Can the politics of a country be expressed in the clothes of those who govern it?
Perhaps the election, on August 7, of blue colors and peasant silhouettes of the new vice president, Francia Márquez;
the violet jacket, embroidered by artisan hands, which cried out on its sleeves 'environmental and social justice' of Sofía Petro, daughter of the president;
or the 'Carlos Pizarro' embroidered in beads by reinserted ex-guerrillas that Senator María José Pizarro wore on the back of her coat, can you talk about other ways of being linked to politics?
Can politics be done with the body?
It is not that Colombian politics had never been played in the symbolic, in the clothes of its protagonists, in the colors and signs that they have historically chosen.
In a very opposite arena, former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez himself was a shrewd politician in capitalizing on the symbols of the peasantry, Antioquia muleteer, man made by freehand, ejeo
pa'lante
, to flirt with and fascinate an electorate that was fed up with the Bogota elites, with pretense of European aristocracy, who had always governed the country.
Loading his dress with symbols such as the poncho or the hat, with the gestures of his body and with the particular use of language, accent and popular sayings, he managed to make millions of Colombians feel close to him, part of the profound people, despite the fact that he clearly came from a millionaire family that had little or nothing to do with that swarm of signs.
Álvaro Uribe made politics with his clothes and with his body.
But it is true that together with Uribe and other few exceptions, such as Senator Piedad Córdoba, who always wore braids and turbans typical of the African Pacific diaspora, or the former mayor of Bogotá Antanas Mockus, who defied good manners in Colombia, the clothes of politicians and their close circles have always been rather bland, stripped of deep ideological meanings, and have rather been constrained to very strict and conservative canons of good dress.
Sofía Petro during the inauguration of Gustavo Petro and a detail of the jacket he used.REUTERS / RR SS
While in the bipartisan tradition of the United States, communication teams have been waging veritable ideological battles for decades in each of the dress choices made public by politicians and their families, in Colombia there has always been a certain disdain for engaging in more ambitious strategies in those symbolic planes that surround the political task.
Far from what happened with the emblematic white pants suit that Hillary Clinton used in the 2016 presidential campaign, which invoked the spirit of the suffrage struggles at the beginning of the century;
or with the military green jacket with the message 'I really don't care, do you?'
worn by Melania Trump, in the midst of the crisis over the separation of immigrant families, after Trump's tough policy, in Colombia it is difficult to recall any garment that has transcended and created a deeper conversation than if it looked elegant or "corroncha".
Given this scenario, what might seem unprecedented about this diverse, colorful and for many picturesque stylistic and symbolic course that took place in the past ceremonies for the inauguration of Congress and the inauguration of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, is that for the first time, in an expanded way, groups never before visible in these instances of power, they used their traditional clothing and symbols to manifest a position and to launch, without speaking, harangues on how to understand power.
“We are really witnessing a new social spirit, which does not have to do exclusively with the left, rather it has to do with new sensitivities that have been forged in recent years.
Feminist sensitivities, gender, racial, ethnic, environmental sensitivities, which were historically seen by those in power as purely symbolic, purely cultural fields, without any political value.
But Colombia has realized that what it saw as minor movements can lead politically and electorally and, more importantly, that they can govern", explains political analyst and communication expert Richard Tamayo, who adds: "these movements struggle to make to assert its semiotics and to show why this sensibility has a political character and, meanwhile,
From critical fashion studies, the perception seems to agree that there is another place for the body and clothing in the political sphere.
“What happened on August 7 says that Colombian fashion is a field that has managed to sow questions about design as a communication vehicle, as a vehicle for social and political agendas.
It is also the achievement of ethnic, black, LGBTIQ+ communities, of feminism itself, of establishing discourses on clothing.
This became clearly evident, for example, in the relevance that queer
aesthetics had during the National Strike.
as a way of confronting the police visually and culturally”, explains Edward Salazar, researcher and professor of fashion studies and editor of the book 'Fashion Studies in Colombia, balance of a field under construction'.
A member of the LGTBI community during a march in support of the national strike in Cali, in May 2021. Pablo Rodríguez (EFE)
For Richard Tamayo, the symbolic triumph of these movements that were prosecuted in the electoral arena is also due, in part, to the fact that the Colombian right-wing realized what was happening very late.
“The right is hardly reacting to these new ways of doing politics, and curiously, it is the extreme right that is understanding the fastest the need to communicate and have richer semiotic expressions that connect better with people.
It is seen in María Fernanda Cabal, senator of the Democratic Center.
She is already acting under these new criteria and leading forms of communication of this nature.
We can see it, for example, with her ally Miguel Polo Polo, who uses the language of vindication, as Donald Trump did at the time, with a popular tone, but framed in far-right ideology.”
Let it feel first in the body
The morning after the day of the presidential inauguration, designer Diego Guarnizo's social networks experienced an unimaginable fury.
During his more than 30-year career, he had not witnessed such an explosion of adolescent and youthful celebration of his designs.
The reason was clear: he had created the purple jacket, a typical color of the suffrage and feminist movements, which Sofía Petro wore to accompany her father, the new president of Colombia.
A piece that, with the fabric-on-fabric embroidery technique, had revealed its message of social justice not only from the words sewn on the outfit, but from the very hands that sewed it: those of Elcy Guzmán and Adriana Gómez, two artisans urban women who live in Soacha and who work with Guarnizo to keep alive an increasingly obsolete tradition.
Although Sofía Petro only walked and sat next to her family in her possession, thousands of young people in the country understood her clothes and vibrated with her.
“I see a very evident awareness in the new generations, for them it is important to give a true value and place to Colombian fashion, to feel their dress as their own, and the only way we have for that is called memory, and the memory is stored in our crafts,” explains Diego Duarnizo, who was also the head behind the design of María José Pizarro's coat, printed with a toucan bird, endemic to the Pacific, called paletón.
The commitment to exalt artisan knowledge, to work with a local designer and send a message with clothing, was not exclusive to those who chose to wear a Guarnizo piece.
This is how the representative to the Chamber, Mafe Carrascal, described her stylistic choice for the possession: “The outfit I chose is a tribute to the artisans of Colombia.
My dress is from the brand A New Cross.
The designer Agustín Nicolás Rivero evokes the importance of scars and how their visibility helps us move between moments of trauma, memory and reparation…”.
Then, in case there were any doubts, he sentenced: "the personal is political!".
The senator, María José Pizarro, wears a jacket with an image of her father, Carlos Pizarro.rrss
For her part, the president's wife, Verónica Petro, chose a design that came from the hands of a creator from Sincelejo, Sucre, her homeland.
The dress for the night gala of Antonella, the president's youngest daughter, was made of a third-use polyester, that is, reused, stamped with a letter that Gustavo Petro himself wrote to her.
And Francia Márquez chose her head designer, Esteban Sinisterra, a young Afro talent who has vindicated the aesthetics of the Pacific and who finds his greatest inspiration in his African roots.
What all these dresses seemed to reveal, but also the euphoria in social and media networks that they generated, is that the conquests in terms of taste, the symbolic conquests, far from what the most traditional politics think, are very strategic, because they are conquests that transcend directly in the body of the people.
They bring the political to a very intimate place, with which a mass audience can more easily relate and bond.
As the historian Georges Duby says in 'The history of private life', the great revolutions take place first in that area: in the flesh and in the aesthetics of people.
Far from the canons that insist on this colonial, white and Europeanized version of fashion, the Colombian political sphere seemed to have been filled with clothes that questioned that mandate.
“Other regimes of taste crept in, different from the regime of taste of the elite and this told people that they do not have to disguise themselves, nor leave their heritage or their traditions to come to a presidential inauguration or, more importantly, to be part of the power”, assures Edward Salazar.
For his part, Richard Tamayo concludes: “It is that they are no longer just symbols, it is not only that the fisherman, the sweeper, the indigenous, afro or feminist groups have felt identified with the symbols, it is that now these are the forms of representation of those multiple groups that have finally been taken into account, that are part of power and that are going to start making political demands that they had not made”.
Subscribe here
to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the key information on the country's current affairs.