A not so ordinary story of disobedience: The ‘Little White Dress’ as a contemporary manifesto?

Abstract

When US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez debuted at Met Gala in September 2021, her white dress with the words ‘Tax the rich’ scrawled in large red letters spawned a fierce debate on the political message conveyed. In this article, we want to reconfigure the choice of Ocasio-Cortez from a cultural perspective and make sense of the ongoing legacy of the ‘Little White Dress’, a garment that appears as a sort of canvas to express social and political statements. Its genealogy is indeed complex and obscure. Following Naomi Lubrich’s reconstruction, the dress appeared during the French Revolution probably as a sartorial tribute to democracy modelled on an ancient Greek women’s gown, but it was also worn by Queen Marie Antoinette as a symbol of innocence and martyrdom. It was then adopted by Napoleon’s wife Joséphine as a recalling of her Caribbean ascent and fully integrated into the imperial fashion as a sign of the sobriety of classical antiquity. During the Revolution and the Empire, women’s magazines matched the dress with an astonishing range of exotic accessories, showing how polyvalent the dress was; its meaning, however, grew more and more connected to the political sphere and from time to time linked with colonialism, Jewish emancipation and the abolition of slavery. In the recent scenario, the dress has reappeared in some important cultural events, shining for its talent to support political messages and challenging the observers to make sense of its polyhedric nature.