Kamala Harris Is Dressing to Be President

Over the last week, as Kamala Harris has stepped into the spotlight as the likely Democratic nominee for president, she has done so with a high-wattage smile, a pop culture boost and a cascade of endorsements. Suddenly everything about her seems to have been electrified, except one thing.

Her clothes.

In her campaign stops in Milwaukee; Indianapolis; Wilmington, Del.; Pittsfield, Mass.; and Central Florida, Ms. Harris has appeared in the neutral pantsuits she adopted as her vice-presidential uniform, in shades of black, dark blue, burgundy and beige, with the occasional jolt of salmon pink or baby blue. The rest of the world may be embracing the “Kamala is brat” meme in all of its acid green glory, but the candidate herself is not.

Instead she is wearing her usual tone-on-tone silk shells and pussy-bow blouses. Her usual signature pearls and 70-millimeter Manolo Blahnik heels. For the last four years, that was the perfect camouflage of the country’s No. 2 executive: somber, deferential, kind of dull.

But does it look presidential?

In an election in which so much about one candidate is potentially pioneering — she could be the first female president, the first female president of color, the first president of South Asian descent — that is a key question.

“How you present yourself as a woman in leadership is an issue every woman in leadership has to consider,” said Ashley Allison, the chief executive of Watering Hole Media and a former Biden-Harris campaign adviser. Ms. Harris, she said, “is trying to break what is potentially the biggest, thickest, largest glass ceiling there is.” How she equips herself for that matters.