Dressing the Resistance: The Visual Language of Protest - Hardcover

by Camille Benda (Author)

Dressing the Resistance is a celebration of how we use clothing, fashion, and costume to ignite activism and spur social change.

Weaving together historical and current protest movements across the globe, Dressing the Resistance explores how everyday people and the societies they live in harness the visual power of dress to fight for radical change. American suffragettes made and wore dresses from old newspapers printed with voting slogans. Male farmers in rural India wore their wives' saris while staging sit-ins on railroad tracks against government neglect. Costume designer and dress historian Camille Benda analyzes cultural movements and the clothes that defined them through over 150 archival images, photographs, and paintings that bring the history of activism to life, from ancient Roman rebellions to the #MeToo movement, from twentieth-century punk subcultures to Black Lives Matter marches.

Includes a Foreword by Ane Crabtree, costume designer, The Handmaid's Tale.

Author Biography

Camille Benda is an LA-based costume designer and Head of Costume Design at California Institute of the Arts, School of Theater. Benda designs costumes for film, theater, and commercials across the US and Europe and regularly speaks on dress history topics. She has a Masters of Fine Art in Theatre Design from Yale School of Drama, and a Masters of Art from the Courtauld Institute in the History of Dress.