Obama had planned to wear a designer outfit that night, but her team advised her to wear J. Crew instead, because Leno was certain to ask what she was wearing. Obama took the suggestion, and sure enough, when Leno greeted her, he looked at her outfit and said, “I’m guessing about 60 grand?”

“Actually,” she was able to respond, “this is a J. Crew ensemble.”

In that moment, recalled New York Times fashion director and chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman, Obama had won the room, and recognized “how effective fashion could be as a form of outreach.”

“It really did set the tone for the next eight years,” continued Friedman, who shared the anecdote during the final event in the When Women Vote: A Zócalo/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County series, “Does Power Dressing Have the Power to Change Politics?”

The relationship between politics and fashion is a well-documented one, said Friedman, who moderated the panel. It’s also one, she continued, “that is becoming more important as social media takes over the world, and we increasingly communicate via image, which is the closest thing we have to a universal language.” Nevertheless, she said, kicking off the discussion, “A question I get all the time—often from readers who are not necessarily happy that I’m writing about fashion and politics—is: Why, why are you doing this?”

“I get those same complaints,” said fashion historian and author Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell. “Why are you making fashion political? Well, fashion has always been political. We can go back to the French revolution, and much further back, and look at examples of fashion making political statements,” she said. “Fashion is a tool of communication—whether we realize it or want it to be communicating for us or not. It is fun and it is frivolous, it is escapist, but it can also be very serious and very political.”

Abrima Erwiah, co-founder and president of Studio One Eight Nine, which promotes and curates African and African-inspired content and clothing, pointed out that if people don’t see a connection between power and fashion, then they aren’t looking at the way clothes are sourced, sewn, and sold. “I think about all the people that are impacted within the supply chain from the clothes we wear,” she said. The fashion industry intersects issues around climate change, migration, poverty, women’s right to work, and more.

The final panelist of the discussion, fashion designer Bibhu Mohapatra, said for him “getting into fashion was about being creative and saying something different with my craft.” Thinking about fashion and power, he wondered, “Why do we only talk about fashion or clothing to establish power or social standing?” It can signal so much more, he said.

Often, Friedman pointed out, when people talk about fashion, they focus on women and how their clothes can be used to diminish them. Is that a misconception? She cited Hillary Clinton, who after much resistance came to embrace fashion as a tool. “Suddenly, instead of being a weapon used against her,” said Friedman, it made her more accessible in a way she hadn’t been before. “In some ways,” she said, “I think, women have an advantage if they are willing to engage with it.”

Chrisman-Campbell agreed; women have a lot more options, however, she said, “they also have a lot more opportunities to get it wrong, unfortunately. They can’t retreat to the sober anonymity of a three-piece suit.”

“For a man to make a statement with his clothes he has to do something odd,” Chrisman-Campbell continued, whether that’s congressman Jim Jordan almost never wearing a suit jacket or Andrew Yang’s “Math” lapel pin.

But men’s diminished role when it comes to fashion and politics is not a global phenomenon. In Africa, Friedman pointed out, there’s more of a tradition of male politicians embracing the politics of fashion.

Erwiah agreed, citing President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana’s choices. “He goes out of his way to wear local designers or to wear traditional prints,” said Erwiah, because he understands how what he is seen wearing can impact the people and companies who create, manufacture, and sell the garments.

After talking about the Trump Administration and former First Lady Melania Trump, and the implications of her breaking the long-standing tradition of wearing U.S. designers, the conversation moved to the current administration. Speaking about Vice President Kamala Harris, Friedman said, “You can see how deliberately she chooses her moments,” whether it was the white trouser suit she wore for her victory speech—”it seemed truly a nod to both Mrs. Clinton, the suffragists, what has become an expected understanding of that style”—or her attire for the inauguration, designed by Christopher John Rogers and Sergio Hudson, two young Black Americans, in unmistakable purple, a color often symbolizing the unity of the two parties.

But her regular uniform, said Friedman, is often a dark pantsuit where “the clothes disappear and the focus becomes what her words are.” She posed the question to the panelists: Is that a pattern we’ll keep seeing?

“She’s being judged so harshly, in so many ways,” said Erwiah, “I’m assuming she wants to focus on the work and not have this be what people are looking at her for. But I believe as she moves into her role, we’ll see changes.”

“I think we will see something shift with our VP’s outfits,” agreed Mohaparta. “I’ve seen her wearing saris to celebrate Diwali, and I think she has it in her, and it will come out.”

The conversation moved to Harris’s first Vogue cover, from February 2021, which was criticized for leading with a more dressed-down photograph of Harris in a campaign trail outfit of a jacket, a white t-shirt, pearls, slacks and Converse Chuck Taylors—instead of the more formal shot taken of her in a power suit by the same photographer (Tyler Mitchell, who became the first Black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover in 2018) that her team initially thought would run.

Speaking to the backlash, Erwiah said, “One of the reasons people wanted to see her more done is because of the magnitude of that moment.”

“We don’t see Black women on the cover, we don’t see South Asian women on the cover,” Erwiah continued. “I know there’s been good reasons as to why it was a great cover but some of the feelings was like, we could have done that. Why couldn’t it be more?”

Questions poured in from audience members in the YouTube chatroom. One person wanted to know whether politicians will be able to dress more freely in the future.

“I hope so,” said Chrisman-Campbell, but she said it took until the 1990s for women to be allowed to wear pants in the Senate, and until 2017 for sleeveless dresses to be allowed in House of Representatives. “We are all very impatient for more change. But change has been a long time coming, and it’s only been in relatively recent times that we’ve seen this kind of change.”

Another audience member referred to Biden inaugural day poet Amanda Gorman, who was featured on the cover of TIME in a yellow Greta Constantine gown.

“I think she’s trying to tap into this moment, and I think she’s the future generation of this moment, and she has the power through her words to heighten this, and it’s interwoven into her clothes,” Erwiah said. “I loved the bright colors she’s wearing. I think it says something about our ability to shine through.”

A final questioner wanted to know if there was an outfit that could push policy change: “What can lawmakers wear to promote the minimum wage for all?”

“Making a conscious effort to wear brands where you can trace their supply chain and being conscious about which brands you choose,” said Erwiah. “As we said at the beginning,” she said, “people underestimate power of fashion and don’t give it enough credit considering its size and scale.”

It would be an incredible opportunity, Friedman agreed, if someone asked President Biden or Dr. Biden or Vice President Harris what they were wearing—and they responded with a breakdown of who made the dress and in what factory and what workers were paid to make it. “They could take this question, which is treated to be frivolous or demean them, and make a teachable moment.”

The post From Cleopatra to Clinton, Politics Is Never Out of Style appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But we didn’t anticipate that the act of bringing people together in person for smart, thought-provoking discussions wouldn’t even be possible for most of 2020.

Since 2003, we’ve hosted live events in Los Angeles and beyond. This year, Zócalo—thanks to staff, partners, collaborators, and Zoom—rapidly shifted to hosting our events online, at a time when we felt our audience needed it most. On March 20, 2020, we hosted our first virtual event—thinking and hoping that it would be a temporary state of affairs. Instead, the ongoing pandemic has led us to spend nine-plus months rethinking what makes Zócalo events special. And we’ve begun to see what might be accomplished when we bring people together in a virtual public square to which everyone in the world is invited.

We’re proud of the robust, civil audience chatrooms we’ve hosted, of the thoughtful speakers we brought to you (entirely free, as always), and of a new, Twitter-only live interview format we piloted. We put our heart and soul into all our events, but we do have our favorites—the ones that, this year, drew most deeply on imagination, art, and scholarship to address the toughest problems in our communities and our world.

Thinking back over 2020, it was difficult to choose just a few of our favorites to highlight. But these half-dozen Zócalo events (and the clips we’ve shared here) stood out to us.

How Are Native American Artists Envisioning the Future?

Our final in-person event of 2020 featured three Native American scholars and artists delving into the concept of “Indigenous Futurism”—as a counter to erasure, as a method of solving problems like climate change, and as a way of challenging the status quo. One of the evening’s most memorable moments was when Oglala Lakota artist Kite explained how we might create an ethical relationship with artificial intelligence through the lens of contemporary Lakota epistemologies.

What Can Poetry Offer Us in Distressing Times?

When you bring a group of poets together, the only guarantee is that you will get some unexpected insights into yourself and the larger world around you. That’s exactly what happened when we invited United States Poet Laureate emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera, poet and author Inez Tan, and Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Ríos to talk about what their art has to offer in very difficult moments like spring 2020. In this highlight clip Tan talked about asking her poetry students to consider the central emotion from which they write—in her case, that has meant embracing the power of writing from fear.

Why Don’t Women’s Votes Put More Women in Power?

To mark the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, we put together three events this year in partnership with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Titled When Women Vote, the series has investigated the past, present, and future of politics, power, and gender in L.A. and around the world. A powerhouse panel led this lively discussion on gender inequities in politics—which have become even more stark amid the pandemic. During it, Rosa “Rosie” Rios, the 43rd Treasurer of the United States, spoke passionately about why American women lag behind men in almost every major economic and political indicator, and the structural change that’s needed to close this gap.

Does a New Wave of Anti-Asian American Racism Require New Ways of Fighting Back?

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in incidents of anti-Asian American racism that began in early spring—and that was encouraged by President Trump and other politicians. What are the best ways—old and new—to combat this wave of violence? Zócalo and the Daniel K. Inouye Institute brought together scholars and leaders, including United States Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaiʻi, who spoke about how to channel outrage into action and change.

What Would Society Look Like Without Police?

Our final event of 2020 addressed one of the most urgent questions of the year: What should a new, equitable criminal justice system look like? Kicking off our The World We Want series in partnership with the University of Toronto, a panel of scholars compared their visions of a society without police—or rather, a society where the police have vastly different duties than they do in communities currently. University of Toronto Faculty of Social Work Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work dean Dexter Voisin, Harvard University professor of criminal justice Sandra Susan Smith, and Rachel Harmon, director of the Center for Criminal Justice at University of Virginia Law, offered several specific ideas for “de-tasking” the police and reassigning their work in areas from mental health to traffic enforcement.

The 10th Annual Zócalo Book Prize: How Do Oppressed People Build Community?

The Zócalo Book Prize event—where we honor the author of the best nonfiction book that explores community and social cohesion—is always an annual highlight for us. But this year’s lecture and interview with the winner, University of North Carolina historian William Sturkey, author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White, stood out for its urgent and timely exploration of how communities create social movements. Sturkey, in a fast-paced conversation with Yale University historian David W. Blight, wove the surprising story of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, from its founding in 1882 as a place of opportunity for whites and Blacks alike, to how it helped birth the Civil Rights Movement. Sturkey’s recounting of the first day of Freedom School—July 2, 1964, also the day Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act—was particularly inspiring to an audience that tuned in everywhere from Hattiesburg to Los Angeles, and across the Western Hemisphere.

The post Our Favorite Events of 2020 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.