Harris, in a white suit, was dressing for history
U.S. vice-president-elect’s outfit wasn’t a fashion statement — it was a political statement
On Saturday night, when Kamala Harris stepped onto the stage and into history at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., as vice-president-elect of the United States, she did so in full recognition of the weight of the moment and in full acknowledgment of all who came before.
She is so many firsts: first woman to be vice-president, first woman of colour to be vice-president, first woman of Southeast Asian descent, first daughter of immigrants. She is the representation of so many promises finally fulfilled, so many hopes and dreams.
How do you begin to express that understanding, embody the city shining on a hill? For the next four years, that will be part of the job.
She said it — “while I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last” — and she signalled it, wearing something she had not worn in any of her moments of firsts since she joined Joe Biden as his No. 2 (or, indeed, in the months before when she was running for the Democratic nomination herself ): a white pantsuit with a white silk pussybow blouse. The two garments have been alternately fraught and celebrated symbols of women’s rights for decades, but have over the past four years taken on even more potency and power.
The white pantsuit: a nod to the struggle to break the final glass ceiling, stretching from the suffragists through Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and the women of Congress. A garment in a colour meant, as an early mission statement for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage published in 1913 read, to symbolize “the quality of our purpose.” Latterly redolent with frustration; now, finally, transformed into a beacon of achievement.
The pussy-bow blouse: the quintessential working woman’s uniform in the years when they began to flood into the professional sphere; the female version of the tie; the power accessory of Margaret Thatcher, the first female British prime minister. And then, suddenly, a potentially subversive double entendre in the hands of Melania Trump, who wore a pussy-bow blouse after her husband’s “grab ’em by the pussy” scandal.
Now, again, reclaimed. The point was not who made the clothes; it wasn’t about marketing a brand (though, on the subject of “building back better,” the suit was by Carolina Herrera, an American business). The point was that to wear those clothes — to make those choices — on a night when the world was watching, in a moment that would be frozen for all time, was not fashion. It was politics. It was for posterity.
And it was the beginning of what will be four years in which everything Harris does matters. Obviously, what she wears is only a small part of it. But in her firstness, in her ascent to the highest realms of power, she will become a model for what that means. How, as a woman, as a Black woman, you claim your seat at the highest table. Clothes are a part of that story. In some ways, they are how those at faraway tables connect to it.
As Dominique and François Gaulme wrote in the 2012 book “Power & Style: A World History of Politics and Style,” clothing, from its earliest origins, was developed “to communicate, even more clearly than in writing, the social organizations and distribution of political power.”
And when the person possessed of that power is a pioneer, when she is defining a new kind of leadership, understanding those lines of communication and how to employ them is key. Not because she is a woman, but because she will be the first female vice-president.
Hillary Clinton came to understand this, over a career in which at first she seemed to dismiss fashion and then, as first lady, to resent it, before finally embracing it as a useful tool.
It began when she joined Twitter in 2013 with a biographical note that included the descriptors “pantsuit aficionado” and “hair icon,” along with “FLOTUS,” and “SecState.” When she started her Instagram account in 2015, her first post was a photo of a clothing rail with an assortment of red, white and blue jackets and the caption “Hard choices.” During an Al Smith dinner before the 2016 election, she joked that she liked to refer to tuxedos as “formal pantsuits.” She weaponized her clothing as necessary.
This is an option of which Harris herself is well aware. She has embraced the political pantsuit tradition presaged in 1874 at the first National Convention of the Dress Reform League, when, as reported in the New York Times, one attendee declared: “This reform means trousers. They are freedom to us, and they afford us protection! Trousers are coming.” But she did not partake in the Crayola-coloured pantsuit tradition of the generation before: Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel.
Though Harris has been lauded for her love of Converse (and talked about her Chuck Taylors more than any other item of clothing) and for her Timberlands, when it comes to professional situations, she has usually favoured a uniform of dark colours — black, navy, burgundy, maroon, grey — with matching shell blouses, pumps and pearls. Those were the suits she wore at the Democratic National Convention and at the debates.
So her choice, this time, to finally join that tradition could not have been an accident. It was deliberate. Not to credit that is to give her less credit than she is due.