Journalists attack Nikki Haley for a dress
Tiana Lowe
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Because Nikki Haley is running for an office as public as the president of the United States, the former United Nations ambassador gave her followers a brief peek at her daughter Rena’s wedding. And because Nikki Haley is a woman of color running as a Republican, the media had to attack not her policies, not her record, but her outfit.
“Nikki Haley divides opinion by wearing white dress to daughter’s wedding,” read a headline in the Independent, citing random social media trolls. OK! magazine declared she was “scolded” for her dress, while a Newsweek reporter actually contacted the 2024 hopeful for comment.
The journalistic humiliation is not that Haley’s dress was actually gold, as she clarified on Twitter. It’s that the entire premise of caring about what a female politician wears to her daughter’s wedding is about as sexist a trope as one could create from the annals of toxic American wedding culture.
When wondering whether a journalist’s narrative is intentionally misogynist, ask yourself this: Would a man ever be asked this? The answer is obviously no.
Haley is specifically bait for liberal sexists because she’s conventionally attractive enough that critics of her appearance can’t be accused of punching down and she’s a working conservative mother who doesn’t actually make a big deal out of it. Rather than reckon with the substance of her campaign and her candidacy, why not just pit Haley’s appearance against another woman — in this case, her daughter?
The nontroversy also exemplifies the worst excesses of myopic millennial wedding culture, which allows bridezillas to go apoplectic if a female guest has the audacity to “outshine” the main character of the day in a gold dress or a blush one. As a daughter of Indian immigrants, Haley probably didn’t grow up in a culture that panicked if a guest wore white (Indian brides traditionally wear red), and as a Gen Xer, she definitely grew up in a time when being the bride wasn’t a license to bully all the women around you. The problem here isn’t that Haley ran afoul of moronic millennial wedding manners, but rather that the media wanted to make her the villain of a story of a bridezilla.