14 DAY TRIAL // Politics is a serious game, but every once in a while fashionistas do their mighty best to get in on it by coming up with those lists everyone loves to hate (or just plain loves) with the best and worst dressed ladies and gents in the public eye.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has never been on a famous best dressed list, but we’re thinking she never aimed for this “accomplishment” either. She’s got bigger fish to fry, as the saying goes. And, believe it or not, not all women are fashion victims.
For Mrs. Merkel, for instance, the key word is practicability. Whether she means it or not, this way, she proves that fashion can be both timeless and cheap, because it means that you don’t buy into every new fad that comes along at the change of the season.
More importantly, this way, she earns major points with her people, because she comes across as the ideal politician: she’s always elegant but she’s not a snob, she doesn’t spend millions on designer pieces, not when she can reuse the same items in her wardrobe over and over again.
Deborah Cole from AFP, who says on Twitter she covers “Angela Merkel, Europe’s top economy and foreign policy but they let me do the film fests too,” notes that the Chancellor has been wearing a colorful wrap for exactly 18 years.
You can see a photo of it in the tweet below. However, that’s not the only item that the Chancellor has been “recycling” in public, which proves that, like most common-sense women, she has a few basic items in her wardrobe that she takes out regularly for a certain type of events.
Outside of the celebrity world, she’s not the only public female figure to do this and not even the only one to receive praise for it.
The US First Lady Michelle Obama was hailed as a champion of accessible style in the early months of her husband’s first term, because she was always choosing creations from American designers (for the fancier events) and items from national stores (for the less fancy outings).
It’s true, she was rarely photographed wearing the same outfit twice, but at least she didn’t go overboard with expensive designer creations.
The Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton is another famous “recycler.” She reuses anything from hats and fascinators to coats, dresses, jewelry, and shoes and, back home in the UK, whenever she wears a dress off the rack, the item becomes suddenly so popular it sells out in hours.
The idea is that fashion doesn’t have to be expensive, not when you have a few timeless pieces you can build an entire outfit around. For women in politics, fashion must never be perceived as expensive, even at those (rare) times when it probably is. Mrs. Merkel knows this only too well.
Why Germans love Merkel: she's been wearing the same wrap for 18 years via @BILD http://t.co/cuLUokFp2a pic.twitter.com/wUBCF3tki5
— Deborah Cole (@doberah) August 5, 2014