Power Dressing: Style as Status

Victorian suffragettes advocating for women's rights

By javier

Across history from the royal courts to corporate boardrooms, fashion has long been a language of authority. Power dressing is more than aesthetic- its strategy. There is much more to play than simply how the attire looks, there is storytelling and self-definition sewn into the clothing. There are many notable figures in history, Elizabeth I, Grace Jones, Ethel Smyth and the creators of the power suits of the 1980’s, show us how clothing can make status visible.  

Power dressing, fashioned by identity also tells us who we are, and who we would like to become.  

The onset of Elizabeth’s reign in 1558 brought her to a world of politics entirely run by men. She had to use her clothing as a tool to assert her power. Portraits of her capture her in gowns richly adorned with pearls, elaborate embroidery, oversized ruffs, and jewelled bodices.  

These were all coded messages. The pearls resembled purity and the divine right; broader ruffs enlarged her authority. Luxurious textiles symbolised wealth, stability and control.  

She created the image of the “Virgin Queen” in a time of compromised female authority, she stood unrivalled, and her style spoke of her power.  

Ethel Smyth and the suffragettes: 

In the early 20th century, the politically charged clothing became a renewed form of visual communication. One of the passionate advocates of the British suffragette movement was Ethel Smyth. This movement recognised the power of a collective presentation. The suffragettes used three memorable colours to represent their movement. Purple was used to represent dignity, white was used to represent purity and green was used to represent hope.  

The movement displayed a strategic use of an aesthetic to visually unify the movement. When they marched through the streets of Britain in their white dresses with coloured sashes, they showed respectability and order and defied the stereotypes of hysteria and disorder.  

Smyth also conducted fellow suffragettes through a prison cell with a toothbrush after being incarcerated for activism, an iconic scene that even when in prison, conveyed the defiance of the suffragette movement.  

Power dressing in this instance for the suffragettes was a form of collective identity, and solidarity was stitched into the fabric of their clothing.  

Grace Jones: 

By reinterpreting the traditional concepts of feminine fashion, Grace Jones has firmly established herself as an influential figure in women’s punk rock style, working with French designer Jean-Paul Goude, she created her own vision of what it means to be feminine and as a result, developed style that embodies androgyny, power and dominance.  

In the late 1970’s into the 1980’s, many women in the west were seeking empowerment through their clothing choices; Grace Jones helped pave the path for women to redefine feminine aesthetics into something more masculine and thus more powerful.  

Dressed in sharp shouldered suits with sculpted shapes, masculine cuts, and over the top glamour. Grace Jones blurred the line between masculine and feminine styles before there even was an idea of a fluid gender identity that existed within the mainstream culture. Jones didn’t dress to fit into power; she redesigned its silhouette. In her case power dressing became avant-garde resistance.

Status was no longer inherited or institutional, it was constructed.  

The 1980’s power suit: authority rewritten.  

By the 1980’s more women were entering into corporations than ever before, fashions changed to accommodate this demographic. The power suit was defined by structured shoulders, clinched waist with neutral or bold monochromatic colour schemes, sharp tailoring became uniform of ambition.  

Designers such as Giorgio Armani softened traditional men’s tailoring for women along with other designers created powerful silhouettes that demonstrated power.  

The exaggerated shoulder pads of these suits were designed to imitate men’s shoulder widths and allow women to take up space in male-only boardrooms. Power suits were not intended to be a copy of men’s clothing; they were made to be tools for negotiating with environments that had been designed for men and to demonstrate to men their rights to authority in those environments. 

The power suit shifted from using royalty as a reason for power to creating a corporate strategy.  

Style as status: then and now. 

It is clear throughout these historical moments what has remained consistent in the quest for power using clothing. Clothing always precedes voice, title and action in shaping how one is perceived for example Elizabeth used opulence to establish sovereignty, suffragettes used collective action to legitimise their protests, Grace Jones used androgyny to redefine how dominant people looked, women of the 1980’s used tailoring to assert corporate authority.  

Power dressing is never about clothing only but rather a way of creating identity architecture with which an individual demonstrates their authority outside in order to support their authority inside. Although in today's world status is demonstrated by minimal luxury brand manipulations, cultural symbols or digital proof, the principle has not changed.   

The clothes we wear send messages of power.