The Final Night of the DNC Featured a Sea of Women (and Some Men) in White—Here’s Why

On day four and the final night of this year's Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Vice President Kamala Harris made history as the first Black and South Asian woman to accept a major party's nomination for president.

To no one's surprise, the official Democratic nominee for president dressed the part, wearing a custom-designed navy wool two-piece suit and matching pussybow blouse by Chloé's creative director, Chemena Kamali.

But Harris wasn't the only one who dressed for the occasion: As the vice president looked out into the United Center crowd in Chicago and gave the most important speech of her political career to date, she saw a sea of white.

According to the Associated Press, Democratic delegates and convention attendees coordinated their outfits—all (or most) wearing white in honor of the women's suffrage movement, which culminated in white women securing the right to vote in 1920. (While some Black women also secured the right to vote at the same time, Black women as a whole weren't granted that right until 1965.)

As the Associated Press notes, the sea of white at the culmination of this year's DNC was not the first time women have evoked the color and paid homage to the feminists who came before during pivotal and historic political moments.

In 2016, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton wore an all-white suit as she took the stage in Philadelphia and accepted the Democratic party's nomination for president. In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro—the first female candidate for vice president—accepted the party's vice presidential nomination wearing white.

In 1968, political icon Shirley Chisholm wore white while becoming the first African American woman to be elected to Congress. And in 2020, Harris herself wore white while addressing the nation in Wilmington, Delaware, for the first time as the first woman, Black person, and South Asian person to be elected vice president.

During her speech, she said she "stands on the shoulders" of the women who came before her—the Chisholms, Ferraros, and Clintons.

In the vice president's history-making acceptance speech, she evoked the women of the past while urging those in attendance to help create a more equitable future as this year's presidential election nears.

"On behalf of my mother and everyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey. On behalf of Americans like the people I grew up with. People who work hard. Chase their dreams. And look out for one another," she said.

"On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth. I accept your nomination for President of the United States of America."