How to dress like a woman
You don’t have to conform to a 70-year-old groper’s idea of proper attire.
Newsroom, the Melbourne Herald, mid-1980s. I’m a 21-year-old cadet reporter, doing my best to stay out of the way and learn from the paper’s big guns. Someone nudges me and points to the glassed-in pen in the centre of the room. Heads up! The chief of staff is about to rip someone a new one. I watch one of my idols – the head of the state political reporters team and one of the only women on the Herald’s senior reporting staff – gesticulating to her boss, losing the argument, being ordered off the premises. The word spreads quickly; the boss is not happy this award-winning journalist has come to work in trousers, and so she’s been sent home to change into a skirt. I stand there for a while with my mouth hanging open, trying to understand what I’ve just witnessed. Why would a busy man like that care whether one of his senior staff was wearing a smart pants suit, or a smart skirt suit? A year or so later it’s me being hauled in front of the newsroom fashion police, having broken some unspoken rule. The new chief is a bloke in his 30s called Steve Price (now a major player in the right-wing talk radio scene in Sydney) and he Is. Not. Happy. I should point out here that I am quite tall. Steve Price is not, in fact, the nickname he’s unable to shake is ‘‘the Angry Dwarf’’. Hey, I didn’t make it up. So, Steve knits his legendary eyebrows together in fury and points to my shoes, a particularly towering pair of stilettos. In them, I am well over six foot. ‘‘Don’t. You. Ever. Wear. Those f ..... shoes to work again!’’ he bellows up at me. These charming scenes came back to me this week when I heard how particular that paragon of fashion, the new US president, is about what White House staff wear to work. The men must ‘‘dress sharp’’ and he likes ‘‘the women who work for him, to dress like women’’. We know what the Orange One actually wants, right? Heh-heeeeeey, he wants for you to be wearing short and preferably tight skirts, with four-inch heels so that as he wanders the White House halls there’s always one of you wobbling in an out of his vision while he checks out your arse. Now, I’m not going to talk about Trump every week. This is both a promise, and the mantra I repeat to myself every night just after I take my anxiety meds, and before I start the TM deep breathing my yogi says should stop the nightmares.
But can I resist this one? As one witty website observed, this is just another of Trump’s perspectives on women that doesn’t just border on sexist, it invades and sets up camp there.
People around the world started riffing on #DressLikeAWoman. They shared pictures of women at work in HazMat suits, judges’ robes, US Airforce flight suits, senator Tammy Duckworth in combat fatigues. Welders, scientists, construction workers, lawyers, garbage collectors.
I stopped scrolling at one particular image: Sally Ride, the first US woman to travel to space in June 1983. I clearly remember seeing the photo in the newspaper 30 years ago; I was 18 and felt a rush of pride at the sight of a woman in a Nasa spacesuit. It seemed like a giant leap for womankind.
In the business of television, my business for more than 20 years, women’s clothing has always been political. Pencil skirts, tight, bright jackets, not too much cleavage, and you’d better not be bigger than a standard 10 because the camera puts on at least that many kilos, you know! A presenter on the Australian morning show Today, Samantha Armytage, was mocked in a national newspaper for the ‘‘frumpy’’ clothing choices she was apparently making off air, in her free time. Meanwhile, her male colleague Karl Stefanovic wore the same navy blue suit every day for a year to make a point, and nobody noticed.
Here in New Zealand the carping’s the same. Newshub’s Kanoa Lloyd kicked the trolls’ backsides in classy style when she was accused of dressing ‘‘like an old lady’’; the magnificently pregnant Jenny-May Clarkson was called an ‘‘eyesore’’, Paul Henry social media host Verity Johnson was criticised for her knees. Her knees! Barrel bottom scraped.
There’s nothing wrong with a workplace requiring a professional standard of dress. If you’re representing clients in court, appearing on camera, or driving a bus, your employer absolutely has the right to expect you to represent the company in a neat, appropriate, professional manner.
What you don’t have to do is conform to a 70-year-old groper’s idea of how a woman should dress.