From banned headwraps to punk runways, fashion has always been used as a statement for change. Grace Jappy explores if the messaging behind outfits is intentional or ingrained in each of us. As we look in the mirror and prepare for each day, do we even realise we are getting dressed with politics in the seams of every outfit.
Fashion likes to pretend it’s innocent. That it’s about beauty, or comfort, or the thrill of a good outfit. But history tells a different story. Fashion has always been tangled up in power, who has it, who doesn’t, and who gets punished for showing it. Walking down any street you’ll see it. Dress codes masquerading as professionalism. Modesty rules framed as morality. ‘Appropriate’ clothing that quietly enforces race, class, gender, and obedience. Before fashion became expression, it was control.
“Someone has got to say something, everyone has conformed to a degree where they are so scared to say anything.” explains Morgan Sidle, the creator and Creative Director of fashion brand ‘Atelier’. His work draws on identity, resistance, and visibility. His designs don’t just dress bodies, they question who exists comfortably within them. Jess Robinson, promoter and assistant at ‘Atelier’ continues the brands ethos saying “capitalism, an ever expanding belly of greed. I think it’s good to hold the institution accountable through everything, especially fashion, you’ve got to”.
Fashion has never been separate from politics, it has been one of its most intimate tools. From laws that dictated what women and people of colour were allowed to wear, to designers who used the runway as a site of rebellion, clothing has always carried meaning far beyond the mirror.
When Clothing Became Law
In 1786, under French colonial rule in Louisiana, the Tignon Law regulated the appearance of Black women. The law required hair to be covered with a headwrap, or tignon, to mark them as socially inferior and limit their visibility within public space. It was fashion weaponised by the state, an effort to control race, gender, and sexuality through fabric.
But the tignon did something unexpected. Rather than erase identity, Black women transformed the headwrap into creativity and resistance, using bright colours and elaborate styles that refused the law’s intent. What was meant to humiliate became a declaration of autonomy. This pattern of resistance following restriction repeats throughout fashion history. In the early 1900s, hat pin laws emerged, limiting the length hat pins were allowed to be. Ostensibly introduced for public safety, the laws targeted women’s growing independence. Hat pins, often used for self-defense, became symbolic of women’s mobility and independence, something the state was eager to contain.
Then the skirt length index, a theory that suggests hemlines rise during times of economic prosperity and fall during periods of recession. While not a law in itself, it reflects how women’s bodies become economic and moral battlegrounds, read as indicators for social stability. Fashion, once again, becomes a canvas onto which political anxiety is projected.
What we wear has rarely been left up to us alone.
Morgan Sidle says, “Everyone has got a message, I don’t think anyone can design without thinking about politics. Nothing is ever meaningless, not a single item of clothing”.
Designers Who Refused to Stay Silent
As governments attempted to regulate appearance, designers stepped in to disrupt it. Mason Thomas, the creator and Creative director of MASON KANE THOMAS, believes this was a stark act of rebellion, “Marie Antoinette was punk, she wore a chemise when she should have been wearing a silk gown, Coco Chanel was punk she wore trousers instead of a dress, there is so many cases where fashion has pushed change in society.”
Error: No feed found.
Please go to the Instagram Feed settings page to create a feed.
Error: No feed found.
Please go to the Instagram Feed settings page to create a feed.
Error: No feed found.
Please go to the Instagram Feed settings page to create a feed.
Error: No feed found.
Please go to the Instagram Feed settings page to create a feed.
Coco Chanel illustrates these tensions by introducing trousers and relaxed silhouettes into women’s wardrobes. Chanel challenged rigid gender norms and class distinctions. Comfort became a quiet rebellion against the corseted ideals of femininity that dominated the early 20th century.
But fashion’s political power cuts both ways. Christian Dior’s 1947 ‘New Look’ with its cinched waists and voluminous skirts arrived in the aftermath of World War II, signaling a return to traditional femininity just as women were being pushed out of wartime labour and back into domestic roles. The collection was celebrated as luxurious and romantic, but it also reinforced conservative gender expectations at a moment of social recalibration.
Where Dior softened politics, Alexander McQueen sharpened it. His collections were visceral, addressing nationalism and violence. McQueen’s runways didn’t ask for comfort, they demanded confrontation. He made fashion an emotional and political reckoning.
Mason Thomas’s inspirations from out-spoken designers continues with Vivienne Westwood, “she knew what she was doing was shocking, she didn’t just do things to be offensive she did things to convey a message, to make fun of something, and reclaim power through fashion.”
Vivienne Westwood made rebellion her brand. Rooted in punk, her work rejected authority, using clothing as a billboard for anti-establishment messages. Westwood didn’t just design garments, she designed dissent.
Together, these designers prove that fashion is never passive.
However, this can be argued as the money capital of fashion distorts the genuineness of their ingenuity.
Morgan Sidle believes “high fashion brands cannot be political, absolutely not, not at all. As soon as money gets involved, the soul gets ripped out, they want to play it too safe.” Whether reinforcing or resisting power, art always takes a side. “Only the very wealthy can afford high end brands, so a message or intention of societal change can be lost”, explains Caroline Young, author of fashion and pop-culture styles, whose work examines the intersection of designers, power, and history.
The Politics of Personal Fashion
Today, the power of style is still important, but has become more diffuse. Control often appears through dress codes, workplace policies, social media scrutiny. What’s deemed ‘professional’ continues to disproportionately affect women, queer people, and people of colour.
“When you wake up, you choose what you want to wear, that’s a preference. But I think it’s intertwined, preference and politics,” says Morgan Sidle. Whose designs speak to the idea that visibility itself can be radical. His work challenges the idea that clothing can ever be neutral within systems built on exploitation. Jess Robinson continues that “all clothing is political.”
Fast fashion adds another layer to the politics of dress. Global supply chains rely on underpaid labour, environmental degradation, and a cycle of overconsumption that disproportionately harms marginalised communities. What we wear isn’t just a personal choice, it’s an economic one.
“Everyday you are selecting items of clothing that have a meaning, a personal meaning, a political meaning.” notes Caroline Young. In this sense, fashion becomes a daily political act, one repeated every time we get dressed.
Style as Survival, Style as Protest
For many, fashion has never been optional, it has been a strategy. From queer signalling through coded dress, to cultural styles that preserve heritage in the face of erasure, clothing often operates as both shield and signal.
For Mason Thomas, whose practice centres on sustainability and social justice, fashion is inseparable from these structures. “I like to be political with fashion, I think fashion has been political for a very long time. The punk movement was a way for people to say I’m not going to do what society expects of me. If we offend you then at least you are paying attention to us”.
This is where fashion’s political power is most potent, not on the runway, but in everyday life. In the choices people make to dress loudly, defiantly, or joyfully in systems that attempt to regulate them.
Caroline Young adds that, “creatives are fuelled by politics and by what’s meaningful to them, you couldn’t be a creative person if you didn’t have ideas that come from politics, that come from society.” She continues “I think fashion is political, I think it can be used to communicate opinions, ideas, to show a membership of a certain belief.”
Nothing We Wear Is Neutral
Fashion may sell itself as fantasy, but it lives firmly in reality. It absorbs our fears, our values, our hierarchies, and our hopes. From runways to streets, clothing has always been a reflection of who is allowed to exist freely and who wants to challenge this.
As Mason Thomas puts it, “Don’t dream it be it, if you want to dye your hair, shave off your eyebrows, wear a pearl earring, a dress, a suit, an elaborate hat, do it, and be proud to be yourself. That’s being political because it’s being you, it’s not conforming.” Every outfit is a choice shaped by history. Every silhouette carries a legacy. And every morning, whether we realise it or not, we get dressed inside a political system that’s been stitched together long before us.