Kamala Harris and the Politics of Style

0:00Hi, it's Imran. While I'm taking some holiday, we'll be sharing some new episodes of The Debrief. Hosted by my colleagues Sheena Butler-Young and Brian Baskin, The Debrief goes deep inside our most popular BOF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. Beginning in September, a new episode of The Debrief will come out every Tuesday here on this feed, as well as The Debrief's own dedicated feed. So subscribe now if you haven't already. We'll be back to regularly scheduled programming of the BOF podcast on Friday, September 6th.

0:44Hello, and welcome to The Debrief from the Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular BOF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm Executive Editor Brian Baskin. Please welcome the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President of the United States of America, Kamala Harris.

1:10Kamala Harris made history as the first female, Black, and South Asian vice president of the United States. Since she replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket a little over a month ago, she has leapfrogged Donald Trump in the polls and become a full-fledged cultural icon. Inevitably, that has led to intense scrutiny of her policy stances, her choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz as Vice President, and of course, her appearance. Today, I'm joined by Sheena Butler-Young, Senior Correspondent, and Yola Mzizi, Editorial Apprentice at BOF, to discuss how Harris's beauty and fashion choices are being interpreted by different audiences across the political spectrum, and what that means for the future of political style.

1:53Hello, Sheena, and hello, Yola. Welcome to the Debrief Podcast. Hi, Ryan. Hi, Ryan. Thanks for having us. Sheena, let's start with you. You recently wrote an article with the headline, Why Kamala Harris Isn't Making Bold Fashioned Choices Yet. To pull back the curtain a bit, the origin of that piece was that we were discussing in our newsroom before the DNC, what sort of discourse there'd been around her style. And we basically came to the conclusion that there really wasn't much of one, or at least the conversation hadn't been as fraught as it had been when there was discourse around the style of Hillary Clinton or AOC or any number of other female politicians when they hit the national stage.

2:38And you had this great observation about what was really going on here that led to this story. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, sure. So I remember a few things from that conversation. So one of my takes was no one truly opts out of signaling something with how they present themselves. So I remember studying Mass Comm in college and we do these like nonverbal communications classes and there's like this stat that gets repeated over and over, which is upwards of 90 % of communication is nonverbal, right? How you present yourself, your cadence, when you do speak your body language, posture, all of those things communicate so much before you even open your mouth.

3:16So that was one of the premises of this article that she is communicating something, even if it's not remarkable as fashion people have called it not remarkable so much so that it resists remarking on, which is sort of what we were discussing in that meeting. And the second part of it is that as the first Black and South Asian woman vice president, and then the first Black and South Asian woman at the top of the Democratic ticket, how Kamala presents herself, the expectations around it actually have powerful implications for women in politics and broadly in the future. And I think it's also a powerful proxy in terms of where we are now as a country.

3:55So those were kind of the big themes driving the article that we eventually did. Now, Sheena, let's delve into her style. What is it about her wardrobe that is capturing attention or more precisely hasn't caught people's attention? Well, I think the sentiment in fashion and beyond is she's dressing within the political standards, right? The suits, the pantsuits specifically, the color schemes being black and gray and navy blue or just blues in an occasional pastel, a pump as the shoe, an occasional converse, pearls. Those are very much in line with how politicians dress. I think it signals for her and for most other politicians things like consistency, reliability, trustworthiness not fussy not sloppy polished also not being so preoccupied with fashion or your style or not distracting from the message by being over the top so she's doing sort of all of those things I think what's interesting is the more broadly the standards of political dressing haven't budged much but they have budged ever so slightly for men so you look at her running mate Tim Walz and his ability to sort of play around with style, those well-worn red wing boots, the camouflage hats, you know, that they actually, rather than being distracting, they actually endear some voters to him.

5:21He gets to signal his Midwestern aesthetic, speak to hunters, all of those interesting things. Kamala, for all intents and purposes, doesn't seem to have the license to do that. She seems to be expected to stay within those political boundaries. And they're playing different roles in the campaign, too. Kamala is trying to prove to the American people that she can be a steady hand running the country. And her vice president is playing some role in that. But I think he's ultimately there. His image, I think, is perhaps more important to this particular campaign than hers, almost. I think the way you put it, that her wardrobe is not distracting is really apt.

6:00It seems to me she's found this sweet spot where there's style there, but it's not in a let's dissect every little detail way. I've definitely seen articles that do that with each pantsuit and jewelry that she wears. and you know there's people who want that but I think the average viewer is clocking that she's conveying power she's conveying joy and then they move on and listen to what she says. I think that's spot on something interesting as it relates to Tim Walz and his image is around this idea that I've heard political pundits but also thought leaders mentioned which is the need for Harris to temper herself right as the first black South Asian woman she represents a lot of things and Tim Walz is seen as an ability to sort of offset or temper that but we'll get into that a little bit later.

6:44We're recording this pretty soon after the Democratic National Convention. Did anything about the way that she presented herself on the big stage change what you wrote about in your piece? The short answer is no. She wore a custom Chloe dark navy blue pantsuit, consistent with all the trends we've seen before. I heard someone refer to it as like working class blue. Obviously, Democratic, blue is the color, but they use that phrase, a political commentator. I think that's interesting. It's consistent, but it's interesting because I think she wanted to perhaps send a message that she's ready to work.

7:26But also one of the criticisms of her has been, or one of the desires people have for her is to speak a little bit more about policy and economic policy. So I think working class blue and economy, those were some pretty interesting signals, but still consistent with what she's done all along. And it's worth noting she's on the fastest track towards a presidential campaign that we've seen. So I think it would be probably unwise to change course and image at this point. I don't think anyone expected her to do that at the DNC when she was accepting the nomination. But on the other hand, we have seen moments of sort of levity being injected into Harris's wardrobe.

8:06The first suit that she wore, I believe it was on the first day of the DNC, she was wearing sort of a tan suit. and we know sort of like the cultural connotations and like the connotations of a tan suit in US politics. So that just felt like she was just trolling everybody. But at the same time, that Chloe suit, the shade, if you go on their website, it's actually coconut brown, which is a very fun nod to the adage that has been memed to death where she says, You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. So even though Harris herself, her personal style may not scream, I'm having the most fun.

8:52And it basically whispers, it's time to get to work. Her campaign and the merch and sort of the fashion around it has been sort of injected with a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of fun. But a lot of that has been sort of grassroots, like bottom up. We saw this with like the brat green and we saw this with the camo hat. Anything that feels top down where through her candidacy, she's telling the public, hey, I am a fun person would seem a bit inauthentic considering that she wears pantsuits all the time. So finding her own way of sort of nodding to like the broad supporter base that has really energized around her and all of this conversation around her in her own way through her pantsuits and the color of coconut brown.

9:34I thought that was that was quite smart. That's a great point. I mean, her merch is so fun and even fashionable in some cases. But it is hard, at least at this point, to imagine her wearing one of those t-shirts at a rally, let's say. And Shina, your article actually got into this a little bit about why maybe it isn't the right move for her in particular to be dressing like that. Yeah, I think it's a loaded aspect of the conversation. Who has license to do what? I love what one of the sources, Dr. DeGregory, who is the director of the Women and Girls Institute at Bethune, said about this. There's been a lot of conversation about whether Kamala is being too palatable, whether she is not moving the needle or pushing the envelope a lot or enough.

10:27And DeGregory talked about this idea of what do we mean by palatable, right? Politics is the, to use her words, the public's palette. And so a lot of how Kamala presents herself or how she's scrutinized tells us a little less about her and a lot more about us and what as a collective we have an appetite for. Right. So if Kamala were to push the envelope and if as we wanted to, let's say she's speaking to her her black supporter base, are we asking her to wear box braids in her hair? If she wants to speak more to the South Asian community, are we asking her to don a sari? And what the bottom line is, as to Gregory and a lot of sources put it, is that she probably doesn't have the license to do that without consequences.

11:14Right. When she dresses a certain way or if she does a certain thing with her style, she's really asking us as a collective to confront our own biases, to explicitly vote for a Black woman, to explicitly vote for a South Asian woman, to explicitly vote for a woman. It's something that Michelle Obama broached, who is not in politics in terms of running for office, but obviously was a first lady. She would not, we'll probably get into this a little bit more later, as Yola's article got into the hair part of it, but she would not wear braids. She actually resisted the urge for eight years to braid her hair and kept that sort of sleek, blown out Bob look because she felt like it would force Americans to confront the fact that they were dealing with a black first family, which she thought they weren't fully able to accept.

12:01So in the case of Kamala, she's kind of contending with all of that. And it's an interesting, I think it's an interesting testament to where we are as a country and less about her. And by the way, I think it's worth noting that we don't know if this is how Kamala just likes to dress, right? She's a lawyer by profession. She may truly appreciate that light feminine makeup, that hairdo, the pearls, that nod to her sorority, and then the pantsuits. Like we can't assume she's every morning resisting the urge to, you know, wear an Afro. She may not. That's a good segue into the yet part of your headline.

12:40The headline was why Kamala Harris isn't making bold fashion choices yet. And I think everything you said is true, but at the same time, a prominent politician and certainly the president has the power to move the conversation in the direction that they want, not unlimited power, but to an extent. I think one example, one of my favorite details from your story was about Hillary Clinton and where these pantsuits in politics came from in the first place, which is she started wearing them in the, I want to say the nineties, maybe earlier. And there was endless, very tedious conversation and critiquing of that style choice, which at the time was a bit of an outlier for female politicians.

13:25And she basically, I forget how you put it in the story, but she, she basically bored or browbeat everyone into submission by just wearing pantsuits day in, day out for 30 years. And now it's considered so normal that we're describing Kamala Harris wearing the exact same wardrobe piece as as unremarkable. So I guess my question is, let's say she wins the election, you know, by a healthy margin. She's very popular at the start of her presidency, at least. Could she perhaps nudge political dressing in a new direction? There's a couple opportunities there. For that story, I was interviewing Deja Fox.

14:04She was one of my sources. She was the youngest person to work on, I think, maybe a political campaign ever, but that might not be it. But at least the youngest person on the Harris 2020 campaign run. And she talked about this idea. And I think there might be a viral voice snippet of Harris talking about leaving the door open. Sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won't. And then you need to kick that door down. And so that her being the kind of person, this is Deja's experience working with her in that 2020 campaign and then continuing to be a supporter today is that Harris fashions herself, pardon the pun, as someone who wants to leave the door open.

14:45And so one way that Deja thinks she might do that is in supporting black and minority designers. And so we've seen her do a little bit of that already, or maybe a lot of that already, quite frankly. She wore Sergio Hudson. She wore Christopher John Rogers, Pyre Moss by Kirby during the inauguration festivities for Joe Biden four years ago. So she shows a propensity to support some emerging designers and designers of color. So that's one opportunity to sort of broaden the aperture of who gets to dress a president or a first family. So that's one opportunity that I think she'll have more leeway to do when she's empowered right now.

15:22I think she's constrained, again, without assuming anything about how she would want to dress. But I think she's constrained by this idea of having to cater to this broad collective public palette right now. But that's one opportunity. And I think another one, which DeGregory mentioned in my story, is maybe giving some nods to her maternal family in India and kind of sending some messages around that, that I think could make some of these underrepresented groups feel more represented on a national political stage. So that could be those could be some interesting ways she could could do that and also maybe speak to some younger generations as well.

15:59Although to circle back to one of your earlier points, it is ultimately her choice. And I think that does represent progress. I'm not sure it would have necessarily been up to her to the same degree 10, 20 years ago. One area where she has actually sparked a conversation is with her hair. Yola, your piece, the headline was, How Kamala Harris's Signature Tresses Became a Gen Z Hit. And in a way, it's almost diametrically opposed to everything Sheena wrote. She's actually had a pretty substantial influence in some style choices she's made, are considered both, I'm not sure if groundbreaking is the word, but they've definitely gone viral and influenced how people are thinking about their own hair.

16:43Can you talk more about your story? So as we mentioned at the top of this conversation, Harris has dominated the cultural conversation since she's taken over the Democratic ticket from President Joe Biden. That's no secret. But the conversation around her hair actually goes much deeper and has been going on for, I believe, as long as she's been in politics. There's been many a Reddit thread, a Black Twitter discourse about how is it that Kamala Harris keeps her silk press so fresh? So a silk press is a temporary way of straightening curly and coily hair using cheeks. It's a centuries-old way of straightening hair, and it's been around for generations upon generations.

17:22Most people associate it with just the hair that they have to have for Easter Sunday or the style that their grandmothers would have. So it's very interesting that Gen Z is like taking this up. And the conversation around her hair, because it is a temporary way of straightening the hair. So it lasts for about a week because it uses heat. So if you are in a very humid environment or if you sweat or if you take a shower, the straight hair reverts to its natural texture. So for Kamala Harris, who wears this as sort of like her signature, it requires a lot of maintenance. So she's probably in and out of that salon chair every week or she's doing it herself at home.

17:59And the conversation has always been, how does she keep it so fresh and like buoyant and bouncy? It reached a fever pitch when she did this sort of like run of the mill interview with Kiki Palmer. And they were talking about black maternal health. And there was an aside in this interview where Kiki Palmer had to ask her, how many times a month do you get a silk press? So, you know, I don't use a curling iron. It's too much heat. I use a round brush. Now what kind of magical round brush? I mean, your hair must be super... And what I found quite interesting is that she actually indulged in this question and went into detail about how she gets her hair done and how she achieves those curls.

18:41It takes a while, a boar bristle or, you know, but it takes a lot of heat, but it's just too much heat to do that and do. Girl, you have a ship on the internet. And since then, the interview has taken a life of its own. On TikTok, mostly young, Black, Gen Z women are replicating Harris's style, heeding her instructions in what they have dubbed the Kamala Harris Silk Press, and some are calling it the presidential silk press. Wow. I love that. You alluded to this earlier, but it sounds like there's more to this and more history here than with some other style choices we've seen. I'm thinking of, you know, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema wore a purple wig in the Senate a few years ago.

19:24You've got John Fetterman with his hoodies. I understand that the conversation around the press is perhaps a little more fraught and goes back a little further. Yeah. So what we need to understand about Sinema and Fetterman's sort of style and beauty choices is that they seem to be actively pushing against the grain of what is expected from politicians. They are shaking the system up through their looks and changing the way that we think about what is considered a professional person or what we look for in a politician. The Silk Press is not doing any of that. The Silk Press is sort of like the epitome of assimilation and being middle of the road.

20:03And to understand that, we need to go back to the history. It all exists in the context, as you would say. So the Silk Press is actually born off of the need for survival for Black Americans. So as they were moving out of the Jim Crow South, fearing racism, terrorism, and also very limited socio and economic opportunities, a lot of Black people moved to northern cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago and settled there. Not to say these cities were any better in terms of racism, because racism is still alive and well today, but they were able to enter into predominantly white workforces in droves, which was not necessarily possible through Jim Crow laws in the South.

20:44So even though this was happening, the standard of what is considered a professional person still was the picture of whiteness. So you saw a lot of black people straightening their hair and sometimes even lightening and bleaching their skin in order to gain employment and to advance their careers. So it's a way to survive. So the Silk Press is seen as a way to sort of assimilate, to not shake things up, not ruffle any feathers. And we can see those with Harris's stance on policy and politics as well. And you saw quite centrist as a candidate. She's not there to burn things down and be radical.

21:20She's there to maintain the status quo and keep the establishment moving. That's so interesting because as you point out in the story, the politics and the general thinking around Black hair has evolved so rapidly. And as you said, in the other direction from what Harris is going for here, can you talk a bit about the Crown Act and what that signifies in this conversation? Yeah. So what I found quite fascinating, sort of the tension of why is it that Gen Z finds this style so attractive is partly because Gen Z is entering the workforce at a time where in 26 states across the country, so that's like a little bit over half of the country, they're able to enter workforces without the fear of race-based hair discrimination.

22:06And that's what the Crown Act prohibits. So the Crown Act states that you cannot discriminate on a candidate or someone or even just an employee based on how they choose to style their hair or how their hair grows on their head, which seems quite standard, but it's revolutionary considering the history of this country. So as Gen Z is entering the workforce, they don't have the pressure to straighten their hair. So the silk press then is seen as a choice. It's no longer an occupational necessity to advance in their careers. It's a choice. But of course, this is not the case everywhere across the country, but it's also very much a generational thing.

22:44Kamala Harris grew up at a time where it was necessary for women to have their hair straight, especially in conservative spaces, predominantly white and conservative spaces like the White House. And we saw this, as Sheena mentioned, with Michelle Obama, where she said that the American public was just not ready to fully embrace her and Barack Obama as a Black family. That's why she decided to also get her hair so pressed. I don't want to be critical of Harris, but one point I do want to make is, is there an opportunity to move us forward a little bit more? There's the Crown Act on paper, but in reality, I think, does Harris or any other Black woman on the national level truly have the ability to step out onto a stage with a hairstyle that's not like that and not face consequences that are negative.

23:35I don't know if the Crown Act has actually seeped through to the public sentiment, even though it's on paper. And I think it's also, there's also a point around a city like New York City, a state like New York, Los Angeles and California and what's happening there and then appealing to the Midwestern demographic. I think that that's an interesting, road to go down. I worry that we're not far beyond where we were in terms of how women should look, Black women and women of color have to look to be palatable, if that's the word of the day, palatable. Has the public's palette actually moved on Black women's hair?

24:17I would say to some extent, it definitely has, because you can look at a Black woman like Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wears locks, for example, and no one has really ever had, there's not been much conversation around her hair. Maybe it's because she's in the Supreme Court and she's not in the public eye as much as Harris is. But at the same time, if Harris were to switch up her style now and decide to wear her hair in an Afro, that would also seem completely inauthentic because the silk press is just a part of who she is at this point. She is known for those curls. Watching her on screen at the DNC, I could not help but say, how does she keep her hair just like moving like that all the time?

24:57Because it's like I cannot stress this enough. A silk press lasts at most for a week, week and a half. So the fact that she has kept this hairstyle for years, decades even, is is quite remarkable. So it's it's even if it's situated in such a tough history around assimilation, I feel like she's truly embraced it as this is who she is. And that's what Gen Z is also responding to when they call it the presidential press. It's a way to support her candidacy in a fun way. I'd like to bring things to a close here by pulling back a bit and looking at how the fashion industry has engaged with this election as a whole.

25:38I was looking at our coverage of the 2020 election. And around this time, there were just a slew of brands putting out get out to the vote merchandise. And there were a number that were more explicitly supporting Joe Biden as well. And this year, there's been much less of that. I mean, I saw the other day that Patagonia made an announcement they were going to give employees the day off to vote early in October. And I thought to myself, oh, yeah, I was getting a press release like this multiple times a day four years ago by August. I also think back to a quote an expert gave us at that time, which was they advised brands, it's a real risk to do nothing now.

26:17Complacency is what is problematic for a lot of consumers and a lot of employees at companies. And I think this also speaks a bit to the conversation we just had, but looking more at how brands are approaching the election, Sheena, I'm guessing an expert would probably give a brand different advice for this election. I want to pull things back a little bit in terms of giving context around where we were at the beginning of this year, and probably for much of the past year up until a couple months ago, perhaps. So we had that major blowback against the Pride Month campaigns of brands last year, right?

26:55And then went into a summer 2023 where the Supreme Court effectively struck down affirmative action for colleges and universities in the United States. And so at the start of 2024, I think the brands were in an interesting and uncomfortable places as it relates to engaging with politics. We had a different race. We had Biden versus Trump. And I think for brands, the best practice became there is no upside right now to engaging in politics. There is no reward for getting into the into conversations around everything from DE &I, which became political because of that affirmative action ruling. Speaking out on wars and political geopolitical unrest was very hard to figure out if you were going to reap any rewards from that.

27:41And so that was sort of coloring how brands got quieter and quieter and quieter over the last year. More recently, now that Harris is in the conversation, is in the race, I think she's brought some newness, some freshness, some things that the fashion community sort of appreciates. So, for example, at the DNC, she gave 200 content creators VIP access and encouraged them to use that platform and that space to create content and to kind of engage Gen Z voters. The jury is out on terms of how the fashion community sees her as fashionable or not fashionable. But she does wear a lot of buzzy, exciting designers from Schiaparelli to Altuzura to Khloe.

28:24Like she's in the fashion conversation in that regard, even if the choices of wardrobe are not the most fashion forward. So I think there's been a broader embrace by the fashion community of Harris and I think more opportunity for the community to get involved. And Kamala has even had endorsements from the Designers for Democracy, which is a collective of more than a dozen really high fashion, buzzy designers. It's Sergio Hudson, Tom Brown, Vera Wang, Tory Burch. A lot of who's who of fashion people are getting behind it. And I think that's opening up the conversation of the fashion community being able to get back in the game of politics and kind of feel like there's upside and maybe safety in doing that now.

29:03And we see a very similar conversation happening in the beauty realm as well, that Harris's candidacy is opening up new avenues for different kinds of brands to sort of have their say in this larger conversation. Just looking at sort of the traditional sponsors of the DNC and the RNC tend to be sort of big box corporate corporations, like major retailers that scream America, like AT &T, for example. But this year, the DNC had its first beauty sponsor and Black Opal was the lead beauty sponsor for the DNC, which meant that everyone who went on stage was wearing makeup products and cosmetics or had their look partly done using products from Black Opal and Fashion Fair.

29:50And this is a big deal because Black Opal is a Black-owned, Black-founded and also a beauty brand that caters specifically to Black people. And this is just broader, just pushing out the message that fashion and beauty are taking center stage in politics right now. Not just because Harris lends herself or is an easier candidate to sort of project fashionable or beauty ideals onto, but also because I think everyone is sort of waking up to this idea that we do communicate largely via images now. The more globally connected we are, the more we communicate via imagery. And fashion and beauty can also be a very interesting and new avenue for politicians to get out their messaging.

30:33You're both definitely right that the vibes of this election are definitely just friendlier for brands right now, which, of course, is what this is all about. But I guess the question I'm curious to see unfold over the next few months is whether most brands actually engage. I still think there might be just a reluctance for the reasons that Sheena outlined to touch the election at all. And without the intense consumer demand for brands to speak out on so many issues that we saw a few years ago, I'm curious if many will just say, you know what? the least risky option is to simply wait this out and keep selling our clothes the way we always do and see what happens in November.

31:19I think we can wrap things up there. Sheena and Yola, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Brian. Thank you, Brian. This was lovely. And please be sure to check out Sheena's article, Why Kamala Harris Isn't Making Bold Fashion choices yet, and Yola's piece, How Kamala Harris's Signature Tresses, became a Gen Z hit at businessoffashion.com. These and other stories are available to BOF professional subscribers only, and you can find the links in the episode notes. You've been listening to The Debrief, produced and edited by Olivia Davies, mixed and mastered by Eric Bria. I'm Brian Baskin. We'll be back next week with a new episode.

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