When Kamala Harris took the stage nearly a week ago on Saturday night to give her acceptance speech, she acknowledged the full weight of the historical moment. “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she said. She was also wearing a white pantsuit.
To speak seriously about pantsuits is to open oneself up for criticism. But politicians are in the business of symbols, one of their most important sets of tools in getting elected, staying elected, and making meaningful change for the people they represent. Symbols make a point, humanize, and galvanize. And clothing—perhaps more than ever in the style-over-substance Trump era—is a symbol that politicians employ every day, whether they choose to or not.
In 2020, for a woman in office, there is nothing more self-consciously symbolic than a white pantsuit. It has meaning because the people wearing it have given it meaning; namely, that it’s a nod to suffragettes who claimed white as one of three colors to represent them. Geraldine Ferraro wore a white pantsuit to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for vice president in 1984. Hillary Clinton, who went from bristling at all the talk around her wardrobe in her early career to embracing it, echoed Ferraro when she wore her own white pantsuit to accept her nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, among other meaningful moments. In 2019, after Clinton’s loss and a 2018 midterm election that brought a record number of women into Congress, Democratic congresswomen wore matching white suits to the State of the Union address. Harris saw their groundbreaking nominations, and their suits, and raised them a general election victory and a pussy bow, also in ivory.
But the pantsuit has proven to be multi-partisan tool. Ivanka and the rest of the Trump women wore them often. The pantsuit offered them a sheen of competence and of familiarity. Wearing one to her father’s inauguration, Ivanka, an appointee with no public sector experience, at least appeared to be competent, or a moderating force—someone who could lobby for female interests to her father, the pussy grabber. She—and her half-sister Tiffany, who also wore a white dress that emulated a double breasted suit—showed us that the white pantsuit, and pantsuits generally, can fit any old ideology, even the absence of one. (Though, I suppose Ivanka was her own historic first: the first daughter of a president to also be his political advisor.)
And then, of course, there was Melania, who wore a sleek white pantsuit to the State of the Union in 2018, around the same time it was revealed that Trump had paid off former mistress and porn star Stormy Daniels. There was a lot there, plenty for observers to map rhymes and reasons onto the choice. But according to Melania herself, as told by her then advisor Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, there was no thought besides the fact that she looked good. The point of view from Melania, as ever, is, if it looks good, do it.
So what do we do with the white pantsuit, a symbol stretched over so many? A small but significant part of the relief of watching Harris’s speech last Saturday came with seeing it deployed by someone who likely has a firmer grasp of its iconography. It’s a signal that she knows and cares about history, and about reality and about her predecessors. One of a million tiny symbols that logic and meaning are regaining control.
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