Decoding Event Fashion: Eight Decades of Style, Signal, and Showing Up

From trade show floors to protest marches, wedding aisles to keynote stages—this is a cultural timeline of what we wore to events and why it mattered. Fashion wasn’t just fabric. It was code.

Editor’s Note

While walking through downtown Nantucket this summer, I stepped into the local shoe museum—and it got me thinking: how much of what we wear has been shaped by the places we go, and more specifically, the events we attend?

From trade shows to protests, galas to conferences, the events industry doesn’t just host culture—it dresses it. For bett…