speaker of the house of style

Nancy Pelosi is creating a lot of buzz - not for her position as Speaker of the House, but for her sense of fashion.

Lauding someone for their style on Capitol Hill is a lot like celebrating the best surfer on Florida’s Gulf Coast — it’s all relative, and some would argue irrelevant. Washington has never embraced fashion (nor, for that matter, has the fashion world embraced Washington), and for understandable reasons. In political circles, fashion is a loaded term, smacking of frivolity and vanity.

So, to a large extent, politicians have been fashion agnostic, sticking stubbornly to their dark blue suits, red power ties, multicolored scarves and lacquered hair.

But with the ascent of Nancy Pelosi, 66, widely recognized and admired for her Armani and easy fashion savvy, the days of the dowdy Washington dress code may be numbered. At least that is the hope of a number of women on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats, who see Mrs. Pelosi, the new speaker of the House, as a fashion leader, too. (NYTimes)

Can she really be a Woman of the People if she's banging the gavel while wearing an Armani suit, clothing that most Americans can't afford?

Even Speaker Pelosi has her limits. Her staff members, after repeated requests, declined to talk about her clothing choices for this article. In a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” Mrs. Pelosi said her husband often buys clothes for her.

This is truly unbelievable. Many men do not buy clothes for themselves, much less for their wives.

Lauren Solomon of LS Image Associates asserts, "You don't have to grow up to look like a librarian, but you don't have to look like a hooker, either." Surely women have more choices than that.

(Photographs by Charles Dharapak/Associated Press; Aharaz N. Ghanbari/Associated Press; Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images; Joe Raedle/Getty Images)