When Biden’s 39-year-old daughter, Ashley Biden, showed up for Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 21, 2021, what she was hearing made some people take notice. Not everyone noticed it at the time, but some people did, and the number of people who did notice is now going up. She appeared at the virtual event wearing a tuxedo instead of something more traditional for women to wear. The designer of the suit was the famous designer Ralph Lauren. The outfit for Ashley had tailored plants and the white blouse that she didn’t button up. She has left the bowtie undone. If necessary, there was a black facemask that went with it to stay safe during the pandemic. She wore heels with them instead of traditional men’s shoes. The shoes were from Chloe Gosselin and they were T-straps. It was a surprising choice to have given the expectations for what women and men are supposed to wear during formal occasions. Ashley decided to instead turn those expectations on their head.
Despite being a part of a powerful family, the Bidens’, Ashley decided to focus on helping other people instead. She works as a social worker but still went full out with her outfit. She was turning threads quite often at the event, even if the wider media didn’t take as much notice. She wore her hair long and in a ponytail and she spent quite a lot of time dancing with her parents during the inauguration. It’s not like other people in the Biden family didn’t also stand out, like Dr. Jill Biden with her white dress made by Gabriela Hearst. One of the granddaughters, Maisy put on a gown by Rodarte that she wore with sneakers underneath. Ashley talked about how she tended to help calm down the household while she was growing up with everyone else. She recalls that she was often playing peacemaker and hated when she saw anyone being bullied when she was a younger girl. She said that when she was around 9 years old, she would talk to her father, President Biden, about how unfair it was that dolphins kept getting caught in tuna nets and killed. She even brought her research and data to prove her point.
Ashley then went on to work as the executive director for the Deleware Center for Justice, which is a nonprofit that helps people who need help. She worked there until 2019 and then went on to do more social work and also create her own companies related to fashion design. While her dress was easy to miss initially, due to the crowd, people are much more interested in it now due to the fact that it was more of a gender mix up and had something to say about women being able to wear anything they want even though, in the past, women were disallowed from wearing anything that men would wear, including suits of any kind. However, now people like Ashley are showing the evening out of the world and the fact that women can wear more and more of what they want to wear in any combination, making for more freedom and equality for women. This is likely going to be a point of contention for some time to come when other people do something controversial.
