On Election Day, the Hillary Clinton White Suit Effect

“I was watching the debate with a group of friends, and we all said, spontaneously, ‘That’s a gorgeous suit — I want that suit,’ ” said Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center in Washington.

Debra Katz, a founding partner of the civil rights law firm Katz, Marshall & Banks, was one of them. “She looked so powerful and smashing,” Ms. Katz said of Mrs. Clinton, “and there was this sense she was speaking for all of us.”

Ms. Greenberger said she and her friends had started talking about how they should all wear white to a fund-raising dinner for the law center as a “sign of solidarity,” and it spiraled from there.