Resistance Dressing Through The Decades

The white suits of the suffragettes. The leg-revealing dresses of the 1920s flappers. The embracing of pants in the 1940s. The miniskirt craze during the 1960s sexual revolution. The power suit of the 1980s. For centuries, women's fashion has long served as a powerful tool for societal resistance, challenging norms, and pushing boundaries around gender, class, race, and power. “It's about particular issues,” says fashion historian, author, and curator Emma McClendon to TZR, explaining that the concept of resistance dressing can manifest in several ways. “There are certain style elements that have come to represent rebellion and resistance within just popular culture. I think protest T-shirts. I think wearing of denim, even leather jackets. And some of these elements are culturally coded as resistance dressing because of their association with different protest movements throughout, in particular, the 20th century.”

More obvious and blatant forms of resistance dressing have included the aforementioned white suffragette suit. “Also, during the civil rights movement, two different approaches to dressing,” says McClendon. “On the one hand, there was the Sunday best approach, that was really championed and popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers in a very visible way. At the same time, there were the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee students involved in civil rights who adopted denim overalls as a symbol of resistance and solidarity, in particular with working class and agricultural laboring in Black communities in the south.”

As you can see, defiant fashion has taken on various forms over the years. Ahead, TZR explores the approach — past, present, and future — as it specifically pertains to women.

The Past

Leveraging fashion as an act of rebellion has likely occurred since the beginning of time. However, women’s role in the practice has really hit its stride over the past 100-150 years, arguably beginning with the creation of bloomers (more on that below). Since then, each decade has seen some form of resistance dressing, both flagrant and subtle. “There’s a big reason you have so many of these moments,” says Anne Higonnet, professor of art history at Barnard College and author of Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution. “So you'd think, ‘Well, why didn't the first one work, or the second, or the third? Why do we have to keep coming back to this?’ It’s because there's always a tension between the objectification of women's bodies and their rebellions.”

The historian adds that, while many of these intentional fashion moves may be rooted in rebellion and disruption, they also run the risk of being misinterpreted to objectify women even more. “So that allows these cycles to have to keep on happening because a lot of the gains that women make in these rebellion moments get partly canceled out by the world reacting by saying, ‘Oh, now they're even better toys for us to play with.’”

Ahead, are some key examples of said tension (although far from comprehensive) from the past century or so.

1850s: Bloomers & The Rational Dress Movement

In the mid-19th century, Amelia Bloomer advocated for women to wear looser pants under shorter skirts, a practical and liberating alternative to restrictive corsets and long skirts. Known as “bloomers,” they sparked controversy and symbolized the fight for women’s freedom and equality. The undergarments also signaled the start of a movement away from impractical women’s wear, questioning the control society exerted over women’s bodies.

While considered overtly demure and conservative by today’s standards, Higonnet explains the look was met with “shock and horror” at the time of its debut. “What they were seeing was the outline of women's legs, and they were seeing that women's legs moved,” she explains. “It's the same reason, why people were shocked by women in pants. It's because when women wear pants, you can see that their bodies move. In the most basic primal sense, it gives a power and humanity to women's bodies. Oh, they can move their limbs!”

1920s: Flapper Style

The flapper era saw women rejecting Victorian modesty for short skirts, bobbed hair, and loose-fitting dresses that allowed for more movement. This style was often paired with smoking and drinking — behaviors previously associated with men. The flapper look embodied the liberated spirit of the 1920s, pushing back against gender norms and paving the way for greater sexual and social freedom for women.

“The flappers were actually wearing quite constraining underwear,” says Higonnet. “But certainly the skirts were shorter and the legs were seen, and there was a lot of dancing that became the symbol of seeing the legs. But then the way of fighting back against the affirmative side of that was to say, ‘Oh, well, now women's legs beneath the knees are a great erogenous zone that we all get to enjoy and drool over and desire.’”

1940s: Rosie The Riveter & Pants

During World War II, women working in factories donned trousers for the first time as they took on jobs traditionally reserved for men. This shift represented their increased role in the workforce and challenged the idea that pants were only for men. The look became iconic through the “Rosie the Riveter” posters, symbolizing women's strength, independence, and the ability to work alongside men.

1960s: Miniskirts & Sexual Liberation

The miniskirt, popularized by Mary Quant and adopted by iconic model Twiggy, became an emblem of sexual freedom and rebellion. Women of all ages wore them to express independence from traditional, conservative dress codes. The miniskirt was a bold statement against the idea that women’s bodies needed to be hidden, reflecting the era’s push for women’s sexual autonomy and broader liberation movements.

However, despite its original mission, the look was exclusive in nature. “The ideal physique to wear the new mini styles was very young and very thin, which gave rise to dieting culture,” said McClendon in an April 2023 article for The Standard. “Women were increasingly expected to obtain and maintain a fashionable physique.”

1980s: The Power Suit

As more women entered corporate jobs, power suits with sharp shoulder pads became the uniform. The suit was a way to claim authority in male-dominated spaces and reframe femininity to fit the corporate world. It became a symbol of ambition and professionalism for women, representing the desire for equality in the workplace.

“The power suit was fabulous,” says Higonnet, noting iconic designer Thierry Mugler as a pioneer of the look. “The compromise he made with the power suit was that the shoulders were big and the overall silhouette had a lot of strength to it, but there was also often a lot of cleavage, a lot of constrictive shaping around the waist that made for a small waist and big hips. And so in a way, the concession was a re-sexualization of women's bodies in some ways.”

The Present

Amidst the increasingly rapid trend cycle of a post-COVID world, a few have emerged that can easily be construed as “resistant.” There’s the meteoric rise of gender-fluid fashion, which challenges the binary division of clothing into "male" and "female" categories. Women are embracing traditionally masculine clothing to defy gender norms and assert that clothing need not define one’s identity.

“After the 2016 election, [there was a] rise in particular of suits and tailoring and even sneakers and more comfortable clothing for women coming into the spaces of high fashion,” says McClendon, referencing the first presidential win of Donald Trump. The election triggered a “questioning” and hyper-realization of the treatment of women in terms of gender in a broader social sense, but also in this real visceral physical sense. “There really was an embrace of more comfort and different silhouettes that were not necessarily gendered in a strictly feminine sense [...] So, resistance dressing can take the form of going against those expectations.”

Higonnet points to Celine alum Phoebe Philo a pioneer in this new frontier of androgynous dressing. “I think the magic of Phoebe Philo is that she's found this sweet spot between the authority of clothes that are coded masculine and a feminine fluidity of silhouette, which is a very, very hard balance to find,” says the historian. “But I think she finds it over and over and over again. And I think that that's why she's very fascinating to a lot of fashion people.”

Another movement having a clear moment — literally and figuratively — is the “free the nipple” or “naked” look, which ultimately encourages women to dress for comfort and self-acceptance, challenging body shaming and restrictive beauty standards. This includes embracing bralessness or wearing clothes that society may label as revealing. This movement calls for the de-stigmatization of women’s bodies, rejecting traditional ideals of modesty and allowing for more freedom in how women choose to present themselves.

While not directly fashion-related, the recent celebrity shift to cleaner, makeup-free faces is also aligned with the rejection of traditional views of beauty and glamour. “I think a current example of this is Pamela Anderson, who refuses to wear makeup even when she's at red carpet events and in public settings,” says McClendon. “These are forms of that type of resistance now.” (Before Anderson, Alicia Keys famously eschewed makeup for a clean, bare face back in 2016, and stuck to the approach for years.)

The Future

With last week’s election ushering in a second Trump presidential term, it seems another era of resistance fashion is nigh. In fact, within days, Vogue writer Hannah Jackson observed an immediate reaction to the results. In a Nov. 6 article for the publication, she noted: “The first two young women I saw after I left my apartment were also cloaked in head-to-toe black. Walking down the train platform in Williamsburg, Brooklyn felt like a funeral procession.” For her — and many — the mourning attire served as a “salve” and “coping mechanism.” Perhaps this is resistance in itself. Or perhaps it will evolve into something else, something more anger-fueled and defiant. Or maybe not.

“What we saw in 2016 was an embrace of the dad sneakers, big suits, this rise in the body-positivity movement, that was a real momentum moment,” says McClendon. “One thing that we've seen that's different to 2016, in the lead-up to this election, is that there’s been a clear shift in the conversation around women's bodies and inclusivity.” The curator lists the thunderous return of The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show and the meteoric rise of Ozempic as prime examples of this shift.

“We've got the incredible shrinking of countless celebrities right before our eyes, and mixed with a clear reversal of the shift that had been happening towards greater representation of plus-size, mid-size, and non-white models on runways,” she says. “All of this has been very potently visible and happening over the last few years. So I'm curious to see if the election has an impact on that.”

Higonnet’s view is hopeful, if not idealistic. “You can’t step into the same river twice,” she says frankly. “You can't actually really roll back time. So eventually the cycle will go into another cycle and there'll be more gains. I think the future is Phoebe Philo-like. Through the innovative use of materials and construction, we arrive at clothing [...] that gives women authority.”