Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum backs Indigenous artwork and ladies’s work — one costume at a time
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s costume selections symbolise girls’s energy. Photographs: AFP
MEXICO:
The wardrobe of Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first lady president, is greater than a press release of favor; it has develop into a canvas for her political message of advancing girls’s and Indigenous rights, in addition to native craftsmanship.
The leftist chief proudly makes use of small-scale, native tailors and shuns “these manufacturers which can be tremendous costly.” As an alternative, she says she helps “the weavers, the embroiderers, all those that use backstrap looms in our nation — largely girls — who’re a supply of nationwide pleasure.”
The Mexican authorities has taken on well-known manufacturers comparable to Adidas, Shein, Zara and Carolina Herrera over the alleged cultural appropriation of conventional designs. And in her personal style selections, Sheinbaum has likewise chosen to provide credit score the place she says it’s due, and to uplift these she will alongside the best way.
The 63-year-old chief was included on The New York Instances record of 67 most trendy folks of 2025 — the one politician featured. “Her ideology has all the time been very centered on folks’s rights, on equality; even in her fashion of costume,” mentioned Mexican picture guide Gabriela Medina.
One particular person liable for her look is Olivia Trujillo, who runs a small tailor’s store from her house within the bustling neighbourhood of San Pedro Martir on the outskirts of Mexico Metropolis. “Her favorite colors, for sure, I might say are purple and burgundy,” Trujillo instructed AFP.
Trujillo was lately referred to as to the Nationwide Palace for the ultimate becoming of a purple costume with finely embroidered flowers that Sheinbaum wore in December to her first face-to-face assembly with US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Washington.
“The color purple is related to energy, authority, luxurious, royalty, spirituality and sobriety,” Medina mentioned of Sheinbaum’s alternative. It’s also the color “that the feminist resistance motion has embraced,” she added.
One other emblematic Sheinbaum alternative was the costume she wore for her October 2024 swearing-in: a knee-length, ivory creation with embroidered wildflowers cascading down one aspect. The higher half was left plain “in order that the presidential sash would stand out,” recalled Trujillo.
The flowers have been painstakingly hand-sewn onto the material by Claudia Vazquez, a 43-year-old Zapotec Indigenous lady who instructed AFP she had practically given up on embroidery, her past love. She mentioned Sheinbaum’s curiosity in her artwork had “modified her life.”
Within the nation’s centre, within the village of San Isidro Buen Progreso, lives one other embroiderer whose providers the president has enlisted. Virginia Arce, 48, adorned the formal robe Sheinbaum wore in September when she grew to become the primary lady to provide the Cry of Independence.
“The president selected the tones and a chicken she actually appreciated — it was a swallow,” Arce recalled. The duty took her two months, however the end result was price it when she noticed the pinnacle of state step out onto the presidential balcony in her handiwork.
Gender analyst Laura Raquel Manzo factors to the hazard of stereotyping girls by analysing what they put on — scrutiny historically not utilized to male leaders. On this case, nonetheless, she says ignoring Sheinbaum’s deliberate costume selections could be “to disclaim how picture shapes authority.”
