Deja Vu

What She Wore to the Revolution

Tags:

Edmund Burke,

health care,

revolutions,

shopping,

women

2010: Dividing legislators and laymen, the health care debate brought out the blue and red in everyone. But on the night the reform passed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wore purple, a sartorial touch suggesting a hope for reconciliation and compromise. Despite the conciliatory hue of Pelosi's Sunday suit, the debate over what this bill signifies for nation has remained heated. This week, we've watched liberal pundits eagerly celebrate the reform as a moment indicative of democracy's progress, while their conservative counterparts aggressively criticize it, deeming it a regressive encroachment on individual liberties. Rising above the fracas, The Daily Beast, however, offered an unconventional, if insightful, reflection on Pelosi's position presiding over the debate, reminding us that even politics falls prey to fashion and aesthetics.

It’s a historic moment for the working woman, the one who hustles night and day to wrangle 219 votes for a sweeping legislative victory and also those who struggle toward marginally less stratospheric goals. With her subtle, maternal sense of style, Pelosi is helping to create a new archetype of sophisticated femininity, in Washington and around the country. Come September, all the most fashionable ladies will look a little like the speaker of the House.

Pelosi’s aesthetic has barely changed over her tenure in public office. That lavender suit has made dozens of appearances. Pelosi doesn’t have a stylist, according to a source close to her. She’s useless with a blow dryer and allots 20 minutes a session with an expert at a salon, coming and going with clockwork precision and spending the whole time studying notes. For the most part, her husband, Paul, picks out her clothes.

Gary Croteau of Salon Mario Russo in Boston does Pelosi’s hair from time to time, as well as a number of other high-powered women’s, including Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s. “Anna is basically the Nancy Pelosi of fashion,” he says. Pelosi, for her fearsome authority and consistent style, could likewise be called the Anna Wintour of Congress.

The speaker has been going for a softer look lately, Croteau said. “She’s told me before that the temptation people have when they do her hair is to make it look very helmet-like just because of who she is. She wants it to look good all day, but doesn’t want it to look hard.”

A helmet might have been useful at some stages of the debate, but Pelosi managed to emerge looking like a warrior. Every day she turned up power-suited for battle. She invariably adds a feminine touch, a strategy often employed by women in positions of power. Madeleine Albright had her pins; Nancy has her pearls.

1790: Dubbed the father of conservatism, Edmund Burke might have had reservations about Pelosi's stance on health care reform, but he certainly recognized the influence of aesthetics on politics. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, his notorious attack on the egalitarian spirit driving the French Revolution, Burke, a man of taste, revealed his devotion to Marie Antoinette, whom he never met in person. His frothy study of the dauphiness presages contemporary pundits' fascination with the figures and fashions of female politicians.

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

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