Alexandra Ocasio Cortez wore a nondescript black jacket, and that was enough for a controversy.
Someone snapped a picture of the young congresswoman from behind, prompting a snide tweet from a conservative reporter that Oscasio-Cortez, who has been forthright about her financial challenges, “doesn’t look like a girl who struggles.”
"If I walked into Congress wearing a sack, they would laugh & take a picture of my backside," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response. "If I walk in with my best sale-rack clothes, they laugh & take a picture of my backside. Dark hates light - that’s why you tune it out. Shine bright & keep it pushing."
Which is an excellent sentiment. But god, when it comes to things you can wear in the workplace, it sure seems like we have to push a lot harder than any men around us.
When I was younger, and seemingly much more patient, I went to a lecture on what women could wear in order to be taken seriously in the workplace. It was that pre-Trump, Sheryl Sandberg era where we believed that if we did everything perfectly everything would be fine. I believe the answer was “a turtleneck and round toed pumps”—though there is no question in my mind now that would also be open to criticism (not fun enough, not sexy enough, too matronly). The class ended with a woman asking the lecturer how she could tell one of her female co-workers that the co-worker was not dressed appropriately because some women do love making life harder for other women for no reason.
The men’s class was the next day.
Haha, I am joking; and laughing, as a man would if you suggested he attend such a lecture. Men know that as long as they do not wear swimming trunks and a Nazi armband to their office, they’ll be pretty much fine.
Now, one might say, “well, men just wear suits to work so it’s not a problem because they have a set uniform,” of which, in itself, there’s no true female equivalent. If you do want to be a woman who wears a suit, do you wear a skirt suit, or does that come off as too Ally McBeal? Or a pantsuit, but that can come off as too Hillary Clinton? Or you could wear a dress, but that presents its whole own problems. There’s no “just wear a suit” equivalent for women.
Besides which, the notion that all high powered men are going around in identical suits, isn’t true is it? Men in Silicon Valley are considered visionary for wearing the same damn thing every day.
This is what happens to women who try that.
The former “understood he had a finite capacity to make excellent decisions” and was managing his time excellently by repeating outfits. The latter “is guilty of committing the ultimate fashion faux pas... wearing the same outfit just four days apart.”
By the same token, the writer and broadcaster Chrissy Iley remarked, “It is simply harder to be taken seriously wearing pink, so why make life hard?” But it only makes life harder for women. The Independent found that men who wear pink earn an average of 1,000 pounds more than men who don’t—and they also receive more compliments than their colleagues.
One story about Mark Zuckerberg that is treated as a glorious sign of bravado in The Social Network is about him going to an investor meeting in pajamas. Stories like that do not exist about women like Sheryl Sandburg or Marissa Mayer. They do not seem likely to any time soon.
Meanwhile one study that asked what a “successful woman manager” should look like remarked that “the concept of the ‘normal’ organizational body is implicitly masculine. The female body is thereby stigmatized or seen as ‘other’—defined as inherently sexual, dangerous, suspicious, volatile and disruptive.” To exist as a working woman means having to prove that you are none of these things. Any misstep in your dress can be perceived to prove the opposite.
The road that men can walk in the sartorial aspect of life is very wide. The path that women can walk is a tightrope. There is no way for women to dress “right” because the more successful you get, the narrower the tightrope becomes. I doubt any critics really care about the quality of a woman’s coat. They just want to see women fall.
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t make an effort to dress for situations. A man who demands to wear a T-shirt to a formal wedding does not strike me as being maverick so much as he just seems weirdly petulant. But women like Ocasio-Cortez are trying. Men who make no effort whatsoever on the fashion front get a lot more leeway than women who do make a sizeable effort. A man can wear pajamas to a meeting and be credited as a cool renegade. A woman can wear a black coat and be controversial. If a man dresses well—and by well I mean maybe he buys some interesting ties, or has a cool scarf, or wears a suit that isn’t black or blue—he’s seen as being so stylish that the actual substance of his work barely matters. That’s true even when his actual message is horrifying. Meanwhile, any flaw in a woman’s appearance is an excuse to dismiss her message, no matter how good.
I doubt Alexandra Ocasio Cortez is alone. I suspect there are many women with stories like her’s. And like her, I guess we’ll keep pushing.
HarpersBAZAAR.com is committed to telling women's stories. If you have an experience you would like to share, please fill out the form below:
Jennifer Wright is BAZAAR.com's Political Editor at Large. She is also the author of 'Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes That Fought Them' and 'It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Break-Ups In History.'
