Sinema’s outfit, which also included oversized fuchsia glasses and gigantic earrings containing a charm of what appears to be a skull and butterfly, is right in line with her sartorial M.O. The former Congresswoman and first-term senator has long been the flashiest dresser in the Capitol, and during the pandemic, her wardrobe has gotten even weirder.* She’s worn several highlighter-hued wigs on the Senate floor to hide her grown-out dye job as she stayed home from the salon. (According to her spokesperson, the wigs were a reminder to constituents to practice COVID-19 precautions.) In February, she wore a pink sweater emblazoned with the phrase “Dangerous Creature,” a nod to a line from one of romance novelist Lisa Kleypas’ books: “A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.”
I’ve always been a fan of Sinema’s flamboyant getups, which have gotten more daring over the course of her tenure—not because I particularly like the clothes she wears, but simply because they make Congressional fashion a lot more interesting. Her eschewal of the traditional array of solid neutrals and jewel tones, sheath dresses, and conservative pumps would seem to suggest a healthy disregard for fusty, outdated customs—both explicit and implicit—of political dress, which were devised with a certain race, class, and gender of politician in mind. That’s probably the exact interpretation Sinema intended: It supports her self-presentation as an independent-minded outsider, beholden to no party or standard of Congressional dress. One would be forgiven for assuming that a neon-wigged, go-go boot–clad, “Dangerous Creature”–wearing senator was a hippie-dippie liberal, but one would be wrong. Sinema’s weirdo wardrobe isn’t an outgrowth of some anything-goes progressive ideology, but rather a matching complement to her weirdo politics, which have drastically changed over the years and don’t seem to coalesce into any discernible, deeply-held ideology at all.