25N: The Body as Battlefield, the Wardrobe as Resistance

More than sixty years later, the furore has not softened. According to UN Women, around one in three women worldwide has experienced physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. Millions endure threats, coercion, digital harassment and manifestations of psychological abuse, leaving no bruises but creating deep and irreparable fractures. In 2023, over 51,000 women were killed by a partner or family member — an average of 140 femicides every day. Violence persists, mutates and moves from domestic spaces to screens, from the visible to the quiet.

Yet harm is not only physical. It lives in the gaze that scrutinises. In the guilt placed on them. In the question that should never be asked —“what were you wearing?”— and in the suspicion permanently directed at the same bodies. It operates in the everyday, the intimate, the symbolic.

This is why we write today. Because 25N is not a tribute but a reminder: aggression rarely begins with the blow. It takes root much earlier in how a woman is observed, judged and controlled.

Invisible violence often shapes a woman’s entire life. It does not make headlines or appear in statistics; it slips into daily gestures, into small decisions taken to dodge a normalised threat: changing clothes before going out, sending a message upon arriving home, choosing well-lit routes, avoiding certain places, measuring every word. It is not irrational fear — it is constant, forced adaptation to an environment that promises punishment.

Subtle, insidious, suffocating. All this patriarchal logic is rooted in one premise: a woman’s body is available to be questioned, surveyed, disciplined.

This is where fashion enters unwittingly, because judgement always starts with what is perceptible to the eye. Clothing becomes evidence, excuse, alibi. The system shifts responsibility: the victim ends up scrutinised for her outfit, as though brutality were an aesthetic consequence rather than an act of power. Ahead of tragedy, there is perennial conditioning, mistrust, surveillance, self-protection turned routine.

This paradigm has been exposed again and again by movements tired of displaced blame. #MyOutfitIsNotConsent was born in Ireland to highlight the absurdity of linking sexual violence to appearance after a notorious court case involving a minor; #NiUnaMenos made clear we are not dealing with isolated incidents but with a structural pattern that kills and violates; #HandsOffMyHijab reminded everyone that forcing a woman to undress, uncover or obey an imposed dress code is violence as well.

Getting dressed has never been a neutral act. Long before it became an industry, clothing signalled belonging, empowerment or reprimand; a boundary between what was permitted and what was condemned. In a world that audits women relentlessly, fashion has historically operated as a mechanism of control by dictating what must be hidden, what may be shown, what is deemed acceptable. Even so, it has also served as a site of resistance, a subversive artefact.

Throughout the twentieth century, countless women translated clothing into a form of insurrection. Suffragettes chose white to make themselves impossible to ignore. Coco Chanel freed bodies from the corset. Madeleine Vionnet redrew a silhouette once moulded to please. Vivienne Westwood turned provocation into a political stance. None of them spoke merely of style — they discussed freedom, territory, and who is entitled to decide over a body.

That legacy continues, despite the landscape changing. In the digital era, images circulate with a velocity that magnifies their impact, turning garments into immediate statements: Maria Grazia Chiuri reclaiming feminism as public position; Marine Serre crafting a visual universe shaped by environmental, migratory and gendered crises; the now-iconic “Protect the Dolls” T-shirt, a sharp warning against contemporary objectification.

When a community is denied a voice, the body speaks… and clothing answers.

Resistance is also written in images. In a world saturated with visuals, every appearance carries the potential to cross borders, disrupt silence and create a collective archive of dissent. This is not aesthetics for its own sake, but the political force of amplification: the moment when a photograph, a video or a look becomes evidence, solidarity, rupture.

Recent years have made this unmistakable. Cut hair raised as a symbol of Woman, Life, Freedom. Thousands dressed in black during #MeToo, turning mourning into a public denunciation. Racialised bodies reclaiming visibility on covers and timelines under the cry of #SayHerName. Protest no longer belongs solely to the street; it moves through the image that, repeated countless times, tears a hole in the silence.

Within this terrain, fashion operates as an amplifier. A garment, a pose, a frame — each can become a stance. None of this is accidental. Images remember, and resistance must be seen to be acknowledged. Where words falter, the body — and whatever covers it — completes the sentence.