DRESS TO PROTEST
I don’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
