Responses to the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s new relaxation of Senate dress codes have so far fallen along partisan lines: Republicans have been deploring it as a lapse in decorum and order. “Most if not all Republican senators think we ought to dress up to go to work,” Mitch McConnell said. Mitt Romney called it “a terrible choice,” and from the House, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene pronounced the change “disgraceful.”
Democrats have tended to dismiss these complaints, insisting that matters of dress are mere distractions in light of the grave matters facing the Senate: On X (formerly Twitter), the Democratic senator Tina Smith wondered how anyone could complain about a dress code when “House Republicans are about to drive the federal government off a cliff.” Senator John Fetterman, famous for sporting shorts and hoodies (and for whose benefit many believe the rules were changed), expressed a similar sentiment in an interview with MSNBC: “Aren’t there more important things we should be talking about rather than if I dress like a slob?”
Well, yes and no.
The fact is that how we dress in various settings is inextricable from serious political issues. How we dress telegraphs intricate messages to those around us, as well as to ourselves — messages we receive and interpret constantly, consciously or not. There is no such thing as “total freedom” of dress, only different registers of meaning, which are entirely context dependent. Just as words make sense only relationally — in sentences and paragraphs — garments have meaning only in relation to other garments. A tuxedo’d guest at a wedding is unexceptional, nearly invisible. A tuxedo’d guest at a picnic is a spectacle.
Business attire does some of this for women, but can never offer the same degree of carefree simplicity. Women are still the adorned, visible, bodily sex whose physicality gets staged by clothes. Accordingly, women’s fashion — including even business attire — requires a near-infinity of daily micro-decisions from head to toe: dress or pants? Low or high neckline? Flats or heels? (If heels, how high?) What kind of jewelry? How much makeup? What is my hair “saying”? Harder still, these decisions all carry a perpetual risk of tipping us somehow into “inappropriateness” — of exposing too much or too little, of trying too hard or not enough, of missing that sweet spot between alluring and dowdy, while, of course, presenting the usual challenges concerning age and body type.
