The Sex Appeal of Women in Power

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Meanwhile, Ernesto Martinez, the costume designer for Veep who dresses Julia Louis-Dreyfus, said in theNew York Times’s “ Outfitting the Veep” that for “most politicians, their stab at looking good is not really so great. The idea was to be powerful, but attractive.” Neither Nancy Pelosi nor Kirsten Gellibrand worked; instead, he had to turn to our most famous unelected Washington woman: Michelle Obama.

Ultimately, how well dressed or charismatic a politician is shouldn’t matter. But these shows reveal that women who run for office have to play by a different set of rules than everyone else. And they also give us a picture, if only for sixty minutes, of how fun it would be if there were some more cracks in Washington’s glass ceiling.