Sure, if we wear the same pair of sweatpants from Friday night to Sunday night, our boyfriend is all like: "Girl, those things could stand up by themselves now and I know that stain is cheese-dip related." This guy wears the same suit for a year and he's a hero! It's not fair.
Fine, it's totally different scenarios, especially since the morning host for an Australian program did it for good reason.
Today's Karl Stefanovic wore the same cheap, blue Burberry knock-off suit, every morning, for an entire year. All he did was change up his tie. And not a single person noticed. No critics. No viewers. Why did he do this?
Because he was so upset at the harsh criticism his co-host Lisa Wilkinson gets on a regular basis about her wardrobe, a fact that was made very clear after she gave a very moving Andrew Olle Lecture in 2013 where she read actual viewer letters bashing her clothes and paying no attention to her journalistic skills.
.@karlstefanovic's been wearing the same suit for the past year to prove this point: http://t.co/jFQcLM9H12 #Today9 pic.twitter.com/J94vlK5gRv
? The Today Show (@TheTodayShow) November 16, 2014"No one has noticed; no one gives a s--t," Stefanovic told The Age about his test. "But women, they wear the wrong color and they get pulled up. They say the wrong thing and there's thousands of tweets written about them. Women are judged much more harshly and keenly for what they do, what they say and what they wear."
At first, he was only going to wear the suit for a couple of days in a row. But that quickly turned into a month, and still no one noticed. Finally, after a year of wearing the same thing, Karl is speaking out about what his sexism experiment says about male and female roles in the media.
"I've worn the same suit on air for a year—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," he said. "Whereas women are quite often judged on what they're wearing or how their hair is."
There were only two people who knew about his little suit game: Lisa, the woman he was doing it all for and Today newsreader Sylvia Jeffreys. And in case you were wondering…yes, they did think Karl smelled in that suit.
"They often remark that it's getting a bit stinky," Karl admitted. "I'm hoping to get it into the dry cleaners at the end of the year," he said.
Point proven, sir. And well done.