As sets out this week to earn the , armed with major endorsements right out of the gate, she should take a moment to reconsider the role of on the campaign trail. Despite a few fashion hits for notable occasions — including the purple Christopher John Rogers dress she wore at the 2020 inauguration — Harris’s current day-to-day image as number 2 on the nuclear football list has been crafted carefully to fade into the background. She plays it safe with neutral pantsuits: navy, black, grey, camel, the occasional powder blue or pop of suffragette white.
Accessible, professional and deliberately forgettable, it’s a look she has honed since her prosecutor days. It is a truism that women in politics can’t win, fashionwise: they can’t be too sexy, or too dowdy, or too frivolous, or too much of a spendthrift. (In 2008, Sarah Palin was lambasted for on her campaign wardrobe.
) First Ladies have more sartorial freedom: cast as more ornamental figures, they have latitude to be more feminine, or, in the case of Jackie Kennedy and Melania Trump, to embrace high fashion as a point of national pride. Harris has a more complicated path to walk. But it’s a history-making one: she’s poised to be the second-ever female candidate for U.
S. president — and the first Black and South Asian woman to make this run for the roses. This unprecedented moment is the perfect time for Harris to step up her fashion game — to choose bolder colours, to support emerging BIPOC designers, to add .