So says A Current Affair, which took to the streets last night to find out what the public thought of Rein’s sartorial choices during her recent world tour with husband Kevin Rudd.
Responses ranged from “just not stylish” to “very frumpy for a first lady” to, from Sydney hairdresser Joh Bailey, who styled Anita Keating, “[Her hair] definitely needs to be blowdried straight and smooth. It’s just not an appropriate look for the world stage.”
More appropriate for that stage, apparently, was Nicholas Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni, who was “papped and praised” during her recent visit to the UK. Bruni, if you’re not familiar with her, is a former supermodel.
But not even she escapes criticism in ACA’s online slideshow, which includes a photo of the newly minted French first lady naked, declaring it “a far better look than Bruni’s Soviet Bloc factory worker ensemble when she decides to venture around with clothes on.” At least Bruni fares better than Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Imelda Marcos, who is described as “the vain witch who gave Snow White the poison apple”.
Washington Post fashion editor Robin Givhan said in a recent speech to the International Museum of Women that “the combination of politics and fashion is a natural one. Politicians are more concerned about the messages they convey, the way in which they’re coming across to their constituency and the way in which they’re perceived, than any other group of people I can think of, except perhaps for entertainers.” But there’s a big difference between paying attention to one’s appearance and the very shallow misogyny displayed by ACA last night and online.
ACA, unsurprisingly, was quick to distance itself from its own story, host Tracey Grimshaw commenting on its conclusion: “Can you believe it? This woman has founded and run a multimillion dollar business while raising three kids and supporting her husband to the highest office in the land and everyone’s talking about her clothes.”
So why did you run the story, Tracey?
Cross-posted to Polliegraph