"What are you wearing?" It's the most asked question on the red carpet. It's also the exact same question I was asked after I was raped. One moment it's meant to celebrate fashion and agency. The next it's meant to shame you for the violence that happened to you and blame you. I remember feeling so alone after my assault and being shocked by how much people were blaming the victim. So I decided to reclaim the question.
In 2019, I was at a fashion show and that question came up again: What are you wearing? I had been asked to be there as an activist. In the years since my assault in 2013, I have done a lot of work around survivors' rights to make sure that what happened to me doesn't happen to other people. The question took me back to the aftermath of my rape, but it was a lightbulb moment at the time. I thought, what if we created a space where survivors could ask that question again in a new context that empowered them and celebrated their agency? I wanted to raise awareness about sexual assault in a whole new way by hosting a Survivor Fashion Show during New York Fashion Week.
By this point, I had already done a lot of legislative work through my activism. In 2014, I founded my nonprofit organization, Rise, which focuses on supporting survivors of sexual assault. With the help of my team, I played a key role in drafting what would become the Survivors' Bill of Rights Act of 2016, which passed Congress unanimously and established a series of core protections for survivors. After my rape, I remember walking into my local rape crisis center in Massachusetts and seeing the waiting room filled with other survivors. The greatest injustice I ever experienced wasn't the rape itself, but the subsequent denial of my rights by the country I love. In the state of Massachusetts, rape kits, the evidence collected after an assault, could be destroyed within six months. I had to file for extensions every six months to keep my kit from being destroyed. My bill established that survivors must receive notification of their rights, not have to pay for their rape kit, and be notified of the outcome of a rape kit. Most importantly for my cause, it also extended the retention of rape kits to the full length of the statute of limitations, a matter of years instead of months.
While I've always tried to incorporate my passions into my work, I'd never done anything that really aligned with my love of fashion on a grand scale. So, along with my teammates at Rise, I decided to create a runway event that showed how little the act of sexual assault has to do with what a survivor wears. We hosted the inaugural event in 2021 at the Museum of Modern Art, inviting survivors from all over the world to walk the runway in designer pieces. Dior, 3.1 Phillip Lim, Veronica Beard, and a number of other brands lent a range of outfits, from streetwear to formal dresses, to support our cause.
As I walked down the runway in a custom-made gown designed by artists Suzanne McClelland and Alix Pearlstein and emblazoned with the words of the Survivors' Bill of Rights, I was overcome with a mix of emotions. Alongside me were other survivors and allies, while United Nations ambassadors, diplomats, policymakers, and influencers all gathered to watch. We hoped to capture their attention and, more importantly, inspire their empathy. It took an incredible amount of strength for me to find the courage to publicly confront my trauma. But in that moment, I was not alone.
The fashion show is now an event that we hold every year during New York Fashion Week. It also inspired us to create a traveling exhibition called "What Were You Wearing?", which will debut at the UN Headquarters in 2022. It features 103 mannequins representing the 1.3 billion survivors of sexual violence worldwide. Of those 103, five outfits, including mine, came straight from the closets of survivors who shared their stories with us. Some of the most heartbreaking outfits include a baby diaper, a military uniform, and a child's swimsuit. The goal was to prove that there is no way to distinguish between the outfit a survivor is wearing and the outfits that survivors are not wearing; what we were wearing really didn't matter, and we need to shift our culpability and our focus to the perpetrators and their responsibility. The exhibition has since been on display at our fashion show, at the European Parliament in Brussels, and at the World Health Organization in Geneva.
In September 2022, the exhibition was still gracing the UN headquarters when the Universal Survivor Bill of Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly. This landmark resolution was six years in the making. It outlined and codified a series of basic steps that countries should take to support and protect the rights of survivors of sexual violence. It commits member states to establish gender-responsive legal mechanisms to protect survivors, to expand and invest in judicial and preventive systems, and to ensure that survivors have direct access to justice after their assault.
The adoption of this UN resolution is an important victory, but it is only the beginning. The next phase of our fight is to write a treaty for universal jurisdiction over rape, so that rapists cannot escape justice by fleeing to another country. We have begun drafting this treaty and sharing it with the member states of the United Nations and the World Health Organization, and we plan to implement it next year.
What I wear has always been a conscious choice, even outside of my work with Rise. I also work as a bioastronautical researcher for the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences. As a student at Harvard, I wore comfortable dresses to feel at home; at NASA, I wore polo shirts to commemorate past missions to feel that important legacy; and when I testified before the Senate, I chose to wear bold red dresses to remind myself of my power. Now, every day, I choose an outfit that reflects how I want to feel, whether it's a sharp suit for a political rally or a Vietnamese Today to channel my heritage. This year, as part of Space for Humanity's Citizen Astronaut Program, I will become the first Vietnamese woman to ever go into space. That confidence in what we carry gives us the ability to continue fighting for our dreams, and it has allowed me to achieve mine.
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