The Palgrave Handbook of Fashion and Politics

Book excerpt: This book examines how fashion intersects with political expression in the United States and across the globe. The chapters cover a diversity of perspectives, including experiences of men, minoritized people and women, and LGBTQ persons, as well as examining strategic choices by political actors ranging from dictators to elected officials and from protesters to mothers. Perhaps more importantly, this handbook allows chapters written about the US by mainly US-based academics to be in dialogue with scholarship about other regions of the world largely written by non-US and non-European scholars. Several chapters address regions of the world often understudied by political scientists, including Africa (Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Sudan, Liberia, Nigeria, and Cameroon); Asia (North Korea, Turkmenistan, Indonesia, and Pakistan); and Latin America (Argentina and Mexico). This work goes beyond the usual analyses that cast clothing choices as trivial or constraining and shows how political actors from dictators to elected officials and from citizen activists to social movement leaders incorporate strategic choices about their clothing – ranging from uniforms and business attire to hijab and traditional ethnic attire – in order to advance their political agendas.