Power dressing:Dressing to Not Be Written About

Power dressing used to mean adding armour. The most sophisticated version of it now aims at producing no coverage at all.

In late October 2022, over the three days in which power passed from Mario Draghi’s government to her own, Giorgia Meloni wore three Armani suits. Dark, with a black shirt for the first official photograph with her ministers. Navy in between. Another with a white shirt for the handover meeting itself.

Three days, three variations of the same idea, no visible decision anywhere. Set beside the rest of what was happening that week, the wardrobe was the only element in the frame with nothing to say.

That was not an absence of strategy. It was the strategy, and it is worth being precise about what kind. Armani himself died in September 2025, and the suits have outlived him as a political instrument. 

What power dressing used to mean

The original version was additive, and it announced itself.

Power dressing emerged in the late 1970s and hardened through the 1980s as women entered professional and political rooms that had been built for men, and its method was accumulation. Shoulder pads wide enough to change a doorway. Structure. Montana’s silhouettes. Thatcher’s handbag as a recognised instrument of state. The logic was defensive, but the execution was loud: if the room will not grant you authority, wear something that occupies more of it.

The costume historian Harold Koda observed that the Chanel suit had performed a comparable function decades earlier, allowing women to de-sex the feminine line in order to be received as equals. The garment was doing work the room refused to do.

Everything about that approach assumed being looked at. It simply tried to control what was seen.

What it means now

The contemporary version inverts the method entirely. It is subtractive, and its ambition is not to be described.

Consider what the Armani suits actually achieved. Commentators noted at the time that the choice aligned Meloni visually with the comfortingly familiar wardrobe of captains of industry, and with a house that is a pillar of the power-dressing establishment, making her appear a good deal less radical than her politics might otherwise suggest. Another analysis noted that her uniform never catches the eye, even when it is Armani.

 Maria Luisa Frisa, professor of fashion theory and curating at IUAV in Venice, put the strategy more exactly than anyone has managed since. Meloni, she said, is wearing a suit that cannot be criticised. Six words, and they describe an objective rather than a style. Not a suit that impresses, not one that flatters, not one that signals anything in particular. One that closes off the possibility of comment. There is a second layer to the choice, and it is not aesthetic. Armani is among the most recognisable arguments for Made in Italy anywhere in the world, and Made in Italy is a tentpole of Meloni’s brand of nationalism, to the extent that her government created a ministerial post for businesses and Made in Italy. Wearing the suit attaches the brand’s authority to her own without requiring her to say a word about it, which is the same trick as the neutrality, performed in the other direction. 

Never catches the eye. For a leader whose politics were, at that moment, the most discussed in Europe, that is not modesty. It is a deliberate reduction of the number of things available to write about.

This is the shift. The objective is no longer to look powerful. It is to generate no sentences.

The dial, not the position

Where this gets genuinely interesting is that the neutrality is not fixed. It moves, and it moves with the political weather.

Meloni’s wardrobe did not stay in dark Armani. It softened into pastels, wide trousers, warmer palettes. A fashion academic quoted on the shift put it bluntly: when it became clear that Italians disliked aspects of what the government was doing, the pastels arrived, communicating kindness. At Salone del Mobile she turned up in jeans and a beige blazer.

Read those two phrases together, and the picture is not a politician with a signature style. It is a politician operating a control. Severity when the position needs to appear institutional. Softness when the position needs to appear human. Casual when the position needs to appear ordinary.

The wardrobe is calibrated to how much scrutiny the politics can currently absorb. That is a much more sophisticated instrument than a power suit, and a much less discussed one, because its successful operation looks like nothing happening.

Four years on, with Meloni approaching the record for the longest-serving Italian leader of the postwar era, the reading has settled. Antonio Mancinelli, who teaches at Rome’s Costume and Fashion Academy, has said simply that she understands how important clothing is as nonverbal communication in politics. The pastel suits and the wide trousers are now described as conveying authority without confrontation, which is a precise description of a garment engineered to hold a position without picking a fight about it.

And there is one detail in that outfit worth more than the rest of it combined. The wide-legged trousers fall over the heel and cover it almost completely. The height is still being taken. The advantage is still there. What has been removed is the visibility of the device.

Eighties power dressing did the exact opposite, and did it deliberately: the heel was the point, the shoulder was the point, the armour existed to be seen. The current method reverses the instruction. Take the elevation, conceal the mechanism, and leave the photograph with nothing to hold.

The uniform as immunity

Angela Merkel arrived at the same destination by a different route, and her version is the purest.

Sixteen years of the same jacket in rotating colours. The cut did not change. The proportions did not change. What that produces, after the third or fourth year, is a kind of press immunity, because a garment cannot be news twice. There is no announcement in it, no departure, no evolution to chart. The coverage simply stops, having nothing left to say.

It is worth noticing what a strange achievement that is. A head of government spent sixteen years constructing a wardrobe whose principal function was to be unreportable, and it worked, and we describe this as having no interest in fashion.

The asymmetry nobody names

All of which rests on a condition that applies unevenly.

A male head of government wears a dark suit and receives, by default, the silence that Merkel had to build over sixteen years and Meloni engineers suit by suit. He is not granted neutrality because his tailoring is superior. He is granted it because nobody has decided his clothing is a subject.

This is not a claim that men are indifferent to the instrument. Volodymyr Zelensky has dressed in military registers since 2022. Claudia Sheinbaum wears pieces embroidered by Indigenous artisans. Britain’s new premier has made a point of wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Each is a deliberate and legible use of clothing to make a political argument.

The difference is in how the coverage behaves afterwards. A man who dresses deliberately is understood to have made a statement, once, which is noted and then set aside. A woman in the same office is read continuously, on every appearance, whether or not she intended to say anything at all. Her wardrobe is treated as a standing text over which the press has assumed interpretive rights.

Every woman named here has had to manufacture, through sustained effort and considerable expense, the exact condition her male colleagues receive for free on the first morning. The uniform, the repetition, the palette discipline: these are not aesthetic preferences. They are the labour of producing an absence.

Which raises the question the fashion press tends not to ask. When we praise a female politician for dressing with restraint, for having no interest in fashion, for letting the work speak, we are praising the successful completion of a task that was only ever assigned to her.

What the quiet is for

There is a version of this argument that ends in celebration, treating the neutral wardrobe as evidence of seriousness. That version is too easy.

The subtractive method is effective precisely because it removes material. Fewer sartorial decisions mean fewer things to describe, fewer angles, fewer paragraphs, less attention spent on the person and, by extension, more of it available elsewhere or nowhere at all. A wardrobe that cannot be written about is a wardrobe that closes a line of inquiry.

Sometimes that is a defence against triviality, and it deserves sympathy. Sometimes it is something else. A leader whose clothes align her with familiar corporate authority is making an argument about her own politics without having to defend it in a sentence anybody could quote.

The suit says: nothing to see here.

And the most reliable way to be believed when you say nothing to see here is to make quite sure there is nothing to see.