Fashion and Politics: When Clothes Speak Louder Than Words

We usually consider fashion a matter of taste. We choose a jacket because we like its cut, a colour because it suits us, a pair of shoes because they are comfortable or stylish.

But clothes do something else. They tell other people who we are or, at times, who we want them to believe we are.

And when politics enters the wardrobe, this ordinary form of communication can become more interesting.

A uniform can confer authority. A suit can proclaim a national identity. A miniskirt can become an act of rebellion. A religious garment may express faith and identity. Even refusing to wear a tie may acquire political significance.

Perhaps this is why governments, parliaments, schools, and armies have spent so much time deciding what people should or should not wear.

This is also where fashion can meet law.

When clothing communicates identity, allegiance, dissent, or values, regulating what people wear may also mean regulating what they are permitted to communicate.

Dressing power

Political leaders have always understood the communicative power of clothing.

Consider the so-called “Mao suit”. Its history actually predates that of Mao Zedong, the leader who founded the People’s Republic of China. The Zhongshan suit was associated with Sun Yat-sen – considered the founder of modern China – and already embodied ideas of national identity and political modernisation. However, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, it became closely identified with Mao and acquired another meaning: simplicity, collective identity and an explicit visual alternative to the Western business suit.

The message required little explanation. Leaders and the people could apparently wear the same clothes. Differences in social status vanished — at least visually.

However, equality represented through clothing does not necessarily equate to equality in reality. A uniform may erase visible distinctions whilst leaving political hierarchies entirely intact. The person wearing the same jacket as everyone else may still be the one exercising absolute power.

Mobutu Sese Seko understood this same mechanism in Zaire. As part of his authenticité policy, Western-style suits complete with jacket and tie were rejected, and the abacost (a name derived from à bas le costume)became the regime’s signature attire for men. Western clothing was associated with the colonial past; the new attire was intended to represent an autonomous African identity.

Yet there lies a paradox. A policy designed to liberate identity from colonial influence may itself become a rule imposed from above. Rejecting one dress code can simply lead to the adoption of another.

At that point, politics begins to become law.

Who decides what is appropriate?

A more recent African example illustrates the issue.

The Kaunda suit, named after former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, has been worn by politicians across Africa and has become particularly visible in contemporary Kenyan political life.

In November 2023, however, the Speaker of Kenya’s National Assembly ruled that it would no longer be considered appropriate parliamentary attire. Kaunda suits had previously been tolerated in the Kenyan Parliament, and a former Speaker had expressly accepted both Kaunda suits and Mao-style coats as suitable attire.

A jacket had become a matter of legal and institutional significance.

The episode raises a deceptively simple question: why should a Western-style suit and tie represent parliamentary seriousness more naturally than an African garment worn by political leaders?

There are valid arguments supporting the right of institutions to establish dress codes. A court, a parliament, or a military organisation may legitimately seek to distinguish the institutional space from ordinary social life.

But the Kenyan example reveals something deeper. Even apparently neutral concepts such as ‘formal’, ‘professional’ or ‘appropriate’ dress have a cultural history.

The law frequently operates through such general categories. Yet their content does not emerge in a vacuum. Someone must decide what counts as appropriate.

What looks neutral may simply be a convention whose origins we have ceased to notice.

There may be other considerations as well. A general parliamentary dress code could discourage attire evoking military traditions or clothing signaling particular national or political affiliations, in ways that could exacerbate tensions within the institution.

This, however, does not alter the fundamental question: who decides what meaning should be attributed to institutional clothing?

Dressing against power

Clothing does not belong solely to those who exercise authority. It also belongs to those who challenge it.

The youth cultures of the 1960s and 1970s understood this instinctively. Long hair, miniskirts, bell-bottom trousers, and unconventional colours did not necessarily begin as articulated political programmes. Yet, they challenged prevailing expectations concerning gender, sexuality, authority, and respectable behaviour.

This is one of the distinctive political qualities of fashion: one does not need to write a manifesto to make a political statement.

Sometimes the body wearing the clothes is the manifesto.

The same mechanism survives today. Gender-fluid fashion challenges conventional distinctions between male and female appearance. A T-shirt bearing a political slogan turns clothing into a form of protest. Sustainable fashion may communicate environmental commitments.

Fashion can therefore function as an unusually accessible political language. It requires neither a newspaper, nor a political party, nor a podium.

It requires a body and something to put on it.

But if clothing can constitute expression, a legal question inevitably follows: to what extent may the state regulate it?

When fashion becomes a matter of fundamental rights

India provides a particularly revealing example, as the issue has moved from classrooms to constitutional courts.

The controversy over the use of the hijab in Karnataka arose from restrictions imposed on Muslim female students regarding the wearing of the headscarf in educational institutions where uniforms were mandatory. In February 2022, the Karnataka Government issued an order concerning mandatory uniforms. The Karnataka High Court subsequently upheld these restrictions, ruling, among other things, that wearing the hijab does not constitute an essential religious practice in Islam.

The dispute reached the Supreme Court of India but resulted in an unusual outcome.

In October 2022, a two-judge bench delivered a split verdict. Justice Hemant Gupta dismissed the challenges, whilst Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia ruled in favour of setting aside both the High Court’s judgment and the Government Order of 5 February 2022. According to Justice Dhulia, the issue did not necessarily have to hinge on whether the hijab constitutes an ‘essential religious practice’; it also concerned individual choice, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion.

Since the two judges reached opposite conclusions, no binding majority decision was formed regarding the constitutional dispute.

Subsequently, the political leadership changed the legal landscape.

On 13 May 2026, the Karnataka Government revoked the 2022 order and issued new guidelines allowing the wearing of limited traditional and faith-based symbols — including the hijab —alongside prescribed uniforms, provided they did not interfere with discipline, safety, or identification.

The controversy is particularly instructive precisely because it did not end with a clear-cut judicial verdict. A dress code sparked a constitutional dispute; the highest court was divided on how to resolve it; and the government subsequently withdrew the measure that had triggered the litigation.

Even more importantly, the case demonstrates why clothing cannot always be regarded as a mere matter of fashion.

A piece of cloth can simultaneously be a garment, a religious practice, an expression of cultural identity, a personal choice, and a symbolic expression. A school uniform, on the other hand, may pursue legitimate objectives of equality, discipline, and a shared institutional identity.

The legal issue, therefore, goes deeper than the simple question of whether a particular garment should be permitted: when does a legitimate collective dress code become an illegitimate restriction on individual identity or expression?

The European dimension

European human rights law has repeatedly confronted this same tension.

In the case of Leyla Şahin v. Turkey (2005), the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights examined a university prohibition on the Islamic headscarf. While acknowledging that wearing the headscarf could constitute a practice motivated or inspired by religion, the Court held that such restriction could be justified – within the particular Turkish constitutional context- by considerations including secularism and the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

In the case of S.A.S. v. France (2014), the issue moved beyond an institutional setting. The Grand Chamber examined the French prohibition on concealing one’s face in public and upheld the Government’s argument that the measure pursued the objective of preserving the conditions for ‘living together’ (le vivre ensemble), while acknowledging its particular impact on Muslim women.

The two judgments differ, yet the underlying tension is familiar. In one case, institutional neutrality and secularism played a central role; in the other, the State sought to regulate clothing in public spaces. Both decisions also attracted criticism, particularly regarding the principle of proportionality and – in the S.A.S. case – the potentially expansive nature of the concept of ‘living together’ as a justification for restricting individual freedom.

The cases in question demonstrate just how difficult it is to determine the point at which collective rules may legitimately prevail over individual expression through clothing.

Viewed in this light, fashion law is no longer merely the discipline governing the fashion industry.

It may also become the discipline that regulates the individual’s way of dressing.

When clothing becomes dangerous

Perhaps the clearest evidence that clothing possesses political power lies in attempts to control it.

Governments rarely regulate things they consider unimportant.

Iran provides a prime example. Following the 1979 Revolution, women’s appearance became one of the most visible areas through which the new political and religious order manifested itself and was subsequently enforced by law.

The significance of the Iranian example lies precisely in this shift from social expectation to legal obligation. The State does not merely express a preference concerning appropriate clothing but attaches legal consequences to individual clothing choices.

At that point, fashion, politics and law become almost impossible to separate.

Other contexts are by no means equivalent from a legal or moral standpoint. School uniforms, employer-mandated dress codes, parliamentary rules, and military uniforms involve very different purposes, institutions, and degrees of coercion.

Nevertheless, the comparison helps to delineate the spectrum within which the law operates: from rules intended to create institutional identity to prohibitions that directly restrict personal autonomy.

The question is not whether all dress codes are the same. Clearly, they are not.

It is a matter of determining the extent to which collective authority may legitimately go.

The politics and law of the uniform

The uniform is perhaps the purest expression of this relationship.

Its political strength lies in repetition. A soldier is an individual. Ten thousand soldiers dressed in the same way become an institution.

Uniforms communicate discipline, hierarchy, and a sense of belonging. They reduce individual visual differences to strengthen collective identity.

However, they embody a paradox: the uniform restricts individual choice precisely to create another identity – an institutional one.

A police officer, soldier, judge, student or employee wearing prescribed clothing communicates more than just something about themselves; such clothing indicates membership in an organisation and may imply authority, duties, and expectations established by law or institutional rules.

There is a second paradox. Uniforms can convey both equality and hierarchy at the same time. Everyone may wear the same basic clothes, while insignia, medals, colours and small variations immediately re-establish rank.

Clothing first tells us that everyone belongs to the group and then tells us exactly where each person stands within it.

Fashion does not merely reflect the social order.

Sometimes, it maps it out.

The Global Wardrobe

Today, the relationship between clothing and politics has taken on a new dimension.

A garment worn in parliament, at a protest, on a university campus, or at an international summit can circle the globe in a matter of minutes. Social media removes much of its original context, transforming the item into an image capable of acquiring new meanings across different countries and communities.

Consequently, political fashion becomes simultaneously more powerful and more ambiguous. A traditional garment may express cultural pride, political nationalism, or simply a personal preference. A sustainable dress may communicate environmental responsibility to one audience and elite privilege to another. The same jacket may symbolise revolution for one generation and nostalgia for the next.

The person wearing the garment does not have full control over the message.

And, increasingly, the State does not control the public either.

Clothes are never merely clothes.

A Mao suit, an abaya, a Kaunda suit, a military uniform, a miniskirt, a hijab, and a slogan T-shirt seem to have very little in common.

From a legal standpoint, too, they are very different.

And this difference matters.

Yet, they all demonstrate that clothing occupies a peculiar space between the individual and society.

We get dressed, but we do so in the presence of others.

Through clothing, we can seek inclusion or distinction, demonstrate loyalty or rebellion, reproduce hierarchies or challenge them. The law comes into play in this relationship because societies cannot entirely avoid drawing boundaries between individual expression and collective rules.

The difficult question is where those boundaries should be drawn.

Perhaps, then, fashion is not simply politics embodied.

It is also a surprisingly revealing field for observing the relationship between power, identity, and freedom.

And when a government, a parliament, a school, or other institution begins to tell us what we can or cannot wear, the issue is no longer simply what is fashionable.

It is a matter of determining who holds the power — and the legal authority — to decide what our clothes are allowed to communicate.

Selected References

Adelman, Kenneth L., ‘The Recourse to Authenticity and Négritude in Zaïre’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 13, no. 1 (1975), pp. 134–139.

Finnane, Antonia, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.

Government of Karnataka, Government Order No. ED 14 SHH 2022 concerning prescribed uniforms in educational institutions, 5 February 2022.

Government of Karnataka, Department of School Education and Literacy, Government Order No. ED 14 SHH 2022, 13 May 2026, withdrawing the Government Order of 5 February 2022 and permitting limited traditional and faith-based symbols alongside prescribed uniforms.

Kenya National Assembly, National Assembly Debates (Hansard), 28 November 2023, ruling of the Speaker on appropriate parliamentary dress and Kaunda suits.

Leyla Şahin v. Turkey [GC], no. 44774/98, ECHR 2005-XI.

S.A.S. v. France [GC], no. 43835/11, ECHR 2014.

Resham v. State of Karnataka, Karnataka High Court, judgment of 15 March 2022.

Aishat Shifa v State of Karnataka, Supreme Court of India, 2022 INSC 1085, judgment of 13 October 2022.

United Nations Human Rights Council, Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2024.

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, materials concerning the enforcement of mandatory hijab laws in the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2024.

Fashion law, Sustainability and Geopolitics: A non-obvious but concrete nexus