Should fashion and politics go hand in hand?

Week four’s “Women, Citizenship and the Politics of Dress in Twentieth-Century Philippines” by Mina Roces brings attention to the politics behind and conveyed by fashion. Roces writes about Filipino traditional garb and how it is usually worn by women rather than men. Instead, men would wear Western-style clothing. Roces feels that this distinction conveys a very biased idea about Filipino women: