VIRTUAL Lisbon Livable Cities

Abstract

Style-fashion-dress has recently revealed itself as a complex nodule through which young Mexican women from different backgrounds are actively negotiating their individual and collective identities, in a thrust toward autonomy and agency. In post-pandemic times -and as a direct result of Covid’s impact on the livelihood of Mexican women- groups of young urban feminists who engage in craftivism in public spaces have sprouted throughout the metropolitan area’s public squares. Activities are organized around the sale of recycled or upcycled garments as well as around empowerment, solidarity and the reclaiming of a collective body, vis-à-vis societal and governmental negligence toward the safety, integrity and economic dignity of women. Generally speaking, these highly politicized young women adopt strident modes of dressing (piercings, tattoos, bold hair colors and hairstyles) that stand in deliberate opposition to conservative middle-class codifications around modesty and “good” behavior. Meanwhile, for young women in traditional indigenous communities where the collective body and ancestral textile-making are still organized around deep-seated patriarchal systems in which property, labor, financial independence, and political engagement remain the exclusive privilege of men, style-fashion-dress is also a space where individual expression, creation and livelihood are negotiated vis-à-vis an imposed collective identity linked, in-turn, to notions of Mexicanness oftentimes sustained by the idealization of traditional indigenous values. Case studies afford an opportunity to examine style-fashion-dress as the signifying space where the two apparently opposing directions cross paths, where the one becomes -albeit momentarily- the other, where they meet halfway.