‘Out-duding the dudes’: Bridget McKenzie’s feminist fashion choice

When Bridget McKenzie rose to deliver a speech to the Nationals’ federal council on Saturday, she wasn’t only making a statement with her words.

Her outfit also told a story to the party loyalists gathered at the National Press Club in Canberra for their annual policymaking forum.

Nationals frontbencher Bridget McKenzie says she is sending a political message through her clothes.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

McKenzie, the party’s Senate leader, was wearing a three-piece pinstripe suit and a navy tie featuring the green and gold colours of the Nationals’ logo.

This was no one-time kind of thing. In recent months, McKenzie has taken to regularly wearing a suit and tie, sometimes multiple times a week.

Unlike former prime minister Paul Keating’s love of tailored suits from luxury Italian label Zegna, McKenzie’s suit, made by the affordable Melbourne brand Portmans, was bought from a factory outlet in Canberra (the blazer is selling online for $118.96). Some days she will pair it with a sneaker, on others a high heel. Her ties are often borrowed from male Nationals colleagues, but her own favourite tie is emblazoned with pheasants to reflect her love of hunting.

On the one hand, McKenzie says the choice reflected a desire to have fun and experiment with clothes. Yet the look is also a pointedly symbolic one for the self-described conservative feminist.

“I woke up one morning and wanted to send the message that I’m just as serious as the next guy,” McKenzie says at the end of a sitting week in Parliament House. “I think a tie, in this place, sends a specific message.”

Adding a vest, she says, takes it to the next level.

“Who wears a three-piece suit these days?” she says with a laugh, describing the choice as “out-duding the dudes”.

McKenzie, 54, never fancied herself a fashionista. A passionate shooter and netball player who taught high school physical education and mathematics, she says she is most comfortable wearing jeans, a T-shirt and thongs.

Wary of her clothes overshadowing her work in the infrastructure, transport and regional development portfolio, she only reluctantly agreed to talk for this piece.

“This is everything you don’t want to be talking about as a woman in politics,” she says.

In 2022, Nationals senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price garnered headlines by accusing then minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney of touring remote Aboriginal communities while “dripping with Gucci”, highlighting the risks female politicians take by wearing anything vaguely interesting.

McKenzie experienced the sexism women face in the male-dominated world of politics when colleague Barnaby Joyce called her a “flash bit of kit” during a late-night Senate sitting in 2012.

Victorian senator Bridget McKenzie wore the same suit three times in the past sitting week. Did anyone notice?Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, Aresna Villanueva

A suit and tie has been the traditional uniform for blokes in parliament, although Greens MPs have recently adopted a noticeably more casual look (in 2022, a Nationals MP called out the Greens’ Max Chandler-Mather for not wearing a tie during question time, objecting to his “state of undress”).

By contrast, it’s extremely rare to see a female politician wearing a tie. Pearl necklaces are far more common. This makes McKenzie’s look stand out.

“There’s a lot of pressure to conform, and I don’t feel it’s necessary to conform to others’ view of what a conservative woman should say, do or wear,” says McKenzie, the Nationals’ first female Victorian senator and first female Senate leader.

When McKenzie entered the Senate in 2011, she says there were such limited clothing options for female parliamentarians that they would often text each other to make sure they didn’t show up the next day in a near-identical outfit. The aim for women in politics, she says, was to attract as little attention as possible for their appearance.

That’s changing today. It has become more common for female parliamentarians to wear bold colours, and to balance comfort with style. Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, for example, often wears eye-catching sneakers in the House of Representatives. Frontbencher Anne Aly is frequently photographed in the chamber in outfits she has designed and made herself.

Breaking away from the pack still carries a risk, though. Some social media users have mocked McKenzie for “dressing up in drag” or looking like an aircraft pilot, but she says she’s been overwhelmed by the compliments she has received for her suit-and-tie look.

The science graduate says she ran her own “nerdy experiment” recently by wearing the same suit three times during a parliamentary sitting week to see if anyone noticed. No one did, just as when Today show host Karl Stefanovic wore the same suit on air for a year in 2014.

“That helped me decide to make it a staple in my wardrobe,” she says.

McKenzie acknowledges that some may see it as ironic, or even a backwards step, to promote female empowerment by dressing in traditionally masculine attire. But having served almost 15 years in parliament and accruing some scar tissue along the way – she resigned from federal cabinet in 2020 for her role in the “sports rorts affair” – she says she has earned the right to do what makes her feel good.

“When you get to a certain age as a woman, and a certain level of experience, your care factor is less,” she explains.

“Strength, power and authenticity can be expressed in a variety of ways.”

Including how you dress.

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