedge funds and private equity firms that have their own, less identifiable uniform, much of which can be characterized by what it is not: the banker clothing of yore.

It is the difference between the clothing featured in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the 2013 film tale of overblown early 1990s excess, all contrast spread-collar shirts, pinstriped suits and paisley ties, and that in the Showtime series “Billions” (Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times is one of the creators), which takes place in the current day and features a corrupt, competitive and charismatic hedge fund chieftain with a gigantic mansion and a wardrobe that consists almost entirely of gray T-shirts, jeans and hoodies.

“He is aggressively not a suit guy,” said Eric Daman, the show’s costume designer, who is now prepping for the second season. The hoodies may be cashmere, the jeans Rag & Bone, the sneakers limited edition, but to the untutored eye, the character may look like nothing so much as a rogue Facebook employee (and he would not look out of place at a Sanders rally).

Which is not an accident. As the tech world has risen in the “global pecking order,” in the words of John Studzinski, a partner at the asset management firm Blackstone, its determinedly dress-down uniform has infiltrated the world of those who would finance it. The theory being, at least for some, if you can’t beat ’em, dress like ’em.

For others, “it’s less ‘show me the money’ than subtle,” Mr. Studzinski said. “People are going out of their way to be more understated; materialism is less valued than ownership. At a recent Friday lunch, I was looking around and it was all Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana. I don’t even know if those brands make suits.”

Then there is the fleece, now ubiquitous (but not Old Navy fleece, Sun Valley/Herb Allen fleece), which tends to be associated with the private equity world. Indeed, one founder of his namesake private equity firm is famous for wearing a fleece vest every day to work, and referred to it in an interview as his “signifier.” It is, he said, the new cashmere, a (slightly) more mature relative of the hoodie. It also, he pointed out, had useful associations with work and a no-frills approach to the world, values likewise associated with the Shinola watches, Red Wing boots and bracelets that are now often seen throughout the financial world. Ditto the facial hair.

There are exceptions, of course. The hedge fund manager William Ackman, occasionally known as the “George Clooney of banking,” is famous for his perfectly tailored suits. (Coincidentally, Mr. Clooney has also made a movie about the financial crisis, “Money Monster,” which is to debut in Cannes next month.) Almost everyone I spoke to agreed that financial services guys still look like what you think of when you think of bankers. See, for example, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman, or see their employees — though even they tend to disaggregate their suits when in the office and keep their ties hung on the back of their door.

“But that in-your-face power suit image?” Mr. Studzinski said. “That image is long gone.” This election year, however, its ghost lingers on.