5 Symbolic Protest Fashions

Jun 29

Jun 29 5 Symbolic Protest Fashions

When I was in sixth grade, I was Big Bird for Halloween. As the oldest children of the elementary school, us sixth graders strove for excellence in our costumes. After extensive online research, I found a cute pink and yellow dress, headband, and leg warmers that would serve as a perfect costume. As it turns out, it was 2012, and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were in the middle of a presidential campaign. Soon after my costume decision, Mitt Romney threatened to cut public funding for shows like Sesame Street, and my deeply thought out costume turned into a political statement overnight, without my knowledge. 11-year-old me showed up to school that day, and everyone thought I was a political genius. It was by far the most compliments I ever received for a costume. I unwittingly had led my own mini protest by putting on that fluffy yellow dress Halloween morning.

Throughout history, clothing has served as a personal statement, an outside symbol for the world to judge you on. Clothing has also served as a symbol of political and social movements. The fashion choices people have made at historical protests have put some items down in history as having a second meaning. This is a look at five of some of the most symbolic, aesthetic choices made in history.

The Suffragettes

The Suffragettes were some of the first to use fashion to aid their political and social movement, but they did so through conformity. Rather than go against classic feminine fashion of the time, they strove to dress as elegantly as possible. They specifically dressed up for protests and the media. In turn, their membership grew, and it even became fashionable to be part of the movement for the right to vote. Part of their fashion was their color scheme of purple, white, and green, each color signifying a value of the movement. Women could identify with the movement simply by wearing an item following the color scheme. The suffragettes also sold fashionable items of clothing such as hats or handbags with their colors on them.

Anti-War Armbands

In 1965, the United States was in the middle of the Vietnam War, and many protesters took the streets for the anti-war movement. The peace sign, which was created in 1958 in London for a nuclear disarmament movement, was repurposed in the Vietnam protests. A group of students put on a black arm band, generally a sign of mourning, with a peace sign on it and wore it on their arms to school as a symbol of the anti-war movement. The school had already banned this protest, and the leading students were suspended. Their case was taken on by the ACLU and ended up in the Supreme Court in Tinker vs. Des Moines. Ultimately, the students won on the grounds of free speech.

1968 Miss America Protests

In 1968, in the midst of the second wave of the Feminist Movement, a group of women identified the Miss America pageant as a protest target due to their beliefs that the pageant had long objectified women. One of the main pieces of the pageant that they grounded their protest in was the swimsuit portion of the show. The women organizing the protest released a document stating the ten reasons why they were protesting. One of the most historical parts of the protest was women shedding their bras and other feminine beauty products, such as nails and fake eyelashes, into the Freedom Trash Can in order to symbolize their rebuke of societal standards of feminism. This protest is also where the legendary myth of “bra-burners” came from, though this fact is actually false. None of the women at the protest burned bras that day, as officials asked the women not to since they were protesting on a flammable boardwalk. 51 years later, in 2019, the swimsuit portion of the Miss America pageant was removed.

The Berets

The black beret has historically been associated with the Black Panthers, but recently has been making a comeback with the Black Lives Matter movement. At the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show, Beyoncé’s outfit modeled that of the leather often worn by members of the Black Panthers and her backup singers wore Blank Panther berets in honor of the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2017, Maria Grazia Chiuri began running the house of Christian Dior, and, in the finale of her spring/summer debut show, the models wore black berets like those of the Black Panthers.

The Women’s March
After Donald Trump was inaugurated, people took to the streets to protest the President’s mistreatment of and demeaning language about women. Many protesters wore pink pussy hats, an iconic symbol of the protest, specifically responding to Trump’s comments on the Access Hollywood tape. Though marked in history as a symbol of that protest, there was later controversy over the pink hats as some people felt they only symbolized those who are biologically female and not all people that identify as women. Trump’s comments were specifically directed at those who are biologically female, but the challenges that face women and the issues the protest was standing for were not necessarily specific to those who are biologically female. The hat continues to be a symbol of the protest and a rebuke of Trump’s insulting comments.

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