Why do all meteorologists dress the same? (2024)

“You’ll want to wrap up warm,” say the meteorologists. “It’s shorts and T-shirt weather,” they advise. But under the harsh studio lights it’s scorchio all year round – and the weather presenters themselves always dress the same.

As with so much formal dressing, male weather presenters have it easy. Since the world’s first TV weather forecast (George Cowling, the BBC, 1936) they have worn suits, their only consideration how natty to go with the tie. Famously, when an Australian male TV news anchor wore the same one for a year, none of his viewers even noticed.

Once, female meteorologists wore suit jackets, too, but recently a more gendered uniform has emerged. The in thing is a block-coloured, long sleeved, bodycon dress of the type made popular by Roland Mouret in 2005. So prevalent is this silhouette that in the US this week dozens of meteorologists were spotted wearing exactly the same dress: Homeyee’s stretch poly-cotton-spandex pencil tunic sheath, to be precise, available in seven bold colours from Amazon for $23.

The ubiquity of one dress doesn’t surprise British weather veteran Siân Lloyd. “You have to remember that, with the weather, you are terribly confined,” she says. “You can’t do florals, stripes or checks; they shimmer and shake on television. And if you are using a green screen you can’t wear green, as you would disappear. So you are confined to red and blue – sometimes even purple has too much green in it.”

“Men are so lucky,” she says. “They just wear a different tie each day and that’s it – they’re dressed.” For women, choosing what to wear is both low budget and high risk. “What people forget about the weather is that you usually don’t have any budget for clothes but you are on TV on a nightly basis,” says Lloyd. And while designers might offer to lend clothes to newsreading colleagues, says Lloyd “they don’t usually want to dress the weather people. Apart from at Christmas, when you have a huge captive audience, and I did get lent some fabulous garments – like one velvet jacket with a little fur collar.” Colour isn’t the only consideration: “You also don’t want to bare your arms in a formal broadcast. So if you find something that works, you tend to go for it in an OTT way.”

In Lloyd’s experience, the producers don’t get involved (“you’re more or less an island, left to yourself”) and meteorologists do their own makeup, too, which can feel quite perilous when appearances are picked apart in real time on social media. Thankfully, she says: “Often the cheapest clothes work best on telly, I have some really great Dolce and Gabbana and Vivienne Westwood dresses but designer pieces that have an amazing billowing shape in real life can look awful on screen. And then plain jackets I have from Peaco*cks work a dream.”

Nazaneen Ghaffar, a Sky meteorologist, uses a video wall, not a green screen, but still has to avoid patterns that would distort or colours that would cause her to be camouflaged against the map. In her previous job, at the BBC, she felt the wrath of the internet when a cream-coloured top with a thick black stripe “made it look, under the lighting, like I was just wearing a boob tube. There were so many complaints; my mother was really upset.” She also had to relegate a dress with a top-to-bottom zip after unsavoury viewer comments.

At Sky, budgets must be healthier; Ghaffar has a stylist to shop with. “I pick what I want but she checks that it works – reds and blues are best; stripes we avoid. And I always tuck my microphone pack into a pair of Spanx – that kills two birds with one stone.”

Undeniably, bodycon dresses are more obviously feminine than the boxy suit jackets of the 80s and 90s – that Homeyee dress, says Lloyd, is designed to be flattering: “It has that thing of the black going down the side and at the waist to give that Jessica Rabbit shape. Maybe I’m old fashioned,” she adds, “but I do prefer jackets – they hide a multiplicity of sins, particularly the lump of your microphone box.”

In high-fashion circles, an androgynous jacket would be judged more current than bodycon – just look at the recent shift towards loose shapes in Victoria Beckham’s wardrobe – but the silhouette looks unlikely to leave weather studios for some time. “Weather is never going to be cutting edge fashion.” says Lloyd. “It’s quite a conventional broadcast.” Certainly, the dresses reflect the female power dressing template of our age – seen everywhere from Alan Sugar’s boardroom to Canary Wharf. “It’s important to look smart and presentable,” adds Ghaffar. “People look at you before they go to work so you want to mirror the way they are likely to be dressing.”

More than anything, says Lloyd, the dresses work because “they do not battle against the map. The map is sacrosanct. It would be sacrilege to compete with the map.”