Look of the Week: Monica Lewinsky reclaims office power dressing in new campaign

Editor’s Note: Featuring the good, the bad and the ugly, ‘Look of the Week’ is a regular series dedicated to unpacking the most talked about outfit of the last seven days.

Photographed against a city skyline in a bright, high-rise office, Monica Lewinsky stands in an ankle-length black dress, cinched at her waist with a leather belt, and cheetah-print pumps. She looks the picture of female empowerment. Of course, anyone familiar with the US political landscape of the mid-1990s knows that wasn’t always the case.

The image is part of a new campaign Lewinsky is fronting for LA-based apparel brand Reformation. Throughout, she is a statuesque figure, striking power poses in a monochrome red twinset or a tailored vest and tie. The collection, titled “You’ve Got the Power,” features blazers and office-appropriate knitwear that the brand hopes will inspire wearers around the world into taking civic action.

“Prioritizing people and the planet has always been a big part of what we do. Voting is one major way to do that,” the brand explains on its website.

“Voting is using our voice to be heard and it’s the most defining — and powerful — aspect of democracy,” Lewinsky added in a statement. “Voting is always important, but the stakes are especially high this year with voter frustration and apathy threatening to meaningfully impact turnout.”

To this effect, Reformation has promised to donate 100% of the proceeds of one piece in the collection — a cream sweatshirt emblazoned with its “You’ve Got the Power” title as a Pop Art-style slogan — to the US-based nonpartisan voter advocacy organization Vote.org. “A powerful outfit alone isn’t going to create a more perfect union,” read a press release. “But putting it on and going to the polls is a damn good place to start.”

In 1995, the then-21-year-old Lewinsky joined the White House as an unpaid summer intern. (She was subsequently hired to paid positions there and at the Pentagon.) In just a manner of years, however, her image and career were destroyed after authorities learned of a series of sexual encounters she had had with then-President Bill Clinton, leading to a presidential impeachment for Clinton and decades of misogyny, death threats and social alienation for Lewinsky. “Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one,” she said in a 2015 TED Talk. “It was easy to forget that ‘that woman’ was dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken.”

Today, Lewinsky is an avid public speaker on the topic of harassment as well as a strategic advisor to anti-bullying organization Bystander Revolution.

In her debut fashion campaign, Reformation’s styling seems to evoke elements of Lewinsky’s past. In one image, she’s clad in scarlet, head-to-toe; in another — one of the campaign’s only close-up shots — she wears the kind of blacked-out shades used to avoid paparazzi, as she stares ahead, impervious to the camera flash.

“You cannot run away from your narrative,” she told Vanity Fair last year, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the scandal. “Perhaps the most challenging idea I had to come to accept was that there is no shedding or unshackling of the self that sprang from 1998… You can only try to integrate your previous selves with as much compassion as you can muster.”

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