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When 58-year-old Gwen Whipple Walz — First Lady of Minnesota and wife of Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and vice-presidential candidate — stepped onto the national stage last week at the first Harris-Walz rally, she made a powerful first impression. I was struck by how unmanipulated she looked, like a high-school teacher who’d just dismissed her last rowdy class of the day: the untidy hair, frumpy cardigan, shapeless above-the-knee shift, and comfortable, open-toe shoes. On Monday, at the Democratic National Convention, she wore a floral dress and “demure” makeup (as the kids say.) Before you shut me down for criticizing her, let me say that I find a kind of “situational” beauty to her style that I admire, because it suggests her focus is elsewhere — like on overseeing a policy portfolio that includes advocating for gun control, education, and the corrections system (all of which she does as Minnesota’s First Lady). Then I wondered whether her look was intentional or whether it was the result of a lack of time to prepare. Maybe a little of both?
It seems impossible that someone in Walz’s position couldn’t say, “Get me a blowout, stat!” and not be instantly appeased. But that kind of attention to appearance would have to be top of mind — which it seems it is not. Walz’s professional style, if you browse the photos of her in her role as First Lady of Minnesota, is Hillary-conservative slightly layered bob, natural makeup, generic blouses, and blazers — in other words, a style pulled from the template for your ordinary female politician (or politician’s spouse).
But I think what we first saw in Gwen Whipple Walz suggests no ordinary political spouse. Ian Frazier in the New York Review of Books relates a telling story about her background:
[Walz] grew up in western Minnesota and went to college in Mankato, where she and her husband later taught high school … Mankato was a name not spoken but spat, because thirty-eight Sioux were hanged there in 1862 in the largest mass execution in US history. White Minnesotans wanted revenge for the killings of whites in the recent war with the Sioux. Gwen Walz works for prisoners and prison reform because, having lived in Mankato, she knew its history.
It’s obvious that what women wear in political office or when sharing the stage with a politician is often an indication of their political platform; think of (or try not to think of) Melania’s “I really don’t care do u” jacket. How perfectly did that echo her husband’s paper-towel-throwing moment while delivering aid to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico? And think of Jill Biden, whose expert makeup and perfect blowouts have always been in lockstep with the president’s own buttoned-up, no-hair-out-of-place image. Gwen Walz’s relaxed, easy look seems to reflect the “what you see is what you get” affect of her husband. And women in, or even adjacent to, public office often face close scrutiny about their clothing, which, along with their physical appearance, is used to infer incompetence, among other unsavory characteristics. Remember the brouhaha over Sarah Palin’s clothing? She was blamed for being spendy, even though the choice to supplement her wardrobe wasn’t hers. Hillary was criticized for her “baggy” suits, which indicated what about her abilities? Lack of taste? Lack of accurate body image? Lack of a tailor? More recently, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was criticized for appearing in expensive-looking clothes on the cover of Vanity Fair (no matter that they were almost certainly loaned for the photo shoot).
It seems likely that Walz will be given a makeover during the course of her husband’s campaign (the editors at the Cut call it being “yassified”). I doubt we’ll be seeing her in another pair of sandals, which are still prohibited, along with sleeveless dresses, in the hallowed halls of the United States Congress. But I hope she chooses to maintain her style. It’s refreshing to see someone who looked like she had too much to do to gussy herself up for her first presentation to the country. In a time when it’s sometimes impossible to differentiate between what’s real and what’s fake, Gwen Walz looks unequivocally like the real thing, head to exposed toes.
