The Politics of Fashion: How What We Wear Shapes the World
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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media. I'm your host, Stacey Abrams. Growing up in southern Mississippi, I didn't really pay too much attention to fashion. We shared basically the only mall with the city next door, and the big chains hadn't quite discovered the Gulfport-Biloxi corridor. But my older sister was an aficionado of the magazines and the looks they covered from New York, London, Milan, Paris. So I learned a bit by osmosis. My tutelage was accelerated when I went to Spelman College, started watching Project Runway, and then when I ran for public office. What I wore became as much a topic of conversation sometimes as the legislation I voted on. The intersection of fashion and politics can seem strange, but they are closely aligned.
So clothes aren't just functional. In the right combination of circumstances, they are transformative. What we wear is a form of self-expression, a way to share who we are without saying a word. Choosing between a dress and a pair of slacks, a solid or a vibrant pattern, these are languages all their own. They can speak to confidence, ambition, and even power. Fashion can also be a form of political speech, literally. At the 2021 Met Gala, AOC made headlines in a white satin dress with quote, tax the rich, spray painted in bold red letters, garnering both praise and criticism. In 2019, Lena Waithe and designer Kirby Jean-Ramond wore matching suits emblazoned with, quote, Black Drag Queen's Invented Camp and, quote, Fix Your Credit, Pull Money, Buy Back the Block.
Singer Joy Villa arrived in a red, white, and blue gown that read, quote, Trump 2020 in stark white text. And in every case, the world noticed. But political resistance in fashion has the capacity to be subtle yet unmistakable. Beyond slogans and statements throughout history, clothing has been a quiet yet powerful tool of defiance, a way to challenge norms, assert identity, and reclaim power. We refer to them in The Ten Steps as disrupt and deny. The suffragettes dressed to reflect the Edwardian feminine ideal, purple for dignity, white for purity, and green for hope. Those colors became synonymous with their movement. My boss, former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, the first Black woman to lead a major city, wore a flower every day of her administration, a nod to a constituent and to a promise of a new day.
In the 1970s, the Black Panthers adopted berets as part of their uniform, a symbol of unity and power. And in 2016, Beyoncé and her backup dancers pay homage to that legacy, wearing black berets during the Super Bowl halftime show.
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