On-Air Fashion Shaming Happens All Too Often
On Saturday, a KTLA meteorologist was shamed for her outfit choice. While delivering the weather report, Liberté Chan was interrupted by a person off camera who handed her a cardigan. “What’s going on?” Chan asked, confused. “You want me to put this on? Why? Because it’s cold?” A male voice responded, “We’re getting a lot of emails,” and a bewildered Chan put on the sweater over her sparkly LBD.
Chan seemed quite shocked that viewers took issue with her look and posted a few videos to her Facebook page in the aftermath of the debacle. Chan’s dress, which was a glittery black spaghetti strap number from Aidan Maddox’s Spring 2016 collection, sparked several angry emails from viewers who complained that the piece was not appropriate for her line of work, saying it looked like Chan had just come in from a night out.
“Can we talk about my weather performance?” Chan wondered as her co-workers read the messages aloud. “Everyone! I had this dress on, it did not work, it was very demure,” she explained. “It just didn’t work, and I had a backup, and that’s it! People, I don’t know why every one is hating! I don’t know what to tell you — it’s a black dress!”
According to Chan, the pattern on the original dress she was planning to wear was interfering with the green screen, so she had to quickly grab another one. Local anchorwomen often have to come to work with their own clothes, so backup dresses are important, especially if something doesn’t work for the camera.
Chan wrote about the experience on her personal blog. “I was surprised since I hadn’t seen any of the emails and didn’t think there was anything that inappropriate (the beads/sequins were probably a little much for the morning, but what girl doesn’t like something that sparkles?!), so I played along and put on the sweater.” Chan noted that the person who passed her the sweater wasn’t trying to censor her, he was just poking fun at the situation. “For the record, there is no controversy at KTLA. My bosses did not order me to put on the cardigan, it was a spontaneous moment. I truly love my job, I like my bosses and enjoy working with my coworkers. Since talking to my team, I want our viewers to know it was never our intention to offend anyone.”
There’s a lot of pressure on women on TV, especially those who work for local stations with limited budgets. The on-air talents are DIY masters with no stylists or even makeup artists on set to help with their appearances. And unfortunately, viewers don’t always appreciate the way they look. Chan’s case certainly isn’t an isolated incident.
Jennifer Livingston, a local news anchor in Wisconsin, was attacked for her weight. Pregnant meteorologist Lauren Jones actually threw herself a celebration when she recognized that her audience had gone one whole week without critiquing her appearance in one way or another.
“I once wore this black and white Trina Turk dress. I had my eye on it for a while, I saw it on sale, grabbed it, and I wore it to work the following week,” Lauren Przybyl, an anchor for KDFW Fox 4 Dallas, told Yahoo Style. “I think within an hour or two of me being on the news, someone had already posted a picture online of me in the dress, they’d taken a screenshot from the TV — and it was next to a picture of Beetlejuice.”
People have opinions — that’s everyone’s right. But the question is, why the vitriol? And why do people care enough to pen an email about an anchor’s outfit? For Chan, the dress might not have been the best look for reading the morning weather, but the backlash seems a bit overblown. “I’m sorry if I was inappropriate,” Chan said in a video after the fact. “Will you wear it again?” a co-worker asked. “No!” Chan said emphatically. “It was a loaner anyways.”
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