Fashion giant Vogue honored Vice President-elect Kamala Harris by featuring her as their February cover. The story and accompanying photos were published over the weekend.
“Vice President Harris has already been the ‘first’ many times in her career,” Michelle Obama told writer Alexis Okeowo. “This is a woman who knows what she’s doing. It can’t be about trying to please everybody or prove to certain people you’re good enough for the job. And the vice president wouldn’t be where she is today if she let that kind of thing get to her.”
Tyler Mitchell, who was infamously chosen by Beyoncé for her Vogue cover in September 2018, photographed Harris. The cover poses Madame VP in front of a draped pink curtain over a velvet, apple green background— a tribute to her time as an Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sister at Howard University. Known for casual, comfy footwear, she dons low-top black Converse.
“To me, their colors conjure images of Black women standing together,” Mitchell said of the cover. “[United] in sisterhood throughout time, affirming one another.”
As we inch toward inauguration day, the historical nature of Harris stepping into office as vice president invigorates the already big sigh of relief of President Donald Trump’s removal from office.
“As a brown-skinned South Asian woman has and is making her professional life in primarily white institutions, it was impossible not to see myself in her,” Okeowo’s friend, a psychiatry resident at Yale University, explained. “Hearing the names Kamala Devi Harris and [her mother] Shymala Gopalan Harris read out loud during a presidential press conference was flat-out thrilling.”
President-elect @JoeBiden and I share a vision of America where opportunity is within reach for all the people.
Where everyone can see a brighter future for themselves and their children. We’ll build that together.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 11, 2021
While honoring the magnificence of this moment, Okeowo took a critical lens to the moderate politics of Harris and President-elect Joe Biden. The pair ran on a message of unity, firm that we all actually have the same needs. Despite calls for abolition and student loan debt cancellation across the country, Harris and Biden support policing reform and have made no commitment to cancelling the debt. Still, following the darkness of the Trump administration, the duo will be a severely needed breath of fresh air— our only glimmering hope to make it out alive of this pandemic and recession.
“We can agree that we have more in common that what separates us,” Harris said. “And agree that it’s not in the best interest of who we are as a nation to have any one group suffer for who they are.”
You can read the full story here.
