White pantsuits at the DNC isn’t just fashion

And this week, its presence will be a visual marker of how much has changed in national politics over the last eight years — as well as the last four weeks.

“Fashion is an absolute language; it’s a universal language,” said theo tyson, curator of fashion arts at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. “It’s, what is that garment, what is that thing that can unify and communicate, very succinctly, very loudly — but also very quietly, very subtly.”

The white outfit has a political history going back over a century. It was a color favored by suffragettes. Barrier-breaking women politicians have turned to white outfits on momentous occasions for decades. Shirley Chisholm wore it in 1969 when she was sworn in as the first African-American woman elected to Congress, and Geraldine Ferraro did the same in 1984 to accept the vice presidential nomination as the first woman on a major party presidential ticket.

After it became a signature look in her unsuccessful 2016 campaign, Clinton wore white again to Trump’s inauguration. House Democratic women, notably then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, wore the color to his 2019 State of the Union address.

Harris herself donned a white suit in 2020 when she gave her acceptance speech as the first woman elected vice president.

It’s an outfit that almost certainly would not have made an appearance before the events of the past month, when Biden stepped aside after his disastrous debate performance and endorsed Harris to take the helm.

The decision transformed the presidential race from a plodding rematch between two older white candidates who both seemed to turn off voters, into a campaign pitting a historic, newer generation candidate in Harris against Trump. The role of gender has taken on outsized importance in the new contest — and not just by virtue of Harris’s identity. The contrast has been heightened by the dominance of abortion rights as an issue in the election and amid a slew of comments from Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, that have demeaned women and Harris’s background.

It’s unclear if Harris herself will return to the color for her Thursday night acceptance speech at the DNC, though she certainly will be aware of the power of whatever image she crafts for that significant moment. The color has also been adopted by Republican women at key moments, including right wing firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wore an all-white ensemble with fur trim when she heckled Biden at his State of the Union, and Trump’s daughters, Ivanka and Tiffany, who were dressed in the color onstage with him at the Republican National Convention last month.

But the crowd at the DNC will likely be dressed that way regardless of Harris’s choice. In addition to Virginia’s delegation, the Democrats’ women’s caucus recently urged its membership to wear white on Thursday for Harris’s speech.

“That statement of having a number of people on the convention floor flooding it with one single, unifying color, and in this case it being white, is incredibly momentous,” said Joanna Rosholm, a former press secretary to first lady Michelle Obama, who compared it to sports fans showing up to games in their team color. “A lot of it will be people seeing it in their feeds later, and that visual, a flood of support, unifying support for the person on stage, is a really powerful visual.”

Marks, the Virginia delegate, acknowledged that the outfit was a reference to Clinton, but said the now-widely understood symbol holds fresh meaning for her this year.

“This is our peaceful, assertive, but not aggressive, statement of solidarity and support for the first female president of the United States,” Marks said. “It’s also definitely a nod to Hillary: It’s what we wore for her, what we wanted to wear for her. It didn’t happen; here we are. It’s not a ‘fight song’ anymore, it’s a symbol of progress and hope.”

That echo to the past is one reason that fashion and culture writer Tom Fitzgerald, of the blog Tom and Lorenzo, hopes Harris will choose something beside the white pantsuit for her speech, saying it is too associated in his mind with Clinton and her loss in 2016.

“It is a powerful symbol — I complete understand why any female politician would want to utilize that symbol,” Fitzgerald said. “It feels like a response to the Trump years, and with [Harris], even though she is running against Trump, I feel we have a chance here to cut the cord completely and put all those symbols behind us.”

Harris has her own collection of iconography that are distinct to her. Her supporters often use the catchphrase “Chucks and pearls,” a reference to her habit of wearing Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers (which she collects) for casual occasions and her frequent donning of pearl necklaces. Pearls hold special significance for her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest historically Black sorority in the United States. Fitzgerald and others also noted the campaign’s manufacturing of camouflage baseball hats, a reference to her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and his fashion choices that speak to the rural Midwest. Those signatures stand in contrast with the red Make America Great Again hats popularized by Trump on the right.

The MFA’s tyson noted that even if Harris were to wear the white pantsuit, her own background would give the garment new meaning. Though the suffrage movement was not inclusive of Black activists, tyson noted that both the historically Black fraternities and sororities and historically Black colleges and universities such as Howard University, of which Harris is a graduate, have traditions and ceremonies that involve wearing all white. The color has been adopted by suffragettes and the historic Black organizations, tyson said, because of its history as ceremonial, as nonthreatening, and as a sign of wealth in that it is pristine. She called it a “soft power” color.

And as a sign of unity on the convention floor, tyson said, a fashion statement makes perfect sense as a political statement.

“You think about all of the different jobs we have and industries and geographies we live in. … It might be the one thing you can do to use your voice,” tyson said, “to don a white suit, or to put on a string of pearls, or to grab a pair of Chucks, and that serves as your resistance.”

Tal Kopan can be reached at tal.kopan@globe.com. Follow her @talkopan.