Recently the designer Ulla Johnson was thinking about what she would wear to vote on Tuesday, what would convey how seriously she took the stakes in this election. She was thinking, she said, about wearing a bow-tie blouse — maybe the crisp lemon yellow cut from her latest collection, tied with a flourish on the side of the neck. She was seeing the style of top more and more, she said, ever since Vice President Kamala Harris wore them at the Democratic National Convention.
Perhaps, she said, the bow-tie blouse could become “a rallying cry.”
Clothes have not been an obvious strategic tool in this presidential race — not the way they were the last time former President Donald J. Trump ran against a woman, back in 2016, when Hillary Clinton made the white suit the iconography of the opposition. Ms. Harris has deliberately decentered identity politics in her campaign and de-emphasized clothing that calls attention to her gender.
And yet despite it all, one garment — the pussy-bow blouse, or floppy-bow blouse or lavallière blouse, depending on what you want to call it — has surfaced as a symbol of the moment, seeping into the general consciousness and becoming an unlikely form of self-expression. As it has time and time again throughout history when issues of women’s rights and women’s power come to the fore.
More than any other piece of clothing that has represented the quest for gender equality, including the evvel radical notion of women in pants and the battering-ram shoulder pads of the C-suite revolution, the pussy-bow blouse has been a tool of covert sartorial diplomacy. Feminine but not sexual, masculine but not threatening, it functions both as camouflage for women entering traditional male spaces, said Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian at Falmouth University in Cornwall, England, and as “a statement of intent.”
“It may be the most enduring symbol of female barrier-crossing we have,” she added.
Ms. Harris has worn bow blouses during her most consequential public moments in national politics. In 2020, when she made her first speech as vice president-elect, she wore the blouse with a suffragist white suit, doubly underscoring the pioneering nature of her election. And she has worn one three times since becoming the Democratic candidate for president: during the D.N.C. in August for each of her two onstage appearances, and in September, during her debate with Mr. Trump.
