The Political Language of Fashion

Clothes, accessories, and hairstyles have always conveyed more than a message of individual taste. They reflect social hierarchies of value, display individual and collective inclinations, reveal conscious or unconscious beliefs about identities, convey religious norms, social status, and personal experiences. However, in today’s political world, affected by a global pandemic, economic stagnation, progressive depletion of raw materials and a rise of far right, populist, and authoritarian movements, they acquire an ever-increasing political voice. As a matter of facts, fashion and politics are related and have always been so, despite the limited and only recent attention paid by scholars to their mutual influence. Not only do political choices impact garment production systems and buyers’ spending but they also respond to fashion trends. Indeed, fashion and style have always contained long-lasting messages outliving transient sartorial decisions and conveying a wider meaning than that implied by the wearer. They create a larger nonverbal discourse imbued with political significance: from Medieval, Renaissance and early Colonial sumptuary laws imposing restrictions on clothing, aimed at reinforcing social hierarchies, to modern customs duties on imports of textiles, from policies promoting sustainable cotton growth and recyclable clothing to fashion designers’ engagement in political debates discussing the expression of racial and ethnic diversity in style and, conversely, the fight against cultural appropriation and colonization of the fashion industry, from hippies’ experimentation with a natural and loose look as a form of protest against big corporations and restrictive societal norms to contemporary choices of wearing a pink pussy hat or a Covid-19 face protective mask to protest and/or align against Trumpian attitude and policies. The aim of this paper is to explore such discourse in the wake of recent academic interests in fashion as politics, and focus on political expressions, words, and turn of phrases inspired by fashion items, and coined or popularized (un)knowledgeably by politicians and especially US president incumbents, elects, and candidates.