Friday, October 24, 2008

The real shame...

...about Sarah Palin's $150,000 wardrobe is not that apparently she's wearing $5000 outfits. People who NEED to look good every day have been doing that for decades--start with a pair of Alden shoes ($500), add a tailored shirt ($300-500) and a custom made suit ($2000 or more), hold it together with a great tie ($200) and belt ($100) and cover it with a tailored overcoat and hat ($1000 +), and you're pretty much there. Lawyers, politicians, executives, and others have been doing this for a long time--and if that's a scandal, let's send Barack, Joe, and John out in their Wranglers.

Eww....let's not. As others have said, there comes a time when most men really look best in a suit. Biden and McCain have clearly reached that point, so suits it is.

The same link tells us what the real shame is about Gov. Palin's new wardrobe. It's not that each outfit costs $5000; it's that the RNC evidently bought her 30 or more of them. Reality is, though, that a man really only needs a few good suits to look his best every day. A woman, maybe five to ten. Just enough to mix and match for virtually infinite unique looks, really.

In other words, the RNC should be ashamed for knowing clothes (each outfit looks great), but not wardrobes. It's a lack of the "big perspective" that...shows all too clearly in both political parties.

4 comments:

Gino said...

and hillary's pant suits are 9K a peice.
much goes into the figure of course.
like the amount of raw materials needed to cover hillary's ,ah... never mind.

Anonymous said...

I dunno, I'd like to think you're right, but it's been CW for a long time that a high profile woman shouldn't be recognized to wear the same thing twice in public. I mean, as in centuries. It's not so much that you can't mix and match and "look good" in a smaller number of clothes, it's that for a really high status woman, repeating is in itself held to be a mark of underdressing. I'm not saying she literally needs a new outfit for every day on the trail, but by about the fifth time, the conventional wisdom says "gauche."

It may be the case that she could successfully buck that concept, but my guess is that the felt need to adhere to it is why there are so many outfits.

OTOH, it's come out that they didn't really spend 150K on her. They allocated 150K, about 50 was spent, 50 was returned to budget, and it's expected that the other 50 won't be spent either.

Bike Bubba said...

Ya know, I would suggest that conservatives ought to buck such a trend, but you've got a good point about shallow people noticing she wore something twice.

And of course, the very definition of "shallow" is a media all bothered over the cost of Palin's clothes, but not terribly bothered at all by Obama's close associations with Daley, Rezko, Wright, Pfleger, and Ayers.

Anonymous said...

Well, shallow people write and read articles in widely read publications about stuff like that, and while it's kind of a shame to pander to that kind of concern, the campaign may well decide it's better to spend a few extra 10's of K out of 10's of millions on this, than to try to prove their conservative fashion sense to the world. :-)

And of course you're right on the last point. I've seen fussing about Trig's $300 stroller -- the kind of thing a yuppie would buy a new copy of for every kid (if she had more than one.) Yet be a part of the Chicago political machine and be at least ankle-deep, if not knee-deep in its depredations, and nobody bats an eye.