Sunday, January 27, 2008

must we pretend to be men?

When it comes to fashion, Hillary Clinton has been disappointing in her dated power-suits, reluctant to show femininity because of whatever political repercussions she feels that might entail. I don't know if this is a knock on Hillary or more on our society as a whole.

However, in sticking with her power-suit theme, she has managed to show some signs of girlishness.
She steps outside of the black, grey, brown pallet pretty often, as seen here:

And, there is some definite femininity here in this suit, eyelet lace & all:


Would it be political suicide for her to wear something other than pants on the campaign trail? And, what about a great bag or a fashionable pair of shoes? Is there no power in fashion....

Clinton recently snubbed Vogue by declining their invitation to be featured in the fashion bible (and photographed by Annie Leibovitz no less). Anna Wintour lashed back at Hillary in February's letter from the editor:

"Imagine my amazement, then, when I learned that Hillary Clinton, our only female presidential hopeful, had decided to steer clear of our pages at this point in her campaign for fear of looking too feminine. The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is frankly dismaying. How has our culture come to this?"

image credits: dbiking, myrezyness, and nymag

3 comments:

jimmyconway said...
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pipomixes said...

Similar to her politics, HC's fashion takes little risk and is too willing to fall in line with traditional paradigms

Anonymous said...

When Hillary started her career, it was still so new for lawyers (and CPAs) to be women that we all tried to pretend we were men. We wore those ridiculous floppy bows hoping men wouldn’t notice that we were different than them. There was such fear (probably valid) of not being taken seriously. So even if it would probably be fine for Hillary to be in Vogue (with photos by Annie Lebowitz!) it’s probably hard for her to shake the past. I do think that she has mostly looked her best in the last few months, with pretty makeup and nice hair. And she always wears necklaces and earrings that look appealing. At least she is not always in black or navy, with pearl studs!

- Susan