Sky News host Rowan Dean has criticised Foreign Minister Penny Wong for not wearing “a frock” to the wedding of Anthony Albanese and Jodie Haydon.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese married his partner Jodie Haydon at The Lodge in Canberra on Saturday. The low key private affair saw Albanese become the first Australian Prime Minister to wed while in office.
The event was attended by family and close friends including close political allies from the Labor party. Among them Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
Speaking on his Sunday morning Sky News program, Rowan Dean, complained about Wong’s choice of clothes for the occasion.
“Could Penny Wong have not worn, I’m going to say it, a frock?” Dean said to squeals of reaction from co-hosts Rita Panahi and James Morrow.
Morrow had earlier said the Prime Minister has committed a sartorial faux-pas by wearing a tuxedo to a day time garden wedding, arguing that he should have been dressed in a summer suit.
Wong had been dressed in feminine dark silver blouse and dark trousers.
Women wearing trousers was debated in the Australian parliament in 1933. The sudden popularity of slacks for women was attributed to the popularity of film star Marlene Dietrich who worn a suit in the 1930 film Morrocco, soon after Australian retailers were advertising Marlene Deitrich slacks.
Lorinda Cramer, a lecturer in Cultural Hertiage and Museum Studies at Deakin University explored the history of women wearing trousers in Australia in a 2023 article for The Conversation.
She noted that throughout Australia’s history women had donned trousers to work on the land or in the goldfields, and newspaper reports in the 1920’s asked if there should be a law banning women from slipping on slacks.
World War II saw a sudden growth in women wearing trousers, as did the feminist movement of the 1970s. Who would have thought we’d still be criticizing women for waring trousers in 2025!
