Former Labor prime minister Ben Chifley famously didn’t own a dinner suit. He wore what he wanted, and if a lounge suit didn’t suit then the event didn’t suit him.

When being sworn into the Privy Council, he simply refused to partake in the elaborate ceremony and in response to the exasperated Lord Chamberlain, just calmly said “I’ll bet you two bob I’m still allowed in”.

He won the bet.

Chifley was an engine driver before he was a parliamentarian and he made sure he would wear his working class blue shirt in rooms where the worker should be represented.

It was a political signal – he was a union man, for the worker and he made sure his dress, when necessary, represented his origins.

Curtin had workers at the heart of his sartorial signals as well. He was, as Stuart Macintyre wrote in Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s, “determined to make the Labor Party respectable” and dressed in a three-piece suit.

For him, he wanted the worker to be respected when Labor MPs were in the sorts of rooms that workers at the time would be barred entry.

Greg Combet would make a point of rolling up his sleeves when in meetings, which once helped mark the difference between unionists and the capital class.

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