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Kamala Harris’ metamorphosis is underway
The Met Gala isn’t the first time Kamala Harris has skipped her go-to pantsuit for something fresh. She’s been subtly experimenting with palette and silhouette, including when she ditched her signature look on Easter Sunday, nailing 2025’s hottest color trend — butter yellow. But the Met marked a watershed moment: the first time she’s used fashion not simply to shift style, but also to shift register. No longer dressed for duty, she appeared instead as a figure navigating the nebulous space between former elected official and enduring cultural inscription.
In this, she follows a path the Obamas have carved through the delicate terrain of post-office influence. Michelle Obama, in particular, has offered a steady blueprint. Obama’s impressive style transformation since leaving the White House has leveraged authority and visibility to move from political emblem to cultural arbiter. Harris’ stunning appearance at the Met feels like an early note in a similar transition. It’s a deliberate insertion Off-White’s creative director, IB Kamara, was quick to contextualize. In his statement to Vogue, Kamara spoke of “honoring Black culture and iconicity,” situating Harris within the tradition of Black dandyism, an aesthetic rooted in subversion as well as style. “The true core of dandyism is rooted in confidence and strength,” he said. “There is no person who exemplifies these characteristics more than Kamala D. Harris.”
And if the Met Gala is, as its spectacle suggests, the truest marker of cultural capital in American public life, there lies an irresistible institutional irony in the fact that her former opponent, Donald Trump, remains permanently banned from attending.
