How Kamala Harris’s looks could influence her candidacy for US president

In recent weeks, as Kamala Harris has risen to prominence as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, she has done so with a high-voltage smile, a pop-culture boost and a cascade of endorsements. Suddenly, everything about her seems to have been electrified, except one thing: her clothes.

At campaign stops in Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Wilmington, Delaware, Pittsfield, Massachusetts and Central Florida, Harris has appeared in the neutral suits she has adopted as her vice presidential uniform, in shades of black, navy, burgundy and beige, with the occasional pop of salmon pink or baby blue. The rest of the world may be embracing the “Kamala is a brat” meme in all its acid-green splendor, but the candidate is not.

Instead, she is wearing her usual tone-on-tone silk blouses and bow blouses. Her usual signature pearls and 70-millimeter Manolo Blahnik heels. For the past four years, this has been the perfect disguise for the country’s No. 2 executive: understated, different, a little bland.

But does that sound presidential?

In an election with a potentially pathbreaking candidate — she could be the first female president, the first black female president, the first president of South Asian descent — that is a key question.

“How you show up as a woman in leadership is a question that every woman in leadership needs to consider,” said Ashley Allison, CEO of Watering Hole Media and a former Biden-Harris campaign adviser. Harris, she said, “is trying to break through what is potentially the biggest, thickest, biggest glass ceiling there is.” How she equips herself for that matters.

It’s not really about some objective measure of elegance. It’s not about being endorsed by Vogue, although Harris has been. It’s about what voters read into what Harris wears; how they relate to it. Clothes become, in many ways, a proxy for all the incoherent feelings that the electorate has about a candidate, good and bad, and especially about a female candidate.

The Barbara Lee Family Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on women in politics, has dubbed this factor the “imagination barrier.” When asked to close their eyes and imagine a president, most of them picture what they’ve seen in the past: white, straight, male. Jennifer Palmieri, a former communications director for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, said her team often saw problems with this.

“Voters don’t have a stereotype of what a woman in office looks like,” said Amanda Hunter, executive director of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation. Harris is making it up as she goes along.

SEWING THE FASHION NEEDLE

Harris knows this well. She has proven herself more than capable of drawing on fashion symbolism when she wants to: She wore three different Black designers to President Joe Biden’s inauguration, including Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss, Christopher John Rogers and Sergio Hudson. She wore a white Carolina Herrera suit in honor of the women who came before her on the night Biden declared victory in the 2020 election — the first time she has done so during the campaign. Her decision to stick with her suits isn’t by design. It’s tactical.

“We know very well that she will be scrutinized for her appearance more than a male candidate,” Hunter said. “We found in a study two years ago that voters have even less tolerance for disheveled hair and a rumpled collar on a female candidate than they do on a male candidate. They see it as a sign of careless thinking.

Clothing has historically been the province of the First Lady. She is the one tasked with using her image as a tool of soft diplomacy to reach across borders. To be relatable. To represent a local industry. Clothing, when it comes to elected office, has been used to diminish women, to make them seem less substantial than they are.

For years, the solution was what might be called the political lady suit, popularized by leaders like Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Angela Merkel and Elizabeth Warren. That is, a man’s suit in fruit salad colors, as a pledge to bridge the male-female divide. It is only recently that the fashion has been embraced by women themselves as a potential weapon for good. Clinton often joked about her colorful wardrobe. Nikki Haley wore royal dresses (and skirts and shoes) to highlight her difference from every Republican contender on the debate stage.

Harris, however, took a different approach.

“I call clothing ‘just the facts, ma’am,’” said Tammy Haddad, a former producer on HBO’s “Veep” and the president of Haddad Media. “The most important thing for any candidate is how you walk across a stage. You want to have impact, but not too much impact. You want clothes that are flattering, but not too flattering. You want to look commanding, but not too commanding.”

If you’re Harris, you want to be dressed up, but with just one button. You want heels, but a mid-height heel. You want to suggest fashion without being too fashion-forward. The occasional casual dress code—Harris is a Chuck Taylor fan—helps. So does her black-tie workwear solution (sequins), which allows her to stand out while maintaining her own understated color palette and clean lines.

WHAT DOES A PRESIDENT WEAR?

Realistically, Harris didn’t really have a choice — and not just because the transition from vice president to presidential candidate happened so quickly that she couldn’t rush out and buy an entirely new wardrobe. Instead, any overt style change could have been used against her as an example of indecision and vanity.

“People would notice, and that would be the story,” Haddad said.

Instead, Harris has opted for consistency, a bit of real politics that serves a variety of purposes. It’s a visual refutation of the caricature Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have tried to create of the loony liberal (or Lara Trump’s comparison of Harris to a designer “trash bag”). It underscores the idea, Palmieri said, that she was “called in,” rather than inserted as a pushover. And it’s a reminder of the past four years (for better or worse) and the way Harris has presented herself when meeting world leaders, or walking under the White House portico with Biden.

The attention will only grow more intense as the election approaches. Is it unfair? Yes, of course. Barack Obama acknowledged the double standard when he said of Clinton: “She had to do everything I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, put on high heels. She had to get up earlier than I did because she had to do her hair. She had to, you know, deal with all the expectations that were put on her.”

When Clinton didn’t—when she pulled her hair back into a ponytail—it led to an entire speech about the meaning of the elastic.

As much as possible, Harris, by wearing the same clothes over and over, has taken fashion off the table as a talking point so she can focus on her actual talking points. This can be frustrating for those who want her to represent… what? The country, women, black women in a more exciting way?

And perhaps, if she wins the election, her wardrobe will change to suit the moment. There will certainly be plenty of people happy to weigh in on what that should look like, should the time come.

For now, though, she’s likely to keep her uniform, as has virtually every candidate before her, because, as Obama once said, it reduces the number of decisions she has to make in a day. It’s fit for purpose.

Harris “seems to have internalized this idea a long time ago,” Palmieri said.

But also, what does a president wear? He wears a dark suit. Maybe in November Harris will have the opportunity to break that barrier too. But not yet.