Reykjavík Grapevine - 14.03.2014, Blaðsíða 13

Madam
President
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir
on fashion and the times
Article by Anna Andersen
Photographs by Ari Magg
Arriving at Vigdís Finnbogadót-tir’s house just before noon on Friday, I find a note on the
door: “Anna, please wait! I’m on my
way,” signed “ViFi.” I go back to the
car and nervously watch the clock. I do
not want to keep Vigdís Finnbogadót-
tir waiting. I let eight minutes go by be-
fore trying again. This time, her note is
gone and there’s a car in the driveway. I
ring the bell and the 83-year-old former
president of Iceland comes to the door.
“Did you get my note?” she asks,
inviting me into her home.
It was here, outside Aragata 2
in 101 Reykjavík, that thousands of
Icelanders gathered on June 30, 1980
to congratulate Vigdís on becoming
the fourth president of the Republic
of Iceland. Vigdís waved to the crowd
from her balcony wearing a now iconic
wool dress that one of her supporters
had given her during her campaign
along with instructions not to wear it
until she had secured her victory. The
following day, newspapers all over the
world would run the headline “Woman
Elected President.” Vigdís was not only
Iceland’s first democratically elected
female president, but also the world’s
first.
Vigdís shows me into her living
room and offers me cider, remarking
that it is a favourite of the children
in the house. She is referring to her
grandchildren, three girls who belong
to her only daughter. It’s perhaps a
lesser-known fact that Vigdís was a
single mother when she was elected
into office at age 50, having been one
of the first single women in Iceland to
be granted permission to adopt a child
in 1972.
She returns from the kitchen with
a bottle and pours us each a glass.
“I hope you don’t want to talk about
politics,” the former president says.
Are You Ready,
Madam President?
Let’s start with the exhibit featur-
ing your clothes at the Museum of
Design and Applied Art. It’s called
“Are You Ready, Madam President?”
Tell me, what does that refer to?
Well, I didn’t come up with the title
and the exhibit is completely indepen-
dent of me so to speak, but it refers to
the fact that it is three, four, five times
as much work for a woman to be in an
official position than it is for a man.
A man my age—I was 50 when I was
elected—with the same background,
he would have already had the outfit
needed for formal events, and he
would have been able to keep all his
speeches and lectures inside his jacket
pocket [opens her jacket, motions as
if tucking a speech into a pocket], but
that’s not possible for a woman.
The exhibit has great historical
significance, which is something
that I think men don’t realise. I’ve
heard that men—elderly men at
least—think that this exhibit is only
for women, but it’s far from that. It
shows, and this is something I re-
alised early on, that it’s not enough for
a woman to be intelligent. Intelligence
has to have a modern ‘coiffure,’ as
they say in French [meaning haircut].
When a woman starts speaking in an
official capacity, everybody scrutinises
her appearance: What is she wearing?
Does she look old-fashioned? You
have to be well dressed and preferably
up-to-date with the latest fashion, and
this proved rather expensive for a the-
atre director [her job before becoming
president].
The exhibit features a number
of outfits from the early years of
your presidency, as the moment
you walked into office you had to
define your image—who you were
and what you wanted to represent.
I imagine that it would have been
easier to have this uniform that
men have—a basic suit that hasn’t
changed in the last fifty years.
Yes. I think that Angela Merkel is very
clever—I am full of admiration for
her solution to the clothing problem.
She is always elegant in what is more
or less a uniform: jackets in various
colours that she rotates. Margaret
Thatcher always wore a suit with
pearls and often a hat to underline her
femininity. Madeleine Albright also
wore a suit, but always accessorised
with a huge brooch to emphasise that
she is a woman.
While you were always very modern
and elegantly dressed yourself,
you also made use of the Icelandic
formal costume [‘skautabúningur’]
when you attended banquets with
foreign leaders.

Well, I never wore the traditional
costume—the ‘peysuföt’ or ‘upphlu-
tur’—but I wore the formal costume
on certain occasions when I was a