Wonderwoman

The Sunday Times
October 26, 2008

Sexism rears its head in Palin’s wardrobe

India Knight

Sarah Palin’s folksy, down-home image took a bit of a battering last week with the revelation that the Republican party had spent $150,000 (£96,000) since September on sprucing up their vice-presidential candidate’s wardrobe and that of her family. The bill was paid out of campaign donations. Palin’s spokesman said last week that the clothes would be given away to charity once the campaigning was over; Palin said that the fuss people were making over the cost amounted to sexism.

“I think Hillary Clinton was held to a different standard in her primary race,” Palin said. “Do you remember the conversations that took place about her? Say, superficial things that they don’t talk about with men – her wardrobe and her hairstyles, all of that? That’s a bit of that double standard.”

Many of the clothes were sitting untouched on her campaign plane, she added. “Oh, if only people knew how frugal we are. It’s kind of painful to be criticised for something when all the facts are not out there and are not reported.”

It would be the most gigantic understatement to say that I don’t hold a candle for Palin, but she does have a point. When it comes to women and public life, the wardrobe question, from Marie-Antoinette on, is almost impossible to get right (unless you are Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the former model, and obliged to wear John Galliano’s creations for Dior on grounds of patriotism – a tough job, granted, and God bless her for selflessly stepping up to the plate).

You can throw money at the problem, as the Republican party did, and you still end up with a candidate whose garments, despite being perfectly all right individually, end up looking oddly banal. You don’t think, “Sarah Palin, what a nightmare, but I really love her outfits”; you just think, “Sarah Palin, what a nightmare, wears red a lot”, even though it now turns out that she sometimes changes her outfits two or three times a day.

It also emerged last week that the highest paid staff member on the McCain campaign is Palin’s make-up artist, who earned $22,800 for a fortnight’s work (the make-up artist’s technique seems to involve slapping on a bit of eyeliner and then dunking the client in a pot of bronzer). Obviously these are vast sums of money, but they say more about the quandary that female politicians find themselves in than they do about female vanity.

For women in the public eye, who have a vested interest in looking as though they mean business, the whole business of dressing is fraught with pitfalls (I nearly typed “pitbulls”). As if it weren’t irritating enough to know in advance that every garment you wear is going to be scrutinised by teams of reporters as well as the public, who may also become overly preoccupied with your hairstyle or your shade of lipstick. You can never come out on top.

If you are unfortunate enough to have a decent figure, as Palin does, all those pencil skirts and little fitted jackets make you look weirdly vampy (my theory about the American public’s initial burst of enthusiasm for the vice-presidential candidate hinged on the fact that she looks like a porn star in some scenario involving a library, the unclasping of hair and the removal of glasses). Had Palin hidden her figure under smocky tops and giant ponchos, editorials would have been speculating on whether she had body dysmorphia, or an eating disorder, or both.

If you’re dumpy, which may not be your fault, you are doomed to years of media reports that always allude to your thick waist, or stumpy legs, or matronly frocks: the late Mo Mowlam, before she had announced she was being treated for cancer and was therefore bloated and balding from chemotherapy, was once compared to a truck driver in drag. The fact that I remember this years later is indicative of the power of the sartorial insult when directed at women, who use clothes as armour in the first place.

I can’t think of any male politician who has ever been so belittled in the name of aesthetics: “scruffy” or “unkempt" is as bad as it gets, which is not very bad at all since the implication is that the man is so busy thinking with his giant male brain that the egg on his tie is the least of his concerns.

Caroline Flint, who is a looker, is constantly getting it in the neck from parliamentary sketch writers for wearing attractive clothes; the subtext being that the minister for Europe must either be extraordinarily shallow or some sort of crazed, preening narcissist. Condoleezza Rice once wore knee-high leather boots of the kind millions of women pull on every winter; let’s just say the media reaction was such that she didn’t wear them in public again. Cherie Blair and Pauline Prescott were both ridiculed over their devotion to their coiffures, as though women shouldn’t mind walking around in a perpetual bad hair day. If they had, of course, walked around with haystacks on their heads, they would have been the source of endless hilarity.

In the real world, which politics constantly seeks to mirror, we have more or less got over the idea that you have to dress like a drudge to be taken seriously, or that anyone whose bosoms have the temerity to protrude is some sort of casting-couch imbecile. In politics, looking as though you have a chest is still seen as indicative of the fact that you’re stupid, or a slapper, or both.

There are, surely, enough sticks to beat women with for no one to have to resort to pulling apart their wardrobes. Nobody becomes a politician because they want to have the height of their heels dissected and even Palin deserves (a little) more respect than the acres of print devoted to the question of whether her lips are tattooed (especially as what the acres of print are trying to say, but don’t, is that tattooed lipliner is common).

So yes, $150,000 is an awful lot to spend on a wardrobe in a couple of months and no, the amount isn’t representative of the average hockey mom’s sartorial budget. That would be because – der! – Palin isn’t really a hockey mom: she’s an extremely savvy, ambitious woman who is trying to become vice-president of the United States. Besides, think of the stick she’d have got if she’d worn her own clothes. As I say, a woman dressing for public office can’t win. But it’s pretty low to blame her for trying.