An Australian media personality has revealed she was asked to button up her cardigan to avoid offending foreigners in the Qantas lounge of a Queensland airport, even though there were none in sight.
Nikki Osbourne, 44, first opened up about the experience on her radio show on Brisbane’s Nova 106.9 earlier this month, and then revealed more in a column for QWeekend.
The mother-of-two said she was on work trip to the tropical Whitsundays Islands and dressed in tailored while shorts and a pink bodysuit with a knitted white cardigan over it when she was pulled aside by a staff member.
“She grabbed me by the arm and said: ‘firstly, I’m a long time fan of yours, but I’ll need you to button your cardigan up to cover yourself to protect the other cultures in the lounge’,” Ms Osbourne wrote.
“Other cultures I thought? All I saw in the lounge were a few FIFO workers and a mum! She was very polite about it. I however was suddenly shaken with a combination of shock, embarrassment, humiliation, anger and frustration.
“It was actually hard to process that I’d been made to feel like a tart in my hometown, in front of my male colleague too.”
Ms Osbourne went on to say the experience made her feel “degraded” and left her questioning her own integrity in Queensland, which she described as the “relaxed centre of the world where getting dressed up involves putting some skimpy shorts over a bikini”.
After she told the story on-air Qantas customer service contacted her to say it would “never happen again”, she said.
In the radio segment Ms Osbourne also said she felt there was unfair discrimination against women with larger breasts, and that she thought Sydney Sweeney would have faced less criticism over her American Eagle ad if she was flat-chested.
Header image: Nikki Osbourne (Instagram).
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