Theresa May: does it matter what the new prime minister wears?
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Version 0 of 1. Wearing a colour-blocked Amanda Wakeley jacket as you deliver your first speech as prime minister is not a style statement. Style statements are for those who think a printed silk scarf is, you know, a bit “jazzy”. In context, last Wednesday’s airing of neon yellow and black tailoring was the action of a leader who unashamedly enjoys fashion. Theresa May has a subscription to Vogue and the keys to number 10 Downing Street and, unlike any of the post’s previous incumbents, she does not see a conflict in that fact. This is the woman who famously told Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that a lifetime subscription to the glossy fashion magazine would be her one luxury item if she were a castaway. Whether you care about clothes or not, you know that May does, and her interest in fashion has not gone unnoticed. Almost as many column inches have been spent discussing the navy Roland Mouret Bitzer dress she wore to the Conservative conference last October as they have to last week’s analysis of the speech she made at that event. Social media has been jumping with chat about what exactly it is we admire about May’s wardrobe (Is it her neckline? Her fearlessness? Wait, is liking a Tory wardrobe even allowed?). Reliably, the tabloids have taken this to the extreme. The Sun’s front page splashed a picture of May’s signature leopard-print shoes standing on the heads of various male Tory politicians with the headline: “Heel, Boys.” It would be shoes, wouldn’t it? And May’s kitten heels are now forever cemented in Westminster folklore as the natural descendants of Margaret Thatcher’s pussy-bow blouses. International newspapers were unable to resist, either, with the Russian government’s paper falling into the sexist preoccupation of ranking female leaders’ wardrobes against each other. May’s look is apparently “more attractive than the featureless jackets of Angela Merkel”. However, to rate Theresa May’s style isn’t just patronising and sexist, but it entirely misses the point. As she told the Women in the World summit in October last year: “One of the challenges for women in the workplace is to be ourselves, and I say you can be clever and like clothes. You can have a career and like clothes.” (She didn’t add that you can be clever and like football. Unsurprisingly, male leaders have never felt the need to spell that out.) Arguably, May is a political leader who actively likes fashion, as opposed to reluctantly trying to manage the semantics of it. Other female leaders have a pragmatic and often difficult relationship with fashion. Hillary Clinton ricochets between diffusing fashion critique by wearing a uniform of what Tina Brown nonetheless derided as “Sgt Pepper trousers suits”, to embracing thousand-dollar Armani pieces. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel has hammered the Pantone jacket approach into not-worth-commenting-upon irrelevance. May, by all evidence, uses fashion to please herself, and her love of clothes allows her to dress boldly. Wearing over-the-knee patent boots to meet Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, as she did last year, is not the action of a woman who subscribes to the “dress to negate analysis” chatter. What is telling about May’s penchant for fashion is why we care so much – and more so why we criticise it so readily. Would we condemn a similarly frivolous preoccupation in a male leader? It will be interesting to see whether May is allowed to continue to freely enjoy clothes or whether her advisors will judge her fashion to be too loud – was it an advisor who thought May’s necklace was too showy and suggested she remove it on the day she announced her prime ministerial bid, or was it just annoying her? Let’s hope the latter. Because, for many of us, watching May enjoying her own clothes will be a precious form of light relief in the coming months. |