Hillary Clinton calls herself a “pantsuit aficionado” in her Twitter bio, but in this election season, the Democratic presidential candidate’s preference for matching separates seemed like a meme of the past, a relic of an earlier, Trump-free era. Who’s got time for pantsuits when everyone else is talking about “grab her by the pussy” and “lock her up”? Well, it turns out that Hillary’s supporters do. After lying in wait for months, Clinton voters are turning out to the polls in pantsuits, pantsuiting up their children, and tagging pictures of their pantsuited selves on social media.
Coming about a week after Halloween, Election Day never seemed like much of a costume holiday until this year, when, for some, the symbolism of voting for a woman in a suit became too hard to ignore. According to the New York Daily News, some women were inspired to don pantsuits by a secret Facebook group with more than a million members called Pantsuit Nation. “I wanted to do something to reappropriate that symbol and everything that it means to me as a feminist and Clinton supporter,” one of the Facebook group’s organizers told Fast Company of the pantsuit domination plan. Clinton isn’t exactly a fashion icon, but over the years, her have pantsuits evolved from an object of ridicule into an unlikely icon, as all these people eagerly putting them on clearly shows.
Rather than voting in a perfunctory, I-guess-I-might-as-well-participate-in-democracy sort of way, wearing a pantsuit is a way to declare that you’re proud to be casting a ballot for Hillary, so proud that you want to bring some ceremony to the occasion. If you don’t actually own a pantsuit, you can fake it with a blazer. Some women are also taking care to wear white, as a shoutout to the suffragettes. If not a pantsuit, a jumpsuit, a piece of jewelry handed down from a female relative who’s not around to see this, or a T-shirt declaring that you’re “with her” will all do for statement-dressing in a pinch. Sure, it’s a little like wearing a band’s T-shirt to their concert, but Election Day’s (especially this Election Day) earnestness tolerance meter is higher than most days’.
Even men, drag queens, and babies are joining the pantsuit bandwagon. Pantsuits for everyone!
The most subversive pantsuit vote? When it’s an Ivanka Trump original.
Remember the “sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits” that Clinton thanked at the 2008 Democratic National Convention? Pretty soon she may have good reason to thank that sisterhood again.
