Green Tide

Green Tide

On stage, a voice recited: “I’m the crazy woman who gets on the men’s subway car in a mini skirt and asks the State to get me home safe. I’m the sinner. I believe in you. Me too. Till they end all abuse.”

Fashion is, above all, an act of socializing aesthetics. It presents individual postures and decisions shown to others as possible beginnings of dialogue, transgression and/or provocation, in which the utilitarian object (the item of clothing) becomes the vehicle for an explicit or implicit message.

It is no coincidence that the so-called Marea Verde (the green tide)—that explosion of protests, demands and acts to bring visibility to feminism and women’s role in the contemporary world—has a clothing accessory as a symbol of struggle: a green bandana.

Behind it gathers cries that demand legal and safe abortion, the recognition of sexual abuse, the ending of femicide once and for all, and basic justice and equality in quality of life throughout the contemporary world.

At the Ceremonia music festival, which took place in April of this year, the Marea Verde struck deep and right in the heart of the Mexican creative realm: dressed in bandanas and ponchos designed by Carla Fernández that served as both clothing and message board (bearing phrases such as “My body / My choice,” “Legal Abortion Now” and “Freedom to Choose”) and accompanied by a show by the Russian band Pussy Riot, a group of ski-masked women carried out a collective action in which aesthetics and politics fused in to one common expression.