The finance minister has more important things to discuss than her dress, but it’s also twee to pretend that fashion and politics aren’t intertwined.

Yesterday morning, I lay in bed and thought about what I would wear to work. I do this most mornings. Some days, I give it a lot of thought. I am interested in fashion and want to be comfortable, but I also enjoy the art and act of constructing myself and silently communicating that each day. 

Thanks to a study on how lice began their march towards global domination, we know humans have been wearing clothes for about 170,000 years. Like it or not, clothing has been a form of human expression and a potent signifier since we moved on from mammoth skin modesty flaps. Peasants running around the lower reaches of the Nile in 3100BC knew their fellow peasants were the same class as them because they all wore plain shendyts while the pharaoh’s kids were dripping in gold.  

A lot of people think about what they’re going to wear each day, informed by their planned activities, personal preferences and participation in a civilisation steeped in centuries of culture, code and connotation about what clothing means. Knowing their image will fill the screens of millions of people every day, our politicians may even do some planning of their clothing in advance of significant events.

On Saturday, the NZ Herald ran a story citing a single designer who called out Nicola Willis’s choice of dress for budget day as a signal of “total disrespect” because it was not designed by a New Zealand designer. 

It was one comment by one designer about Willis’s decision to wear a dress believed to be from British womenswear label The Fold London, but in the wake of cuntgate, it represents another escapee from the vault marked “sexist and distracting” that we thought was securely locked. As with that, the layers are many, but reaching for the simple binaries is just too damn easy.

Speaking to RNZ’s Morning Report yesterday, Willis said, “Your audience are smart people. We’ve got far more interesting things to talk about than what clothes I wear. Let’s focus on the policies. This line of questioning, as far as I’m concerned, belongs in the 1950s.”

I am a smart person (I think, I hope) and I am interested in what people wear. The fashion industry is worth $1.7 trillion. Its history runs as deep and long as any form of human expression. Its interplay with politics and gender is frequently where we find some of our worst and most misogynistic commentaries, but it’s also where we find statements about class, power, wealth and status. While no one would bat an eyelid about a Tory politician dropping thousands of pounds on Savile Row, a minor furore erupted in the United Kingdom last year when a Labour donor contributed £16,000 to the cost of  Sir Keir Starmer’s work wardrobe. The optics for Labour politicians, a party born of the working classes, are different.

The designer quoted by the Herald cited Jacinda Ardern, who regularly wore New Zealand designers. Ardern didn’t talk about what she wore, but her pecuniary interest register revealed gifts of clothing from many New Zealand designers, a fact that has been both weaponised against her and lauded as the subtle but skilled use of fashion as a form of soft power. 

In the US, the concept of fashion and clothing choice as soft power, an apparatus of diplomacy and domestic politics, has been aired and acknowledged for decades. For some in this country, it might be a feature of a society and a political system bound tight with the power of image and celebrity, that we want no part in, but we’re no longer domestically siloed in our culture the way we were when Jackie Kennedy first wielded Chanel suits as a narrative weapon. Clothing choice is visual communication in our image-saturated and interconnected democracies. It can be manipulated in the same way political words and actions can be. It can be judged as authentic expression or calculated messaging.

US first ladies and female politicians worldwide have followed in Kennedy’s footsteps. Hillary Clinton had her pantsuits. Melania Trump set off an avalanche of think pieces when she wore her “I really don’t care, do you?” jacket. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a custom-made “tax the rich” dress to the Met Gala in 2021. Michelle Obama nailed the dichotomous tension of leaning into clothing as communication best in her memoir, writing, “Today, virtually every woman in public life—politicians, celebrities, you name it—has some version of Meredith, Johnny, and Carl [Obama’s personal aide and wardrobe stylist, hairdresser and makeup artist]. It’s all but a requirement, a built-in fee for our societal double standard.”

All these women have plenty of insults lobbed at them about their appearance and their attention to it. Both are forms of sexism. One is familiar and obvious, the other a little more opaque. Mired in the dismissal of an industry that predominantly employs women, has been undervalued and not taken seriously, fashion has historically been deemed as of interest to women and is, therefore, frivolous.

You’re stuck in a maze as a woman in the public eye. Turn left, and guilt and complexity await as you hit the righteous railing against beauty standards by second-wave feminists. Turn right, and enjoy the complexity of third-wave feminism, where fashion is used as a form of empowerment but is also weakened by “choice feminism”. Try another direction, and you’ll come face to face with the reality that appearance does matter and that, as an ambitious person making your way through the coded ranks of any visible institution, that’s a useful and powerful thing to understand. Look in a mirror, and the likelihood of being written off as a vain, dumb, entitled bitch will stare right back at you. Look too polished, and you’re out of touch. Look too casual, and you’re not serious enough. Spend money on clothes, and you’re wasting money. Recent comments about dress standards in our parliament skim all of this with a serving of generational misalignment, conservatism and cultural differences on the side. 

In a series of social media posts, her male colleagues have supported Willis and the focus on what she wears by participating in the time-honoured tradition of a fit check. Chris Bishop stood outside a grey parliament in a grey suit against a grey Wellington sky and told us he was wearing a Rembrandt suit, “from Lower Hutt of course”. His tie comes from France. There has been no “Quelle horreur!” about this because no one bothers to needle men over the provenance of their unremarkable suits. Bishop also knows exactly where his suit is from. Male politicians participate in image construction as part of how they communicate power, authenticity, status and authority; they get to pretend that they don’t. 

Willis’s colleagues understand male politicians almost never cop comment about their sartorial decisions unless they’re pulling on an All Blacks jersey. The solidarity on display has its roots in some basic understanding of gender-based double standards and is taken straight from the Cate Blanchett school of red-carpet subversion. As a camera started to pan up from Blanchett’s feet at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2014, she bent down, pointed at the camera and asked, “Do you do that to the guys?” 

It is Willis’s prerogative to tell people to jog on when being asked about her clothing. It is her colleagues’ to point out the rank hypocrisy and double standard that exists when it comes to being interested in what people in the public eye wear. It’s also mine to point out the dissonance when those claiming that clothing doesn’t matter have carefully curated their image and belong to parties that regularly spend wads of cash participating in the highly visual and image-conscious culture of social media for political gain. The real lack of smarts isn’t caring about what politicians wear – it’s pretending that we don’t. Politics doesn’t happen in a culture-free vacuum, and our politicians know that. The question isn’t whether clothing matters in politics. The question is whether we’re honest enough to admit that it does.