Let’s talk about Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits
Can we take a thought break from how fraught this American presidential election is (her emails, and worse, his gutter bigotry and ignorance) and focus on a lighter aspect of the campaign?
Yes, let’s, even though it means venturing into a feminist no-fly zone. (Thou shalt not focus on a female politician’s clothes.)
Let’s talk about Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits. Or more specifically, her decision, as a female politician and aspiring leader of the western world, to almost always wear pants.
I haven’t worn a skirt or dress in years, so her wardrobe decision is essentially mine.
It is also happens to be a decision that has both historical and fashion significance, albeit one Clinton has made light of in the past, describing herself as a member of the “sisterhood of the travelling pantsuits.”
Clinton has beaten most of her critics to the best pantsuit jokes.
In her failed presidential primary campaign in 2008, she told David Letterman, “In my White House, we’ll know who wears the pantsuits.”
And in 2013, Clinton quipped of Meryl Streep, star of the fashion comedy The Devil Wears Prada, “I’m just glad she didn’t do a movie called The Devil Wears Pantsuits!”
Tellingly, there has been little mention of Clinton’s wardrobe in this urgent and ugly campaign. We’ve come a long way since even 2008.
As Vanessa Friedman, the New York Times chief fashion critic, wrote last January, “in one area at least, Mrs. Clinton appears to have already triumphed: She has finally, 23 years after she first stepped onto the national stage as first lady, stopped the conversation about her clothes.”
Friedman concluded, though, that by eschewing the “fruit basket” colours of previous pantsuits (who can forget that tangerine number as she conceded in 2008?) and sticking to more nondescript outfits, Clinton had regrettably “sapped” her clothes of all personality in order to keep the focus on the real issues of the highest-stakes election in recent history.
Not so fast. Many of us do notice what she’s wearing. And feel it does reflect her personality.
Whether highly flattering — like that gleaming white pantsuit in which Clinton historically accepted the Democratic nomination — or definitely dubious — pastel matchies — it’s who she is. A policy wonk who wants to look great but has far more important things on her mind.
Furthermore, it’s mostly not worth obsessing over when her opponent, a billionaire demagogue in schlubby suits with a red baseball hat concealing a bad orange comb-over is threatening to deport immigrants and spewing sexist hatred. Just this week, Donald Trump tweeted that MSNBC morning host Mika Brzezinski was “neurotic” and “a mess.”
When Trump stresses that Hillary “does not look presidential,” it’s easy to wonder whether he is uncomfortable, not just with a powerful woman formidably taking him on, but also because she dresses the way she does. The Trump women in contrast bedeck themselves in svelte figure-hugging dresses and tippytop heels.
Women wear pants for a reason. Not necessarily to conceal our legs — although that is okay — but for ease of movement, and yes, because some of us for various reasons, look better in pants than we do in a skirt. I actually think that’s Hillary’s deal. She just moves more comfortably and looks better in pants.
Yet even the most stalwart pants aficionados among us occasionally go inner retro and wonder how “feminine” we appear.
That’s because pants for women have a long history of being seen to be dangerously androgynous.
In a recent tribute Vanity Fair magazine did to actor Katharine Hepburn, (“The Most Daring Thing About Katharine Hepburn? Her Pants”) the magazine noted that women were once arrested for wearing pants in public, “detained for “masquerading as men.” The U.S Senate in fact had a no-pants rule for women up to the 1990s when women politicians just said to heck with it, and pantsuited up.
I’ve seen Hillary Clinton in great pantsuits and not-so-great ones. Unlike German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who wears a uniform of dark trousers and jewel-tone jackets, elegantly standing out in those summit photo ops, Hillary can wear matching pastel or bright pants and bottoms that send some of her most ardent female supporters into a fashion funk. “She looked like she was in scrubs today” moaned a friend, a donor and Democratic doer, when her candidate took the stage in a loose raspberry shirt and pants.
According to pollster Nate Silver, Clinton still has an 80 per cent plus chance of being the next American President, though the race will invariably tighten.
Clinton has a transition team going full tilt. And somewhere on that team — because there has to be, given the historical significance — there is a fashion person, trying to figure out just how the first female president of the United States will dress.
Not day in, day out — Hillary Clinton has given every indication that she has liberated herself nicely from dressing to suit anyone’s tastes but her own. But at her swearing in, and at all those inaugural balls there will be pressure on her to make a different fashion statement.
So here’s the thing. If she wins and, true to form, wears pants at her swearing in, and pants on the dance floor that night, Hillary Clinton will be like every other American president in history — except they happened to be men. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson