As the contest to find the next leader of the Conservative party – and the next prime minister – continues, the collective conversation surrounding the appearance of the three remaining female contestants has reached fever pitch.

For the inaugural television debate on Friday 15 July, candidates Rishi Sunak, Tom Tugendhat, Liz Truss, Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch debated the state of the economy, the NHS and whether transgender people should have the right to self-identify. It didn’t take long for tweets and think-pieces to circulate about how carefully Liz Truss had “planned her outfit to mirror one that Margaret Thatcher wore in 1979”. One tweet, which has been liked more than 25,000 times, wrote: “Liz Truss has recreated Margaret Thatcher’s appearance from her 1979 election broadcast down to the last detail.” Users starting referring to Truss’s “cosplay” of Thatcher, while another corner of the internet began questioning whether Mordaunt “only has one suit and one blouse” as another remarked that Badenoch’s yellow dress “did her no favours.”

A woman is always more than her clothing – even in politics