How Rama Duwaji navigates the politics of clothing

Women’s clothing has long been treated as public testimony. Not merely aesthetic, it is read as evidence: of seriousness or frivolity, humility or excess, political alignment or ideological betrayal. Men in public life are allowed the comfort of uniformity. Women are rarely granted that mercy.

That reality helps explain why Rama Duwaji, New York City’s new First Lady, has been scrutinized with such intensity since stepping into the public eye alongside Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Artist before First Lady

Before she became attached to a political office, Duwaji was an artist. Born in Houston and educated in illustration and visual storytelling, her work has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker and The Washington Post.

Her drawings often explore intimacy, memory, and the emotional textures of everyday life. That background matters. It suggests a person already fluent in visual language and acutely aware of how images are read, misread, and projected upon.

When Duwaji appeared at Mamdani’s swearing-in ceremonies at the abandoned City Hall station at midnight on New Year’s eve, and the day after in the more public ceremony, the attention quickly shifted from her presence to her clothes.

The politics of optics

Critics focused on her footwear, Miista boots with a retail price often cited around $600, as proof of hypocrisy, given her husband’s progressive politics.

The criticism ignored a key fact: many of Duwaji’s inauguration pieces were borrowed or rented, styled with an emphasis on circular fashion rather than ownership.

This detail punctures the outrage. The issue was never really the cost of the boots. It was the expectation that a woman connected to leftist politics must perform austerity at all times, that her body must visually enact policy, even when men around her are rarely subjected to the same demand.

Style as a way of deliberate structure

For the private midnight ceremony, Duwaji wore a vintage Balenciaga coat. For the public inauguration, she chose a custom design by Cynthia Merhej of Renaissance Renaissance, a Palestinian-Lebanese designer known for sculptural tailoring and intellectual restraint.

These were not random selections. They formed a pattern of independent designers, archival pieces, clothes that emphasize form and intention over trend.

Duwaji does not dress to disappear, nor does she dress to provoke. Her style is controlled, deliberate, and notably uninterested in appeasement.

What her choices suggest

Her approach offers something quietly radical: she accepts that women’s clothing will be politicized and instead of retreating or overcorrecting, she treats dress as a form of authorship.

The clothes become part of a broader practice, as intentional, contextual, and resistant to simplification.

In a culture that still demands women explain who they are before they are allowed to be seen, that choice speaks loudly, and clearly, and on her own terms.