Dressing the Resistance: The Visual Language of Protest

by Camille Benda

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 over 150 archival images, photographs, and paintings that bring the history of activism to life, from ancient Roman rebellions to the #MeToo movement, from twentieth-century punk subcultures to Black Lives Matter marches.

Includes a Foreword by Ane Crabtree, costume designer, The Handmaid's Tale .

Genres: Fashion, Nonfiction, History, Design

208 pages, Hardcover

Published October 19, 2021

Reviews

[Rachel Pollock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the good fortune to hear Camille Benda lead a session at the recent ATCA conference, and attendees received a special discount code for her incredible new book, Dressing the Resistance: The Visual Language of Protest Through History.

The book is exceptionally wide-ranging, from discussing dissident fashion in 1970s punk to revolutionary France and beyond. Many of the books Benda uses as references by fashion scholars like Aileen Ribiero, Dick Hebdige, and Valerie Steele were seminal favorites I read back when I first began exploring an interest in analyzing and decoding the language of fashion.

Of particular interest were the sections on the significances of various colors in resistance movements in global cultures/contexts and the deployment of sartorical conformity as a tool in protest movements. Sections on the interaction between craft and protest garments--knitting, crochet, and millinery--are also fascinating, fun, and inspiring.

This beautifully-designed magazine-sized hardback book would make a great display volume on a coffee table as well as an excellent addition to a research library collection.

ETA: This review originally appeared on my blog, La Bricoleuse.

[Pippa Catterall · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s an impressive range of examples and images in this highly readable book. It ranges widely, more geographically than chronologically, though with a focus on easier to source examples from the UK and US. As an general guide and teaching tool it has a lot to recommend it. I suppose I do, however, have two caveats. The minor one is that this work (understandably given the interests of the author) is organised around dress and styles, rather than modes of protest. It’s the latter I am more interested in. More serious, for me, is the development of the argument. This basically concerns the tension between conformity and rebellion as articulated through dress. This is an important theme, but it’s centrality could be made more explicit at points.

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of the relationship between clothing, or lack of them, in different movements. A fair number I'd not heard about and some I misunderstood! Just don't really know where to go from here to read more

[Millie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me awhile to return this book to the library because, frankly, I wanted to own it. The photos are beautiful but the historical context is even better. I found myself marking pages to note activists, political movements and creators. Really cool book. Can't recommend it enough.