Wear your heart on your sleeve: the power of protest dressing

From the Jacobean Court’s rebellious yellow ruffs to Kamala Harris’ victorious white trouser suit, the novelist Lucy Jago reflects on the many moments in history when fashion has sent a message more powerful than words

Idon’t miss much from the Trump presidency, but I wonder what will happen to protest chic? The former leader’s ‘locker-room’ politics sparked a new wave of pushback at which women excel: dressing to express dissent.

The very day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, an estimated seven million joined Women’s Marches across the world, many wearing pink hats with cat ears to protest against his misogynist comments about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’. And when Kamala Harris strode on stage as the first Black and South Asian Vice President-elect at the end of 2020, she donned a white Carolina Herrera trouser suit that broadcast a message of hope and emancipation. She was following an august line of Democrat women who also wore white suits at symbolic moments: they include Hillary Clinton when she accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as she became the youngest woman to enter Congress; and female lawmakers attending the State of the Union address in 2020 honouring the movement that led to many (but not all) American women being given the vote in 1920. Harris was also paying sartorial tribute to Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to be elected to Congress, who was in white on that night of her historic victory in 1968. White has been charged with political symbolism ever since the British Women’s Social and Political Union chose it to be the dominant colour of the suffragette movement in 1908, along with purple (for dignity) and green (for hope) ‘where other colour is necessary’. Impactful in the black and white news photos of the day, it became a visual statement of collective action and female solidarity. ‘I stand on their shoulders,’ Harris said in her speech of those who paved the way to greater equality.

There is a long history of women co-opting their clothes to say things that would have had them shouted down if spoken aloud. Elizabeth I, attacked in military and propaganda campaigns throughout her sovereignty, meticulously manipulated her image to legitimise her reign to those who thought her unfit to rule, both as a woman and as a Protestant. She was often seen in black and white in her portraits, a colour scheme that became part of her cult, to denote chastity. The ‘Virgin Queen’, her face haloed by spectacular lace ruffs, used the symbolism of purity as a political manoeuvre, to raise her governance above reproach, reminding all that it was ‘God-given’. Using developments in printing, she circulated her portraits far and wide, knowing that they proclaimed what was too complicated and divisive to say in words. Aware of being ‘in the sight and view of the world’, she very deliberately crafted a positive image of female power. But she did not make it easy for other women to follow suit.

When her successor James I ascended the throne of England in 1603, one of his first acts was to repeal the sumptuary laws that defined what a person could wear according to their social position. Suddenly women could shape their identities with greater freedom, fuelled by the growing appetite for news that saw printed broadsheets and scurrilous gossip posted on church doors and tavern walls, illustrated with woodcuts of contemporary ‘celebrities’ such as Moll Cutpurse, who dressed as a man and carried a sword in order to avail herself of the freedoms denied to women.

At court, some men did the opposite – arraying themselves like peacocks to attract the King’s favour – while female courtiers cut their hair short or wore bodices that looked like men’s doublets, to symbolise their desire for power, at least over their own lives. As one (male) observer wailed: ‘How therefore have men and women changed their sex, one with another? Men wearing long hair like a woman and women cutting their hair like boys, wearing nothing thereon but hats… monstrous, monstrous!’

The word ‘fashion’ itself began to change meaning from ‘to shape’, to its current sense of exhibiting the latest style. Into this appearance-obsessed court came Anne Turner with a patent for a new coloured starch to stiffen and dye the period’s extraordinary ruffs and cuffs. Her invention, brilliantly displayed on her beautiful friend Frances Howard, the Countess of Essex, took the court by storm. Out went blue and ‘goose-turd’ green, in came a hue more flattering and symbolically charged: saffron yellow. Long associated with Judas and betrayal in Christian iconography, the shade was linked in the Jacobean period to a more threatening notion – rebellion. The crocus stigmas used to make the dye were grown in Spain, England’s traditional enemy, and imported into Ireland, whose rebellious subjects were a thorn in the sides of many English monarchs. The Irish used saffron (or urine, if the spice was too expensive) to dye their mantles – a very practical form of cloak that was worn by women, as well as men, of all classes. So the cloak and the colour took on the ideology of equality, between sexes, classes and nations – and wearing it was a radical act.

Howard adopted the fashion as silent protest against her marriage, arranged for the advantage of her family, to a cruel young man who hated her and was unable to consummate the union. She and Anne Turner battled the forces that robbed them of a voice and a future, eventually poisoning a man who threatened to ruin them. Even after Anne and Frances’ spectacular downfall, during which Anne was accused of for too great a love of fashion (vanity being a gateway sin to all others, including witchcraft, pimping, adultery, popery, poisoning and murder, for

all of which she was also villified), their Queen still refused to take off her saffron-coloured ruffs and cuffs. Clearly, they meant more to her than merely a flattering frame for her face. The fashion Anne Turner introduced had become the white trouser suit of its day, despite being widely denounced by those who feared the defiance it embodied.

The following century, the possibility of direct female participation in politics was advanced by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, a celebrated society hostess. Georgiana supported Whig causes, including anti-slavery and constitutional liberal democracy as established in the newly independent United States of America. To endorse the party and its leader, Charles Fox, she startled Georgian society by attending hustings in 1784 dressed from head to toe in buff and blue, the colours of the American Revolution, with fox tails dripping from the enormous picture hats she made fashionable. Georgiana’s political and sartorial support saved Fox’s seat and, just before her death, helped return the Whig Party to power after two decades in opposition.

Across the Channel, women were also protesting with their hats. The unisex red ‘liberty cap’, associated with freedom – from slavery, from tyranny – since Ancient Greek times, was worn during the revolution in France to show allegiance to the 1789 declaration of liberty, equality, the inviolability of property and the right to resist oppression. During the 12-month Reign of Terror (1793–1794), when up to 30,000 people died in prison or were executed, suspected of being ‘enemies of the Revolution’, it was worn by anyone hoping to avoid the guillotine. The caps were often knitted by the infamous tricoteuses, whose needles flashed as the ‘national razor’ fell. Marianne, the personification of France, still sports it.

The young aristocrats who survived the bloodbath emerged in 1795, wearing a wholly new, macabre style. Calling themselves Incroyables et Merveilleuses (‘Unbelievable and Wonderful’), they could be seen at the Bals des Victimes, the most exclusive soirées of the time, where invitation was reserved for those whose close relatives had been executed. The women sported red chokers, symbolic of the cut made by the guillotine, and clinging white dresses reminiscent of the undershirts their relatives wore to their deaths, often topped with a red shawl, referencing the one Charlotte Corday wore as she went to her death for the murder of the Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat. This bizarre fashion moment was a way for survivors to protest against the extreme cruelty of the Terror and perhaps allowed them to express the trauma of belonging to the same society that guillotined their families.

In our modern era of widespread literacy, protests often take a more overt approach. ‘The moment I shook Thatcher’s hand, I opened my jacket so the writing would be completely legible to the photographers,’ said Katharine Hamnett of her meeting with

Margaret Thatcher in 1984, when she wore her ‘58% Don’t Want Pershing’ T-shirt. ‘That T-shirt gave me a voice.’ Hamnett was the first to transform the humble garment into a political megaphone, and since then, they’ve become ubiquitous walking billboards. There have been T-shirts for or against almost everything from nuclear disarmament to Brexit. London Fashion Week 2019 opened with a Justice 4 Grenfell event in which 72 people stood in silence wearing T-shirts asking, ‘72 dead and still no arrests? How come?’

Women tread a complex path to harness their visibility, as can be seen at the 2018 Golden Globe Awards to which many nominees wore black dresses to highlight the sexual assault, harassment and inequality many women experience in the workplace. Their actions subverted the question most commonly asked of actresses, ‘Who are you wearing?’, but it still required an interest in their appearance to create an effective conversation around Time’s Up.

Or take Lorde’s Valentino dress at the Grammy Awards in the same year. The singer wore a scrap of white card roughly sewn onto the back of her bodice, with a handwritten quotation from the neo-conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, whose work addresses the ‘urgent necessity of social change’. ‘The old and corrupt must be laid to waste before the just can triumph…’ This was Lorde’s homage to the Time’s Up campaign, and perhaps also a response to reports that she was not invited to perform solo at the event even though the other Album of the Year nominees (all male) were. She was heard, despite not singing.

And those who are invited to sing, like Beyoncé, in front of the 115 million viewers of the 2016 Super Bowl 50 halftime show, can use their wardrobe to provoke debate. Atop their Afros, her dancers wore berets, a unisex icon of revolution. Popularised during the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and by Che Guevara in Cuba, the beret was subsequently adopted by America’s Black Panther Party in their struggle against police brutality. Malcolm X, celebrated and feared for his pursuit of racial justice, was also invoked, as the dancers formed the letter he adopted to symbolise his rejection of a surname imposed by slave-owners. ‘I’m proud to be part of a conversation that is pushing things forward in a positive way,’ Beyoncé said later of her performance.

Trump’s departure means one fewer target for protest fashion, but it will remain a powerful tool of dissent for us all, to fight for those who aren’t heard, a canvas on which to sew, knit or embroider the protests of the future.

‘A Net for Small Fishes’ by Lucy Jago (£16.99, Bloomsbury) is published on 4 February.

Women sported red chokers, symbolic of the cut made by the guillotine