Here’s why Brooklyn Decker, Amy Schumer, and dozens of powerful women are wearing pink suits
If you follow strong women on Instagram, your feed is probably packed with them wearing a bright pink suit. They’ve been spotted on powerful women across industries, including model Brooklyn Decker, comedian Amy Schumer, Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza, and dozens of others. In the run-up to the election—with Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket—these women are using their platforms to champion female ambition in a new campaign called Ambition Suits You.
The campaign is a joint effort between Argent, whose suits are favored by women in office including Harris and Hillary Clinton, and Supermajority, an organization that hopes to mobilize two million women to become organizers, activists, and leaders ahead of the 2020 election.
Supermajority is the brainchild of Garza, National Domestic Workers Alliance director Ai-jen Poo, and former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards. The organization has been training volunteers, holding phone banks, and throwing events to get more women to vote.
“Even though women are the majority as a voting block, women are still considered a special interest group,” says Poo. “We saw this incredible ambition on behalf of women to not just protect our democracy and participate in it, but to shape the future. We wanted to channel this energy into the most important election of our lifetimes.”
While it’s true that more women are in positions of power in politics and corporate America than ever before, biases against ambitious women persist. Women running for office are regularly described as unlikeable, and some worry that Harris’s political ambitions will be held against her. This is part of a broader, global problem. A United Nations report released this year explored biases across many dimensions—including whether respondents thought men made better political leaders and business executives—and found that 90% of people, both male and female, display prejudices against women.
These bright pink suits are designed to normalize and celebrate female ambition. As I’ve written about in the past, the suit has long been a symbol of male power. For decades, women have worn it to fit into male-dominated spaces.
But recently, brands like Argent have reimagined the pant suit as a symbol of female power, by using different color palettes and silhouettes. And with less than a month to go before the 2020 election, powerful women wearing pink suits to prove that female candidates deserve to be all over the ballot, and to urge the rest of us to elect them into office.
“We think this is the time for women to boldly own our collective power,” says Sali Christeson, Argent’s founder. “We wanted to create a visual representation of this power.” (Argent sold out of the pink suit a day after it launched, but it is currently restocking.)
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