TV Host Wears Same Suit All Year, Makes Point

Karl Stefanovic says men aren't judged as harshly as women
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 16, 2014 2:11 PM CST

An Aussie TV personality has worn the same suit on-air for a full year, and not because he likes the smell. Karl Stefanovic, a presenter on Australia's morning news show Today, says he kept wearing the blue Burberry knock-off to make a point: "No one has noticed; no one gives a s--t," he says. "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." And Stefanovic has seen co-host Lisa Wilkinson—with whom he's had an admittedly rocky relationship—raked over the coals because her outfit happens to offend a few fans, reports the Sydney Morning Herald. Unlike Wilkinson, "I'm judged on my interviews, my appalling sense of humor—on how I do my job, basically," Stefanovic says.

He was particularly offended when the Telegraph ran old photographs of a female co-host on a rival morning show, dressed in comfortable clothes while running errands. "She's a mate and she was hurt by that," says Stefanovic, who offered her his support. "And I can understand." Hundreds of tweets (mostly favorable) reacted to Stefanovic's well-worn suit, The Age reports, with comments like "I loved this so much! Bloody double standards, well played Karl xx" and "absolutely brilliant stuff." Others, not so much: A member of a feminist Facebook page called the suit experiment "superficial," while an analyst on Jezebel saw nothing new: "As hilarious and interesting as this is, he simply proved something we all already know, the double standard women deal with on a day-to-day basis," Isha Aran writes. (Another recent viral video shows a woman getting 108 catcalls in 10 hours while walking around New York City.)

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