If Walmart sold a Democratic Resistance Starter Kit, it would probably come with a kaffiyeh, a green abortion-rights bandanna, a pink blazer and a black T-shirt reading NO KINGS in a font that suggests democracy has approximately 15 minutes left. Batteries not included; placard sold separately. For the more traditional Democrat, there is, of course, the Heritage Collection: an immaculate white pantsuit, preferably worn en masse, in homage to the suffragists.
Over the past decade, Democrats have developed an extraordinarily specific political wardrobe. There are clothes for reproductive rights, clothes for Palestinian solidarity, clothes for resisting Donald Trump, clothes for invoking the suffragists and, occasionally, clothes for doing several of these things at once. At the 2024 State of the Union, Representatives Summer Lee, Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib wore kaffiyehs in solidarity with Palestinians, while Democratic women filled the chamber in suffragist white to make a statement about reproductive rights.
Democratic congresswomen also wore the color during Trump's first term, including the spectacularly coordinated sea of white at his 2019 State of the Union. They returned to it in 2024 and, this past February, more than a dozen Democratic congresswomen pulled the white suits back out for Trump's 2026 State of the Union, this time to protest the SAVE America Act. In between, there were other collections.
In 2022, Democratic members of Congress including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Tlaib marched to the Supreme Court wearing specially made green bandannas reading "Won't Back Down" to protest the overturning of Roe v. For Trump's 2025 address to Congress, Democratic women switched to pink. Representative Teresa Leger Fernández, chair of the Democratic Women's Caucus, explained that pink was a color of "power and protest"; Nancy Pelosi joined dozens of Democratic women in the coordinated display.
Elsewhere in the chamber, Representative Maxwell Frost wore a black shirt declaring "NO KINGS LIVE HERE," while Representative Delia Ramirez went with "NO KING. NO COUP." And then there is the look Democrats would probably prefer we forget: June 2020, when Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and other Democratic leaders knelt in the Capitol wearing kente cloth stoles after the murder of George Floyd. The textile is deeply rooted in Ghanaian culture and associated with royalty, identity and ceremony.
On congressional Democrats, the intended message was solidarity, but the (very memorable) resulting photograph looked considerably more complicated. The concept of a uniform isn't relegated to Washington either. Walk around almost any heavily liberal neighborhood in America, and you can often identify the politics before you hear them.
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