Boots, Bread, and Roses
- Emma Tranter
- 14 minutes ago
- 7 min read
How Rama Duwaji’s footwear reveals that, for socialists, fashion is always a material concern.
In the days after Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration, I read far more about Rama Duwaji’s fashion choices than any other element of the ceremony. Tabloids feigned outrage, noting that her boots, made by sustainable footwear brand Miista, retail for $630: the New York Post declared the look “gave more socialite than socialist” and “flew in the face of [Mamdani’s] ‘everyman’ image.” In typical fashion, the story was picked up by other outlets, even prompting a furious Instagram story from White House secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Many rushed to Duwaji’s defence. Her stylist, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, emphasised that the boots were on loan, bemoaning the presumption of the opposite on her Substack. In Vogue, Anna Cafolla explained how borrowing archival pieces demonstrates Duwaji’s commitment to circular fashion while strategically disassociating her from price tags that might make her seem out of touch. For Forbes, Gemma Allen objected to a history of political wives’ fashion being treated as a morality test while, in Vanity Fair, José Criales-Unzueta wrote on the political considerations both Mamdani and Duwaji have to juggle in their clothing choices.
Vanessa Friedman covered Duwaji’s fashion in more depth for the New York Times, arguing that regardless of the context or intention, her outfit at the inauguration offered an image of “aspiration and coded luxury.” I’m not sure that, compared to similar once-in-a-lifetime formal occasions, this would be so hard for ordinary people to relate to — consider the cost of even a low-budget wedding dress. While Friedman is right that it’s “not as if the general public can borrow a pair of designer boots,” this framing overstates the inaccessibility of luxury fashion. After all, for ordinary people the occasional indulgence from the lower-priced end of the designer market can be far more affordable than formerly accessible amenities – like education, medical care and homeownership – that the average earner has been priced out of.
But how should a socialist dress? It’s a loaded question, especially for a woman. The idea of fashion as a specifically feminine fixation is self-perpetuating; growing up with the expectation of interest and finding our appearance under the harsh scrutiny of a patriarchal world, it can easily become a central concern in our daily lives. I often think of Rosemary Hill describing what happens between women and their clothes as “a kind of third rail of female experience.” Coded as a woman’s world, inaccurate as that might be throughout the industry itself, fashion is often considered frivolous and indulgent.
It’s not only reactionaries who perceive fashion as a hypocritical indulgence for a socialist; leftists themselves frequently joke about the personal conflict between their politics and the allure of materialism. “Marx failed to consider…” begins a popular joke format. Of course, this sentiment is tongue-in-cheek, not exactly expressing a sincere fear that socialist politics cannot accommodate “how good life feels when you wear a brown suede jacket,” but it does gesture to widely held views of socialism as aesthetically bleak and austere.
But there is no avoiding that others will read into what we choose to wear. Even if you believe that left-wing politics necessitate a rejection of luxury and frivolity, there are aesthetic choices that you will have to make that communicate such disinterest. Much is made of the scene in The Devil Wears Prada in which Meryl Streep explains why her assistant’s unfashionable sweater has everything to do with the fashionable world of the magazine she runs. It is perhaps a facile view of the many contexts any one garment can be understood in, but it does at least illustrate how influential some of these contexts are. Anti-fashion is itself a style, and the aesthetic history that has influenced the creation and design of clothing is never absent. Even if we have chosen a garment for solely practical reasons, it continues sartorial communication with the world regardless of our intention.
Practical choices can become more calculated aesthetic messaging, too – just think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s worn trainers, shared on her social media to illustrate the mileage she’d racked up door-knocking. What had been a practical choice became symbolic of her tireless efforts canvassing, framing herself as a politician winning by a “shoe-leather campaign”, the underdog connecting to would-be constituents in person.
A shyness of high fashion is understandable for a socialist under scrutiny, given that more than a luxury industry, it is one that has often had a troubling relationship to fascism. Coco Chanel famously had Nazi ties, attempting to use the German occupation of France to seize control of her company from her Jewish business partners, while Hugo Boss was a committed Nazi whose company manufactured SS uniforms and Cristóbal Balenciaga designed for the family of Spanish dictator General Franco. Plenty of designers today dress the women (and men) associated with President Trump, even if perhaps they are wary of publicising it too much; brands that have designed custom looks for Ivanka Trump include Oscar de La Renta and Givenchy.
As such, Karefa-Johnson’s thoughtful styling choices, rooted in vintage pieces and loans, work to distance Duwaji’s image from that of the wealthy, indulgent client of luxury goods conglomerates. Public figures occupy a difficult space regarding their fashion, particularly those, like Duwaji, who have not exactly sought to be in such a spotlight – their clothes are often read as advertisement and influence. Moreover, I wonder what we concede as socialists when our approach to fashion requires so many caveats. Why should we accept that luxuries, and even beauty in the abstract, are by default the realm of the wealthy few?
In all this outrage, few have articulated what they believe is an appropriate alternative to good, expensive shoes. Of course, your average metropolitan fashion girlie is practised in the art of bagging designer items for a bargain, but these excuses mean little to right-wing tabloids. This leaves cheap shoes, poorly made from cheap materials by underpaid workers in sweatshops.
Miista, the London-based brand whose Shelley shoes were the cause of all this controversy, has its own factory in northern Spain, where their shoes and garments are made by skilled artisans. The brand has emphasized their slow fashion approach and commitment to craft, even working with local schools to support the next generation of artisans.
Meanwhile, as fast fashion accelerates at an unimaginable pace, garment workers suffer dangerous working conditions and poor pay across the globe. In 2013, over 1100 people, mostly garment workers, died in the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. While industry conditions have ostensibly improved, a factory fire last year in Dhaka killed sixteen, recalling similar fires in Pakistan, Egypt and Indonesia. In Leicester, UK, garment factories pay far below the minimum wage, often exploiting workers’ immigration status and limited English skills to do so, while in Southern California, the US Department of Labor found widespread violations among garment manufacturers. Perhaps even worse, while researching this piece, it was striking how much reporting on sweatshop labor is already out of date, given that the worst offenders in fast fashion are now significantly outdone by Shein and Temu.
When we abstract fashion from the labor that it depends on, we lose sight of each and every garment as a material object. At the Tate Britain’s ‘Sargent and Fashion’ exhibition in 2024, I was struck by how little attention was drawn to the production and construction of garments, even as the very dresses John Singer Sargent had painted were displayed alongside his portraits. But in one corner, next to a portrait of socialite and suffragist Adele Meyer, a book lay open in a display case. The book was Makers of Our Clothes, a report by Meyer and trade unionist Clementina Black, investigating conditions of garment workers in London. The report was part of the efforts of the Anti-Sweating League in campaigning against the poor conditions in sweatshops, leading to the creation of the Trade Boards Act 1909, which introduced and enforced a minimum wage in the poorest paid trades.
In a moment of sharp class tension, some socialites took a charitable interest in working conditions, especially those of working women. Still, such advocacy was not always welcomed by workers and trade unionists with open arms; during the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, anarchist Emma Goldman’s response to support from socialites dubbed the “mink brigade” was famously chilly, insisting on the necessity for the labor movement’s independence from capitalist philanthropists.
Beyond the centrality of garment-worker organising to labor history, socialists have defended the value and necessity of beauty in everyday life, particularly identifying the production of luxury goods as a place where artistry meets labor. In 1871, when Parisian citizens took control of the city and established the Paris Commune, the Commune’s Federation of Artists was formed, bringing together painters and sculptors with artisans working in the decorative arts. As Kristin Ross discusses in her book Communal Luxury, this inclusion “subvert[ed] the hierarchical relation between art and industry,” a bold stance demanding autonomy and dignity for all artistic workers.
An interesting case study Ross presents is that of communard Napoléon Gaillard, who considered himself a “worker” and an “artist-shoemaker.” In exile after the commune’s brutal end, Gaillard wrote a philosophical treatise titled The Art of the Shoe, which Ross notes sought to argue that the opposition “between the useful and the beautiful” was transcended by shoemakers, who therefore “should be accorded the dignity and remuneration [they] deserved.” His vision, Ross explains, was “a shoe made at last ‘not for the foot as it is, but for the foot as it should be,’” instead of the “narrow, pointed, deforming instrument of torture” that was the modern shoe. Last year, fashion entrepreneur and artist Ramdane Touhami took inspiration from Gaillard, naming an artisanal leather shoe in his honour, with a lengthy dedication to “comrade Napoléon Gaillard” inscribed on the insoles.
At the mayoral inauguration, Lucy Dacus sang “Bread and Roses”, a folk song that began as a poem by James Oppenheim. The song has long been associated with trade unionism and feminism, voicing demands that, along with “bread” (the meeting of the most basic physical needs), “roses” are also needed: “art and love and beauty.” The slogan which inspired the song also influenced the DSA logo; the song’s inclusion says a lot about the image Mamdani wishes to project and the commitments he wishes to make central to his tenure.
As the right wing press and politicians no doubt continue to look to Mamdani & Duwaji’s lifestyle for points of attack (certain, as Ross says of the commune’s critics, “that sharing could only mean the sharing of misery,”) we can take a lot from those who have fought for a world “where everyone, instead, would have [their] share of the best.” It’s a concern that spans from the hand that makes a shoe to the foot that wears it. A refusal to see a more equal world as one of only scarcity but, as Dacus sang during the inauguration, one built on “the sharing of life’s glories.” 🌀
Emma Tranter is a writer and bookworker based in London. She writes about literature, fragrance and feminism at her Substack, Heart Notes, and is online everywhere @emmatranter_.