Like her predecessor, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema marches to the beat of her own drum. But unlike the late John McCain, the Arizona Democrat’s status as the maverick of the Senate includes her sartorial choices.
From the start, Sinema made it clear she wouldn’t abide by the Beltway uniform of ill-tailored Brooks Brothers “power suits” and oatmeal-colored bobs. She donned a fur stole with a pink coat during her oath of office. She refused to wear white like the rest of the women in her caucus during President Donald Trump’s final State of the Union. During the peak of the pandemic, her usual platinum blonde coiffure was replaced by an assortment of neon-colored wigs, which her spokeswoman maintained was as much about style as it was about safety — wearing wigs allowed Sinema to forgo visiting the hair salon.
In a town with little fashion sense and even less individuality, Sinema’s style has been either a breath of fresh air or a bit of an oddity, depending on your perspective. Either way, it’s completely innocuous.
That is, unless you’re a humorless baby boomer who covers Congress for a living.
While presiding over the Senate on Tuesday, Sinema wore a denim vest over a plain black dress. This caused the media to lose its ever-loving mind.
Like firefighters running into a burning building, the Washington Post was on the case of Sinema and the Senate dress code.
“There used to be a sign in the Senate Press Gallery admonishing journalists they were not allowed to wear denim into the chamber,” Deputy Editorial Page Editor Karen Tumulty tweeted, presumably after finding her smelling salts. “Hill reporters: is it still there?”
Quick to solve the mystery, fellow reporter Paul Kane posted a photo of the dress code, which also bans hats, overcoats, purses, and bags.
Responding to CNN’s Ana Navarro deeming Sinema’s outfit as evocative of “a real-life episode of Veep,” Cheri Jacobus of #Resistance fame called Sinema’s fashion choices “an insult to the United States Senate as an institution.” Navarro’s colleague John Dean called the outfit “remarkably sad and pathetic,” while the network’s White House correspondent Kate Bennett so eloquently noted, “I … have thoughts.”
Bill Goodykoontz, the media critic of Sinema’s home state paper, wrote an entire article trying to decode the meaning of the outfit, lamenting that “the most visible member of the Senate who is currently involved in highest-stakes negations on legislation that could shape the future of the country” appeared in the Senate “dressed for some kind of Scottsdale version of a biker rally.”
We all know why the media are selectively melting down over a single denim vest after years of deeming any enforcement of the congressional dress code as “sexist” — namely that Sinema has the audacity not to rubber-stamp President Joe Biden’s agenda. But it is worth considering just how inconsistent the media’s standards are for dress codes.
In 2009, a sleeveless dress worn by Michelle Obama to the State of the Union was considered such a scandal that one newspaper branded it “Sleevegate.” But of course, just as quickly as pants became adopted as the standard uniform for women in Congress in the ’90s, so did sleeveless sheaths and shirts after 2009.
By 2017, the media had come to the consensus that any enforcement of the dress code was sexist, with Newsweek equating Rep. Paul Ryan with the sex-slavers in The Handmaid’s Tale because an officer guarding the then-House speaker’s lobby told a female reporter she was forbidden from wearing a sleeveless dress. (The sleeves rule was only enforced for reporters by that time, not for members of Congress or their family members.)
Conservatives were rightly mocked for their pearl-clutching over Obama’s 2009 dress, and the media ought to feel similarly ashamed for giving a damn about something as innocuous as a denim vest. Maybe, as President Barack Obama once did with his tan suit, Sinema can claim victory with the media meltdown, asserting her only scandal in the Senate was her sense of style.
