Hillary Clinton told CBS News she began wearing pantsuits after photographers shot “suggestive” photos of her during a trip to Brazil.
“I was sitting on a couch, and the press was let in. There were a bunch of them shooting up,” Clinton told CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell.
“All of a sudden, the White House gets alerted to these billboards that show me sitting down with I thought my legs together, but the way it’s shot, it’s sort of suggestive,” Clinton added.
Some of those photos were used to sell lingerie. Clinton said the incident and the constant photography led her to switch to pantsuits, which have become a staple of the ex-first lady’s fashion.
The former secretary of State and her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, sat down with O’Donnell to promote the pair’s forthcoming Apple TV+ docuseries, “Gutsy.”
“I didn’t know that story,” Chelsea Clinton said. “I didn’t know that story. It’s by far and away the greatest revelation I had.”
Hillary Clinton said the incident in Brazil was the first of many uncomfortable experiences she had with press photographers as she increasingly became a public figure.
“I also began to have the experience of having photographers all the time,” she told O’Donnell. “I’d be on a stage, I’d be climbing stairs, and they’d be below me. I just couldn’t deal with it.”
Clinton also said during the interview that she has “no regrets” about choosing to stay in her marriage to former President Clinton, calling it the gutsiest decision of her private life.
Chelsea Clinton told O’Donnell the goal of the mother-daughter duo’s new series is to provide inspiring stories about women to viewers.
“People hopefully can see part of their own life, whether their own struggles, their own opportunities, in the women’s stories that we’re sharing so that they hopefully can be a little bit closer to feeling ‘well, I can be gutsy, too,’” she said.
More of the interview with the two Clintons is poised to air on Tuesday on “CBS Evening News” and O’Donnell’s new streaming show, “Person to Person.”