Although I don't follow fashion and don't spend a lot of money on clothes, I am a sartorial person. I like to come up with new outfits and am always pleased when a stranger stops me on the street to complement what I'm wearing. So I was particularly interested in the sartorial aspect of Biden and Harris's inaugural ceremony. It was the colors, of course, that caught my attention: sky-blue, monochrome white, deep yellow, and purples of all shades. Just about all the women in the spotlight were monochromatically clothed, so the colors seemed even more significant than if they had been mixed.
And so, it seems, they were. The inauguration women were using fashion to make a statement about America.
If I saw in Jill Biden's outfit—shoes, gloves, coat, dress—the beautiful blue of a cloudless spring sky, like a glorious new day, more astute fashion followers knew that this outfit had been designed by Markarian, a three-year-old brand of clothing designed and made in New York City that has a sustainable, minimal-waste policy. Thus the First Lady was saying, by the clothes she wore, not just "a new day," but also, "We will invest in American Businesses and are committed to addressing climate change." Bravo for fashion!
I loved Kamala Harris's bright purple dress and coat and was even more impressed when I learned that its designer, Christopher John Rogers, was a 23-year-old black American from Louisiana, now in New York City.
Amanda Gorman's yellow coat was by Prada, a woman designer with strong feminist leanings. Gorman said that wearing yellow was a nod to Jill Biden, who suggested her as the inaugural poet and who had told her once how much she liked seeing her in yellow. The symbolism of Gorman's outfit was personal as well as political.
Jennifer Lopez wore all white—pants, long coat, lacy blouse, white earrings—a choice fashion editors have interpreted as reflecting the suffragette moment, when women frequently wore white as they marched or made their appeals, but I haven't heard Lopez say that. She might have worn white simply because it was beautiful on her.
Lady Gaga made a smashingly dramatic entrance in her enormous red-skirted ball gown, out of which her dark blue torso rose like out of a cloud. With her white hair and the huge gold dove pin on her shoulder, she looked like America the Beautiful.
Michelle Obama, who as First Lady, unlike her successor, made it a point to wear clothes by American designers, wore a rose-purple pants-and-coat outfit designed by Sergio Hudson, another black American fashion designer. Hillary Clinton wore a grape pants suit from Ralph Lauren, who was born in the Bronx to Ashkenazy Jewish immigrant parents and who built a fortune as a fashion designer: the "American Dream" story. All of this purple at the inauguration, especially by Harris, was certainly a political statement: red and blue combined, signifying the theme of the inauguration, American unity.
As for the men, I certainly noticed Garth Brooks in blue jeans (at an inauguration!). What I didn't know was that Joe Biden's suit was also a Ralph Lauren design.
I won't be wearing Prada, Lauren, or Hudson, unless I happen to stumble across something in a thrift store. There doesn't seem to be any reason to pay attention to what I wear these days, anyway, since not only am I not going to, you know, a Presidential inauguration, but I'm not going anywhere! Still, clothes are fun. Today, for instance, I put on a pair of new Raggedy-Ann-style, black-and-white-striped, over-the-knee socks I acquired as a give-away at Joann's, then tried to figure out what to wear with them. What I came up with wouldn't be appropriate for Kamala Harris, and it makes no political statement, but it's fun to wear.
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