Fashion in Action!

Another last word (as if) on What Not To Wear Palin’s wardrobe. I’ve often wondered what or who inspired her style, if ‘midwestern frump circa 1995’ can be called a style. Has she hired an actual stylist, or does she choose her own clothes? Surely that array of ill-fitting, ill-chosen separates can’t be a deliberate attempt at a look, can it?

The Anchorage Daily News is the first with the fashion gossip, for once in its existence: she’s channeling Ivana Trump. It seems Palin is an Ivanawannabe of long standing :

Alaskans line up for a whiff of Ivana (April 3, 1996)

By Tom Bell / Anchorage Daily News

Published: September 2nd, 2008 01:30 PM
Last Modified: September 2nd, 2008 04:57 PM

Editor’s note:This story was originally published April 3, 1996

Sarah Palin, a commercial fisherman from Wasilla, told her husband on Tuesday she was driving to Anchorage to shop at Costco. Instead, she headed straight for Ivana.

And there, at J.C. Penney’s cosmetic department, was Ivana, the former Mrs. Donald Trump, sitting at a table next to a photograph of herself. She wore a light-colored pantsuit and pink fingernail polish. Her blonde hair was coiffed in a bouffant French twist.

”We want to see Ivana,” said Palin, who admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer, ”because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”

Read whole thing

I should’ve guessed – that hair was a dead giveaway. How can I have been so blind? Mind you, the actual result is more Patsy in AbFab than Ivana:

If I didn’t loathe the woman and all she stands for there’d be one line in that report that’d actually make me feel some sympathy for her; it’s that she then “admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer”.

I can see how a girl from the remote provinces starved of glamour and nice things and mostly smelling of fish might be tempted to go on the rampage when given the run of the nation’s fancy department stores on someone elses dime – I’d be tempted too. However one would hope a potential President really would be able to resist that sort of thing.

One would hope too that in clothing terms – and clothes do send a message – a potential president, male or female, would have the minimum aesthetic sensibility to go for plain, smart and serviceable in colours that suit, and leave it that.

But Palin has gone the whole ’90s soap opera diva playing a politician hog; red leather jacket, bouffant hair, stripes of vivid brick or rose blusher down her cheeks, a tattooed lip outline… and for this she reportedly paid $13,200 to a top make up artist? Well I say she, but obviously it was the voters that donated the $13,200 who paid. Bigger fools them.

I had once thought that Palin’s clothes were a clever stylist’s strategy of identifying with women of a certain age bracket, income stream and lack of fashion interest, a way of appealing to the base. Then I found out that these outfits are what she personally chose and that, rather than the JC Penney’s bargain bin finds they look like, they’re actually stupidly expensive. This convinces me like nothing else can – because sometimes I am very shallow – that the woman’s unfit to be in office. She has no taste and no sense of appropriateness of any kind in anything, from clothes to morals.

Worse than that, as even her wardrobe proves, she’s never had an original thought in her life; her entire schtick from her views to her speeches is all bit and bobs cut and pasted from here and there and cobbled together. You could have some respect for the consistency of a complete yahoo, but she’s not even that.