A Morning Show Host Wore the Same Suit on Air for a Year to Prove a Point About Sexism

Published
Today

This is one of those points people make where you say, “Well, duh.” But you’re also glad they made it because nothing has changed since the last time someone made it. Women working in the media have it harder than their male counterparts.


Karl Stefanovic
, an Australian newscaster for Today, proved this by wearing the same suit on air for over a year. He wore the blue, "cheap Burberry knock-off" two days in a row, and when no one noticed, he kept wearing it. For a week, then a month, then a year.

Karl thought of the social experiment after co-anchor Lisa Wilkinson talked about viewers spending more time critiquing her fashion sense than her journalistic work (fast forward to 27:00 in the lecture below).


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Today

"I've worn the same suit on air for a year,” Karl told The Sydney Morning Herald. “Except for a couple of times because of circumstance — to make a point. I'm judged on my interviews, my appalling sense of humor. On how I do my job, basically.

“Whereas women are quite often judged on what they're wearing or how their hair is,” he continued. “They wear the wrong color and they get pulled up. They say the wrong thing and there's thousands of tweets written about them.”


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Karl concludes, “Women are judged much more harshly and keenly for what they do, what they say and what they wear."

If there’s one sign of his experiment’s success, it’s that Karl didn’t (finally) reveal his silent protest because someone called him out on it. In a year, no one ever said anything "No one has noticed,” he says. “No one gives a s--t."

But if Lisa had worn the same outfit even twice in one week? S--t would have been given.

Now watch Aziz Ansari explain why he’s a feminist thanks to Beyoncé: