Last week, the Missouri House got heated as it spent the beginning of its session debating dress code — but only for women in the House. So are cardigans now allowed — and why did it get so heated?
State Rep. Ann Kelly proposed the rule that would require women to wear jackets because “it is essential to always maintain a formal and professional atmosphere.” State Representatives Peter Merideth and Jamie Johnson told KMOX they thought the proposal was ridiculous.
“In a state where we restrict women in multiple ways, for her to then narrow the choices that we have of what covering to wear in the State House was on brand — very, very on brand,” Johnson said.
Sequins became a contentious part of the debate at a certain point, which Johnson said was used to point out the hypocrisy in Rep. Kelly’s rule proposition — Kelly had worn a sequined shirt the morning before, with a blazer on top.
“So in general fashion, the rule is sequins are appropriate for evening dress, not early morning encounters,” Johnson explained. “So yeah, that was kind of the response of, ‘You can wear sequins before five, but she's telling us we can't wear a shawl or cardigan.’”
Meredith said he found the debate frustrating, especially since there were more pressing things to debate. He also compared it to the mask debate from a few years ago.
“Really, if this is the same crowd that just a couple of years ago was screaming ‘My body, my choice’ about having to wear a mask potentially out of respect for other people saying, ‘Now we're going to vote on the details of how many layers women have to have on their arms in order to respect other people’ — It just felt like this incredible contrast to me,” he said. “Maybe this isn’t the problem to worry about right now.”
Johnson explained that the debate wasn’t actually about whether women should be allowed to have bare arms in the chamber — a rule is already in place that says women have to wear a second layer.
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“It was about the restriction of the type of second layer and restricting it to blazers or knit blazers, which technically does not include cardigans,” she said. “But I also want to mention that this whole debate just overshadowed so much more important debates that we should have been having about the House rules.”
“Democrats offered rule changes that would make our committee process more accessible to Missourians with disabilities, and ensure that Missourians could testify before out of state stakeholders and committee hearings, and just what rules would have made the house work better for the people,” Johnson continued. “And instead, we ended up spending the majority of our time talking about cardigans.”
Hear more about the now-infamous cardigan debate from Representatives Peter Merideth and Jamie Johnson on Total Information AM:
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