Dressing the Resistance

Book excerpt: Dressing the Resistance is a celebration of how we use clothing, fashion, and costume to ignite activism and spur social change. Weaving together historical and current protest movements across the globe, Dressing the Resistance explores how everyday people and the societies they live in harness the visual power of dress to fight for radical change. American suffragettes made and wore dresses from old newspapers printed with voting slogans. Male farmers in rural India wore their wives' saris while staging sit-ins on railroad tracks against government neglect. Costume designer and dress historian Camille Benda analyzes cultural movements and the clothes that defined them through nearly 200 archival images, photographs, and paintings that bring each event to life, from ancient Roman rebellions to the #MeToo movement, from twentieth century punk subcultures to Black Lives Matter marches.