The Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, who memorably posted a photo of herself wearing a ring that said “Fuck Off”, thinks it is offensive that the media keeps discussing her sartorial choices. Sinema has become a household name in recent months because of her resistance to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, but her flamboyant attire and ever-changing style has also helped keep the senator in the news. She’s inspired headlines such as Kyrsten Sinema’s Style Keeps Us Guessing (The New York Times) and Take note, AOC – Kyrsten Sinema’s bad style actually makes a statement (The New York Post).
“It’s very inappropriate,” Sinema told Politico on Wednesday. “I wear what I want because I like it. It’s not a news story, and it’s no one’s business. It’s not helpful to have [coverage] be positive or negative. It also implies that somehow women are dressing for someone else.”
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a senator or a schoolkid, female clothing is unfairly policed. Professional women often find themselves getting scrutinized for their fashion choices in ways that their male counterparts are not. But does that mean, as Sinema seems to be suggesting, that it is automatically sexist or inappropriate to comment on what a female politician is wearing? Of course not. Fashion has always been used to make political statements and there are plenty of examples where a woman’s clothing or appearance is a legitimate news story. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sworn in as congresswoman, for example, she wore all-white to honour the suffragettes and Shirley Chisholm. In this instance, she was very much dressing for someone else.
Style can have substance. One of the most famous examples of this is Madeleine Albright who used jewelry to communicate her views when she was secretary of state. “I found that jewelry had become part of my personal diplomatic arsenal,” Albright has said. “While President George HW Bush had been known for saying ‘Read my lips’, I began urging colleagues and reporters to ‘Read my pins.’”
Sinema, who rarely speaks to reporters, hasn’t explicitly urged anyone to “read her pins”, but it often seems like she wants people to pay attention to her wardrobe. Last year she wore a bright purple wig on the Senate floor; after voting she pointed at her wig, just to make sure everyone knew it was her. “Kyrsten is continuing to call attention to the need for all of us to stay home as much as possible and practice social distancing – which she is diligently practicing, including from her hair salon,” her spokeswoman later said. So are her fashion choices no one’s business, as she told Politico, or is she using them to make a political statement? I’m confused.
But that’s the Sinema effect: she’s the former Green party-aligned activist who ran on a progressive policy platform then, as soon as she got into power, became one of the biggest roadblocks to getting any progressive policies passed. She’s nominally a Democrat, but is so chummy with the GOP that the Republican senator John Cornyn has said he “would be surprised if Republicans tried to unseat” Sinema in 2024. (He’s since walked that back a little.) She’s nothing if not inconsistent.
One reason that so much attention is paid to the senator’s clothes is that people are desperate to understand what (if anything) she stands for, and clothes seem to be one of the main ways she expresses herself. Sinema seems to have forgotten that she is a public servant and that part of her job is communicating with the people she represents. She doesn’t hold public events for her Arizona constituents; she doesn’t communicate with the local progressive groups who got her elected or even her previous allies; she rarely gives interviews and, when she does speak to the press, says little of substance. The New York Times has described her as “one of the most elusive senators on Capitol Hill”; the Politico piece noted that “even after an extended interview, the first-term Democrat holds onto the air of mystery that’s become a signature part of her political brand”.
Sinema owes no one an explanation for how she dresses, but there are plenty of other things she owes us all an explanation for. Like whether all the money big pharma has been sending her way has anything to do with her U-turn on drug prices. Sinema campaigned on lowering drug prices and making healthcare more affordable in her 2018 Senate race; as a senator she had the opportunity to help Biden do just that but instead was instrumental in massively watering down drug pricing reforms. She hasn’t given the public any details regarding this shift – just as she hasn’t given the public any meaningful details on why she is raking in so much money from multilevel marketing businesses (often criticized as pyramid schemes). If Sinema wants people to focus on her work instead of her wigs, then maybe she should remember who she is supposed to be working for. If Sinema starts providing much-needed explanations about what she stands for, there might be rather less talk about the thigh-high boots she’s standing in.