Looks

 On March 29, 2006, Representative Cynthia McKinney went to work, as usual, but her natural hair apparently confused Capitol police, who asked her to step through a metal detector as a visitor to the building, rather than acknowledging that she did not have to do so, as a member of congress. 

The idea that a Black woman with natural hair was not recognized for her prominent role in government sparked a lot of controversy, and a lot of unflattering media photos.  Now that's slowly changing, with women like Congresswoman Gwen Moore wearing her hair in a number of ways, and apparently not getting stopped at checkpoints.  

This past week I was rather looking forward to seeing Michelle Obama, who had been rocking her natural hair on social media, with her lovely natural during the inauguration, but she wore her hair as we'd seen it during her tenure as FLOTUS.  It's her choice, her right to wear her hair as she pleases, but as I looked at the women in their painfully high heeled pumps I thought about how silly the conventions are about dress codes, especially when they are used to signal class, and in some cases, suppress racial differences.

We've just gotten to the point where we're objecting to the erasure of culture in prohibiting Black expression in hairstyles for school children.  We need to carry that into our ideas of what is "professional".  And it's not just about hair.

A young indigenous girl was shamed at her school after choosing to wear her ribbon skirt to a formal event.  

Deb Halaand wore her ribbon skirt to the Biden inauguration.  I was both glad and sad to see that this didn't make the news. Sad because she made a statement in her indigenous attire, glad that she didn't get the criticism and scorn that so many do when they buck the trend in DC.

Those are examples relating to ethnic culture, but there is also issues with other components of culture.  Gender culture is what made the biggest impression on me as I watched the inauguration.  I admit, I missed the pearls (Which could be a whole blog post in themselves) and was focused on the shoes.  Here we have the most powerful women in Washington wearing high heel pumps with pointed toes, standing and walking for hours during the days events.  I noticed that Jill Biden, at some point during the day, changed out of the pumps that had been dyed to match the lapel and cuffs on her jacket into the blush colored pumps she'd worn on numerous other occasions.  I also noticed that at times during the day she was limping slightly or walking gingerly.  

High heels are associated with health issues as well as the short term pain they cause, but they do make your legs look longer and more shapely.  Now, why do women in the highest positions of power in the nation have to make their legs look longer and more shapely?  Because it's expected... because adherence to the male gaze has become part of what is considered "correct" for women.  You don't see men in congress dressing to accent the shapeliness of their legs.

Women, who have often been silenced, often use their clothing to relay coded messages:  White for suffragettes,  Kente cloths while promoting police reform in the wake of the police murdering several Black men, Justice Bader Ginsberg's "dissent collars", and Kamala Harris's pearls (which went beyond being "feminine" and was specifically a nod to the first Black sorority in the US, AKA, of which she was a member during her time at Howard University).  Most of us also remember Barbara Bush's iconic red power blazer, and her "pearls", which became symbolic of powerful women. 

That makes clothing a mixed bag, because on one hand, it's been used to enforce conformance and adherence to white male expectations, and on the other hand, a language of unity and expression.  The line between "unity" and "conformity" at times can be blurry, and I understand why there are two sides to this "respectful" or "proper" clothing argument.

Usually when we're making these arguments, we're talking about women who are non-conforming.  We seldom talk about men who don't meet our cultural expectations when it comes to appearance... until the argument over Bernie Sanders and his coat and mittens.  Not surprisingly, the news was FILLED with stories about the various coats at the inauguration, what the colors and styles were nods to, but all of the coats mentioned were women's coats, except for Bernie Sanders. 

I've seen Sander's attire that day called "disrespectful".  He was wearing a suit. He just wasn't wearing a simple black wool overcoat like most of the other men wore.  He was wearing the practical windproof warm grey coat he wore in cold weather, along with those iconic mittens.  

The question is raised, should Bernie Sanders have yielded to expectations (which are, after all, considerably lower for men) and conformed to the coded clothing of the day, and was it disrespectful for him to not do so, or is it acceptable to chose practicality and function over appearance when sitting in the cold for hours on end?  

We often talk about people as "brands" these days, and their clothing is a key to their brand, their first line of self-marketing.  If we look at what Sanders wore that day, we could say he was definitely on brand for Sanders.  Is it more important to be authentic, or conforming?