American retail is having a tough time but if everyone shopped as fervently as Sarah Palin who knows what the sales figures would be.

There is no denying the importance of a confident outfit to impress the voters. There are some snappy dressers to compete with on the world stage. Nor is the sartorial lot of a politician or politician’s wife an easy one: you’re damned if you make an effort, and damned if you don’t.

Sarah Brown had opted for Jaeger, but after the Sarkozys’ visit in March, when her choice of attire was criticised, she switched to the upmarket polish of the Armani-trained Scottish designer Graeme Black. In the past, Samantha Cameron has played it down in Topshop at the Tory conference; this year she stepped out in a £300-plus dress by the hip New York designer Phillip Lim.

Upping the fashion ante doesn’t come cheap, but the astonishing figures ($49,425.74 spent by Mrs Palin at Saks Fifth Avenue in St Louis and New York; $75,062.63 at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis) seem an awful lot for a woman who appears to have worn similar versions of the same red boxy suit.

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Mrs Palin is said to have been dressed by a secretive circle of stylists. But could we tell that the jacket she wore for her speech at the Republican Party convention accepting the vice-presidential nomination was a $2,500 item from Valentino? Not really. It could have come from Banana Republic.

When a newspaper speculated that her shoes might be from Sergio Rossi, it received press statements from Manolo Blahnik, Christian Dior and Ferragamo, to name but a few, confirming that they certainly weren’t from them. Should she have bothered?

Huge swaths of America have been electrified by this former beauty queen’s “hockey mom” persona. How many “hockey moms” have that sort of budget?

Perhaps one can just about justify the $4,714.49 spent on hair and make-up: the lacquer presumably needed to endure those gruelling TV debates and enough hairspray to create that formidable beehive.

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