In retrospect, maybe the snakeskin print top wasn’t the one Nadia Sawalha might have chosen to wear eight times. It was not, she says with a laugh, “the sort of shirt I would normally wear at all”. The Loose Women presenter just happened to have been wearing it the day before she had the idea to try her experiment, to show how women’s clothing choices are noticed and picked over, and the show’s editor said why not start straight away. Over three weeks, on the days Sawalha was one of the four presenters on the weekday talkshow, she wore the snakeskin print shirt.

It started with a conversation with the Strictly Come Dancing contestant Judge Rinder. Sawalha was chatting with him before he was due to appear on the show and Rinder had said he had worn the same outfit for almost all of his TV appearances, and nobody had ever noticed. Sawalha said that wouldn’t happen if he were a woman. To prove the point – and to get people talking about this double standard – Sawalha thought she would give it a try. “You do anything as a woman and everyone is going to be commenting on the way you look rather than what you’re saying.”

Her mother noticed she was wearing the same top on the second time she wore it. Then viewers started talking about it on the show’s Facebook page. “Why was I wearing it? Had we run out of a budget?” says Sawalha. “Even one of the stylists from another show texted our stylist to ask if I was being a diva and insisting on only wearing the one shirt.” She had planned to wear it for another three weeks, but viewers were getting annoyed so the experiment ended last week.

A stylist buys clothes for the presenter and there is a general rule that nothing is worn more than twice “because people start to notice”. When the show started in 1999, Sawalha just wore whatever she was wearing when she came to the studio, but as it became more successful, “then you’re supposed to look a certain way. When you’re on telly, you’re dressed in the way that most viewers would dress for a wedding.” Sometimes, she says, she finds that difficult because she doesn’t want to put across a highly groomed image that isn’t really reflective of who she is.

Loose Women, it has to be said, is hardly a hotbed of feminist views (there is the fairly regular fat shaming, and who can forget the poll it ran in 2015 which asked if rape was ever the woman’s fault?). Is it a bit hypocritical to make a feminist stand over this? “I think that we have four women every day who are hopefully very different. So there are women on the show who say, ‘I don’t want to be called a feminist’, but there are also women who would be very cross if they weren’t called a feminist.

I don’t want feminist to be a dirty word, I want my girls growing up to be proud feminists, but not everyone on the show would say that.”

It was, she says, about triggering a conversation. “Quite a lot of people on Twitter were saying, ‘I feel the pressure in my job to keep wearing something different’,” says Sawalha. What it showed her was how wearing the same thing every day freed up time and headspace for other stuff (the Mark Zuckerberg approach to getting dressed). “I felt so liberated, like you do at school when you’ve got a school uniform and you don’t have to think about it. I would really be happy to wear a uniform. Whether they would allow me, that’s a good question.” She says she’s going to raise it with her bosses. Her uniform, though, will probably not include snakeskin.